Study Tip #1
SOME BASIC STUDY METHODS

Outline of Basic Study Methods

1.  Always build firm associations.
2.  Set conscious learning goals.
2.  Find what is important.
3.  Work to understand it.
4.  Work to build memory.
5.  Distinguish declarative from procedural knowledge and study them differently.
6.  Test yourself to know when you’ve got it.
7.  Pay attention.
8.  Space out study sessions on the same topic.

Always build firm associations. 

To learn is to build firm associations. When you build strong associations between things, you will be able to remember them. Your memory will be poor if you take in information without understanding it by associating to its meanings or without understanding its relationship to bigger pictures, examples, details and so on. And your memory will also be poor if you make weak and fragile associations to new information. So as you listen, read, study and practice things, keep noticing how the information and actions relate to other things.

Pay attention. 

When you read or listen or practice or take in information in any way, pay attention to the incoming information and its meaning. Attention leads to memory because your unified focus brings more mental resources to bear on the topic and strengthens associations. Distraction and divided attention weaken memory because your mind’s strength of focus weakens as it is spread out. Paying attention is a very simple and powerful way to study. It is one of the few study strategies you can use that does not require extra time.
When you notice your mind has wandered, bring it back to the topic and do so gently. Do not criticize yourself for being distracted. Why not? Negative thoughts will call to mind other negative memories and waste time and make bad associations.

Set conscious learning goals. 

People who set specific and conscious goals to learn usually learn much more while they read, study and practice than do people who just “do the assignment”.

• The reason? What we want while we study affects what we do. And what we do while we study creates what we get as learning results.
• When you have set specific goals, then you can test yourself and find out how well you did. Without goals you cannot know your progress. And general goals are too fuzzy to help.
• Where do you get your goals? The first goal is build strong associations to what you are learning. Identify what your instructor wants you to learn and set that as a major goal. Also set your own learning goals.
• Make yourself turn alive to goals by asking questions, which are mini-goals. Wanting to know the answer to a question and then finding information that is an answer to it will build an association between question and answer. Or say to yourself, “I wonder . . .” Wondering and then finding ideas and experiences that relate to our wonder-ing also creates associations. Your listening and reading will feel different–more alive and alert–when you question, wonder and search for something.
• When you are just beginning to study brand-new topics, set low sub-goals for that day’s studying. Permit yourself to make weak associations. Later, when you are in the middle phases of studying, set higher sub-goals. Build strong associations that survive long time gaps between study and self-test.
• Beware of goals that prevent learning. Many students want to get done fast, to avoid a disliked subject, to be per-fect with no mistakes, or to look smart to other people. When you work for these goals, you will neglect true methods of learning.

Find what is important. 

Not everything you read and see and hear is important. Since you are not required to remember literally everything, you can save time studying by choosing the important things to focus your learning time on.

• What is important? I can’t give a general answer that would cover the great diversity of courses. Here are some common categories: basic information and facts in a field; concepts and the major facts that fit into the concepts; sets of concepts that are organized into schemas or frames of reference; major generalizations about causes and ef-fects; evidence in support of the big ideas; in literature both the specific events and general patterns in a work; in history the big ideas and specific facts; in skill courses the instructions on how to do the steps in a procedure and the worked examples showing how to do it.
• When you find something important in a class lecture, take notes on it. When you find important ideas in reading, mark their location so that when you review, your eye will be drawn to the important and you can skip the minor. It wastes your time to find what’s important on Tuesday and to miss it when you review on Thursday.

Work to understand what you hear and read.

To understand means to be able to associate a bit of information to its meaning and to its relationship with many other concepts and facts. Our level of understanding of information can vary from non-existent to shallow to deep. It is much more useful to understand knowledge than to know it by rote.

