In the days of yore, there were no modern gadgets like laptops, smartphones, tablets et al, which were powered with the prowess of educational and other kinds of apps as YouTube, Facebook, and others. Tests and examinations were packed with challenges even then. But, the availability of the same has witnessed the increase in the levels of difficulty of all those exams and competitions. Hence, in the sphere of exams, challenges have maintained their standards.
However, there are some time-tested ploys that contain the potentiality to sharpen your preparation more, vis-à-vis the exams of today. Moreover, these tricks also bear their relationship with psychology. Hence, they are pregnant with more chances of success. Therefore, I, Rohit Manglik, suggest some strategies that may forward you on the path of academic success, particularly.
Memory Improvement Tricks
There are several things you can attempt for strengthening your memory. Basic stratagems such as upgrading your focus, avoiding cramming, and organizing your study time are a good start, to begin with. Still, there are quite a few lessons that can phenomenally refine your efficiency of learning. Additionally, psychology also gives a ‘go-ahead’ to these maneuvers.
- Focus your attention by studying in a place bereft of distractions such as smartphones, video and mobile games, music, television, and similar others
- Avoid cramming, particularly, that of concepts
- Organize your chunks of relevant information as it’s ordered in your memory in sequenced clusters. Moreover, the effort for amassing similar terms and concepts together, outline your notes and readings
- Use mnemonics like employ a song, rhyme, or a movie scene to help recall a certain information
- Visualize different concepts by crafting flashcards of different terms that you may want to retain
- Associate new facts and details to things you are already familiar with
- Try reading out loud to embed facts deeper into your memory
- Spend more time with complex information to devote more attention to it
- Experiment with your routine of study. Try changing the place of your research every few days and do similarly with the timing also. If you are habitual to studying in the evening, shift this exercise to the morning session
- Have the proper ‘intake’ of sleep. Several studies and observations have strongly alluded to sound attainment of information only with a ‘contented’ sleep
Utilize Various Ways in Learning
Employing various ways in learning a concept serves purposes more than one. Apart from maintaining the supply of freshness and vigor, using different learning methodologies may provide you numerous ways to grasp the same concept or the sub-concepts within it. This way, you can avail a deeper embedding of the whole concept, in the case of the latter.
Try Teaching Your Learned Concepts
It’s a well-guarded but now an open secret, as time has weakened the vigil, that teaching the concepts, ideas, and theories learned by you, significantly helps them take deeper roots into your memory and mind.
Implement Your Attained Ideas
This DIY technique is another significant one besides the above. And why it shouldn’t? Touching the paper and water with fingers; drawing adorable designs and patterns; shading and coloring them attractively, using scissors and taking the feel of its blades, and subsequently gently placing thus prepared paper flowers on to the water-surface will implant the lesson on ‘Capillary Action’ deeper into the minds of young learners, than when monotonously made to listen to and note through the blackboard.
Prefer Finding the Answers Over Struggling to Retain
This applies in the ‘particular’ case of getting confounded with remembering the correct solution/answer. Poor retention of the study content can be assigned as its cause. In cases like these, it sometimes helps more to peek at that solution/answer to facilitate the faster ending of your query-related distress.
Find the Right Learner in You
There are three mainstays of the kinds of learners. They are
- Visual Learners
- Auditory Learners
- Kinesthetic Learners
The visual learners tend to learn faster when facilitated through subject-specific visual stimulants like a presentation on the passing of a morsel from the different parts of the human alimentary canal for the pupils of biology, with the help of images and videos.
Auditory learners usually talk to themselves. They may also read out loud and move their lips. They may encounter difficulty in tasks like reading and writing. These learners usually perform better by talking to a fellow student or a tape recorder and subsequently hearing that recording.
Kinesthetic learners learn the best from moving and touching. Kinesthetic learners tend to score less on concentration if there’s little or no movement or external stimulation.
And, there are learners of various shades in between these three entities, most of who dominantly experience any two of them. With a little online search, you can determine the right learning combination for yourself.
Moreover, theories like ‘multiple intelligences’ as proposed by Howard Gardner, ‘learning style dimensions’ of Carl Jung, may help you discover the right strategy(ies) to aid your learning.
Test Yourself with the Tests, Intermittently
It may appear that greater the time you dedicate to studying the better you maximize learning. But research has exhibited that testing your learning on a regular basis, really helps you retain better your learned content. It even applies to the entity that you didn’t cover for this particular test. The analysis showed that students who undertook a sincere study and then were subsequently assessed had retained the materials better for a longer-term. This event was also witnessed for the topics uncovered by the tests.
Restrict Yourself to Being a Common Mortal
Sadly, being only human beings, we don’t harbor the awe-inspiring wonder of having more than one hand, as Dr. Octopus of the movie Spiderman II enjoys. This naturally translates to our executing tasks one by one and not like performing all of them at one go. Though some of the individuals may experience the ease of saving of their time when they indulge in it, usually that’s restricted to a limited duration of a few days, at the most. For the remaining days, we rely on the natural and reduced efficiency of only our two hands. To execute various tasks one by one, therefore, is much peaceful and easier the way than taking the support of the earlier avatar. Therefore, undertake your tasks, one by one.
Author: Rohit Manglik, the founder, and CEO of EduGorilla.com, an ed-tech portal equipped with the ability to provide solutions to students’ various needs, besides being an avid book reader, also pens articles on education, career, and technology. This article is one such of his written efforts.