Suggestions to Improve Your Study Skills and Your Grade
I want to share with you a few suggestions that may make your academic efforts easier,
help you improve your comprehension of the material, and allow you to enjoy more the
readings and learning process. These habits will also likely improve your grade.
1. Attend class every day. Simple but true: professors tend to talk about what they think
is important, and they tend to test on what they think is important. Simply being in
class is good preparation for exams. Moreover, lectures will (or should) help you pull
together all the various threads of information covered in the readings, thus making
the readings less confounding.
2. Take notes when you come. Obvious to some of us, elusive for others. But come
with paper and writing utensil and write down information covered in class.
3. Rethink your note-taking strategies.
A. On the one hand, don't write down everything your teacher utters. On the other
hand, don't copy only what's on PowerPoint or overheads. Instead, strive to
capture essential material, theories, definitions, useful examples, and lists.
B. Develop an note-taking template or strategy that works best for you. One
suggestion comes from a Cornell University system. (See Appendix, Cornell
Note Taking Sheet)
4. Read all the material before you come to class, and be an active reader. Be careful
not to read academic books like you read a novel. In other words, don't just breeze
through it without reflecting on the ideas and organizing them in your head or notes.
This means you may want to do the readings more than once, underline or highlight
in the book, take notes on the readings, and re-study them before the exams. I find it
very useful to summarize or outline each section after reading it, even if only a couple
of sentences. This way I have notes that follow the outline of the book. I also
recommend you turn off the television when reading and studying.
5. Ask questions. Ask the instructor questions during class or immediately after class,
and go to your instructors' offices to discuss material more in depth. You can also ask
classmates to see if they can explain it to you.
6. Pace yourself, my friend. Many students have relied on cramming. Some fail, some
do poorly, and some pull it off but with a great deal of stress. Instead, begin studying
on a daily basis; set aside some time every day or every other day to do your readings
or review the readings and lecture notes. Don't make the goal such a big thing that
you can't achieve it, such as "I'll read the whole book Saturday." Give yourself
reasonable goals, like one hour per day, and perhaps enter them into your calendar.
Some people use a spread sheet to set themselves a schedule, others set aside the
same block of time every day for studies. However you do it, try to habituate
yourself to studying. You should expect to dedicate about two hours of reading and
studying for every one hour you are in class.
7. Organize your notes.
A. Some people find it very useful to rewrite their notes from class and the readings.
Re-reading and re-writing greatly improve retention of information, and it affords
you a chance to better organize your notes for more efficacious studying.
B. A specific re-write strategy is to use concept maps. This gives you a great visual
of how the many ideas fit together, which makes learning each one easier. To do
this, write in the middle of a new piece of paper what you think is an important
idea that unites other ideas. Then around that core idea write down the related
ideas and connect them with lines. You can even develop your own color-coded
system. For instance, all theories related to "What causes people to commit crime"
could be blue.
i. Let's look at an example of clustering. Assume we have a unit on women
in prison. You may feel three ideas are central: feminism, rehabilitation,
and theories and theorists. Each of these would then become a core idea.
Have as many as you want and don't worry about overlap or concepts
fitting into more than one. That's fine. Then around each of those you will
connect the related ideas. So, for instance, around "feminism" you may
have patriarchy, discrimination, Margaret Singer, and so on. In the end,
you should multiple clusters that look like bicycle wheels.
ii. The most important thing is that you arrange them how you feel they are
logically connected. Don't just take my lecture outline or the book's
outline. You can use them, but the primary organizational logic will come
from you. What you will have in the end is a visual of how the concepts
relate. Instead of memorizing each concept as a discrete, or isolated, term,
you will memorize it as part of a package of terms. This will be easier
memorization. If, for instance, you at first don't remember the definition of
sublimation, but you have that clustered around "Old Theories" or "Weak
Social Theories", you may be able to recall its location in a cluster, see in
your mind that it's next to Freud, and then be able to recall its actual
definition.
C. You may also find it surprisingly useful to compare your notes to those of others
in order to fill in things you missed and learn different note-taking strategies, such
as how to organize them as you are writing them.
8. Re-write definitions. Do this in whatever way you find most beneficial. You could
write them all on one sheet of paper, or you may want to have a single sheet of paper
for each chapter or unit, or you may want to write the definitions on note cards so you
can quickly flip through them, even while walking or eating.
9. Get in study groups. Again, simple but amazingly useful. Explaining an idea to
someone else will improve your grasp of it, and having it explained to you in
someone else's manner may allow the material take hold in your brain. I passed out a
phone list to aid in forming study groups.
10. When studying, use repetition. Quiz yourself and each other using your class notes,
outlines in the book, your own list of definitions, and the table of contents of the
book. Keep going down the lists and reciting your answers aloud. If you get stumped
on one, look up the answer, then go back to the top of the list and start reciting aloud
again. Keep doing this until you can go down the whole list and define every term
and explain every theory. Do the same thing during the next study session. In the
end you should have reviewed each term around 30 times, not just once or twice.
This iteration will strengthen your memorization.
A. The goal is to become fluent in the terminology and ideas. This is more than mere
recognition, where you simply look at the information in the book and say to
yourself, "Yeah, I know that." That's not fluency. You need to be able to put
away your books and notes and still be able to define the terms, explain the
concepts, summarize the research and events, describe the theories, and apply all
this to other situations.
11. Build your studying from the base up. Start with the simplest things, master those,
then work on the more complex topics.
A. Using the strategies above (rewriting, clustering, repetition, etc.), learn all the
definitions. If the exams are multiple choice, definitions are the most important
thing to study.
B. Then learn the important names and what the people contributed. In other
words, be able to match ideas with people's names. Creating time lines sometimes
help at this stage.
C. Then practice summarizing theories. Be able to list the important components
and explain how they relate to each other. Also think of examples that draw from
each theory.
D. Then be able to summarize the thesis (or main points) and evidence of each
article, chapter, and book. Then be able to summarize each section within the
articles and chapters.
E. Finally, reflect on the material. Sit back and think about how each piece of
information relates to other components of the course. Are there similarities
among theories? Do some contradict others? And so on.
12. As you're going along, keep in mind that all these little pieces of information fit in
with a cohesive body of ideas. As you are reviewing each section, you are actually
building toward understanding a discipline. Use this unity of ideas to your advantage:
try to understand the material and links between terms and units, rather than merely
memorizing isolated terms. You will still have plenty of memorization--you can't
speak the language of a discipline until you learn its vocabulary--but the whole
studying endeavor will make more sense if you think about how each component
links back to the overall theme. This process of learning a new discipline includes
learning the vocabulary of the professionals, reviewing the contributions of key
players, being able to summarize the pivotal theories, applying the terminology and
theories, and coming to understand the fundamental principles, and then figuring out
how all these are linked.
13. With regards to writing, be thoughtful and deliberative. You should work hard at
writing. See Appendix on Writing Tips.
Written by Dr. Casey Welch,  2010