5 Study Tips Worth Trying Out

As this school year begins and assessments start popping up on your calendar, it’s about time to start studying. And, no, reading over your notes doesn’t cut it. So, instead, here are 5 study tips that will actually help you out this year.

1. Use your study guide

For some quizzes and mosts tests, your teacher will probably give you some sort of sheet that tells you what to study, with or without practice questions. Instead of just skimming over it a few minutes before your assessment, you should use it to your advantage. If you have practice questions, put them into a website that’ll test you on them. If you have a list of topics, create a document with a little bit of information from each concept. Both of these methods will engage your brain so that you actually remember information, as opposed to mindlessly rereading notes that you know you won’t remember.

2. Write!

Once you think you know your information, put all of your study materials away. Get out a blank piece of paper and just write down everything you know that could appear on your test or quiz. If you can’t think of something to write about a specific topic, then that’s what you need to review. This can be a neat, orderly diagram or it can be a messy blur of information, but both formats will tell you what you need to study. Plus, by handwriting it, you automatically remember the information better than if you type it—it’s a win-win.

3. Teach it to someone else

Similar to the previous method, teaching the information to someone else engages your brain and makes sure that you’ve mastered the subject. Find a sibling, parent, or even a stuffed animal and give them a lesson. If you have to stop anywhere, then that’ll tell you what to study again. Bonus points if your ‘student’ asks you questions and you can answer them, because that demonstrates mastery of the concept.

4. Create flashcards

If your information or class is vocabulary based, make flashcards to help you remember the concepts better. There are websites like Quizlet that allow you to import a PDF of notes, or you can make them the old-fashioned way and write on index cards. Then, with these flashcards, you can do a number of things. Of course, there is the obvious choice of looking at the term and guessing the definition, but you can also make it more fun. For example, hang your flashcards around the house. Once you see a term, make yourself say the definition, and don’t take down the flashcard until you’ve gotten it right.

5. Make connections

Take a look through the notes that you’re being tested on or the study guide your teacher gave you. With each grouping of information, try to come up with an example that’s familiar to you or pneumonic device that will help you remember it. If you’re able to come up with a relationship between a difficult concept and something you know really well, that concept will become much easier to understand.

Now, get studying! You can use just one of these methods or a combination of all of them, because trust us, they work (using them, our founder got a 5 on an AP Exam last year!). We hope that you’ll also have success in your studying, and feel free to read another blog post for more tips and tricks for the school year.