Several years ago a professor wrote his son who was a freshman at college, about study strategies for achieving high academic performance based on his years of university teaching. These methods with his helpful examples are applicable to anyone in school, including online students, nontraditional students, high ability high school students along with freshmen and others who want to deepen their learning experiences.
Four tips for improving understanding through effective studying
- Distribute study, reading and writing time by organizing a schedule and achieving a greater efficiency in your use of time. Smaller study periods are more effective than one long session.
- Elaborate on lecture notes through the process of summarizing, identifying, chunking, comparing, and restating ideas.
- Interact with your textbooks by making notes in the margin and marking the text. This goes beyond highlighting text to actually responding to the author’s presentation of the subject matter.
- Explain ideas, information, concepts to another person, either in a study group or one-to-one in venues such as online chats, discussion forums, emails, or even with your family at dinner. This exercise helps you practice what you've learned by talking about it with someone else.