• Why understand? Since there are many parts in any field of knowledge, you will make mistakes if you do not un-derstand it. Also, research on memory shows that we can more easily recall understood material than not-understood material.
• Starting with the simplest level of understanding, know the meaning of the words in what you read. When words puzzle you, do what is appropriate to figure them out: look up words, use the context to infer the meanings, look behind and ahead to get clues, make mental images of what is said, break things apart in charts with arrows to show relationships.
• Choose a reading speed that is slow enough to give your mind time to look up the meanings of words. Why? Because it takes time for your mind to travel along the paths associating a word to its meanings and to report the information back to your conscious mind. Focus your attention on the meanings flowing into your mind and use them as feedback to your reading speed. Warning: Our minds send a signal that we recognize a word about 0.2 seconds after we see it, but we get the meaning of a word about 0.3 to 0.6 seconds after we see it. Don’t use that 0.2-second signal of recognition as feedback for your reading speed.
• Expect to read more slowly when you read rare words, artificial symbols (math, physics, chemistry), tightly logical arguments, and very new topics. It takes longer to make associations to such difficult information. If you are a fast reader, your learning is at risk unless you catch these signs of difficulty and slow down.
• Stop briefly after a complex phrase, sentence or paragraph. Give yourself one or two seconds of blank time so that your mind can bring the separate parts of a passage together and make associations. Research shows these little stops improve understanding.
• At the level of paragraphs and short passages, know the larger story these units tell. When puzzled, make explana-tions for yourself. Here is how: Take one sentence and then talk aloud to yourself and translate it into your own words. Do it for a series of sentences. As you get a few sentences translated, then explain to yourself how they are related to each other. Each of these translations makes associations that make memories.
• When your social situation stops you from talking aloud, do anything you can to make your thinking clear, because it will strengthen associations. Write notes or talk in your mind in words.

Work several ways to build memory.

When you understand a topic, you will develop some memory naturally. Understanding develops memory because it makes strong impressions of the knowledge and associates it to things we know already. Understanding, however, is not enough to build all the needed memory, by itself, because we cannot recall all information that we understood when we heard or read it. Be prepared to intentionally review and memorize. Later Study Tips in this series will give details on the following suggestions. 

• When the text is written awkwardly, break sentences into small chunks and learn the chunks separately. Changing chunk size is very helpful.
• When you see related information spread across several sentences, bring it together into one chunk and study the larger chunks. Example: An economics book might state in one sentence a cause such as high unemployment and wait until later to state several effects such as people’s poverty, hunger, and migration to other areas. Making chunks larger is a powerful way to improve learning. Group things.
• Study the information in detail. Let it make a strong and clear impression on your mind. Avoid fuzziness when possible.
• Associate other ideas, facts, and feelings to information. Mental elaboration builds memory.
• Intentionally memorize important information. Use look-away methods. Use self-tests.

Distinguish declarative knowledge from procedural knowledge or skills and study them differently. 

• Declarative knowledge means “knowing that” something is so, knowing things you can explicitly talk about. Examples: “It rains about 40 inches a year in Eugene, Oregon.” “Herbivores are animals who eat only or mostly plants.” Study by getting understanding and making associations.
• Procedural knowledge is where we “know how” to do something to get a result. Examples: Having accuracy and speed in reading, keyboarding, playing a sport, playing a musical instrument, solving problems in math, writing an essay, and choosing the right words to say in emotional situations. To study: break procedures down into sepa-rate steps; break steps down into each one’s goals, situations and actions. Practice, practice! All of these actions make memories firm.
• When studying plan to notice which kind of knowledge you are dealing with. You will study them in somewhat different ways. See other study tips in this series for more details on learning declarative and procedural knowledge.

Test yourself so that you know when you've got it. 

Research on learning shows that one of the most powerful learning methods is doing the kind of self-tests that give you feedback and correction. Self-tests help two ways: (1) They show you what you know and don’t know, and (2) they build memory themselves by associating questions to answers (declarative knowledge) and by running through the steps of a skill and building memory of the experience (procedural knowledge). 

• Test your declarative knowledge by asking yourself the important questions and stating the answers. If you use the look-away learning methods, you will be automatically doing self-tests.
• Test your procedural knowledge by doing tasks, problems, and skills. Using the goals that are appropriate for your phase of learning, notice how accurate and fast you are.

Use spaced learning methods. 

Spaced learning means studying the same topic several times in separated sessions. By running through the informa-tion several times, you review similar associations and make new ones; it will strengthen your knowledge. Extensive research on many subjects shows that spaced study increases learning more than massed study does. You can preview and review; you can study several times. Avoid massed cram sessions.

(Dan Hodges. 10/2007)

go to top of page

back to Study Tips list