3 minutes
Who has not felt anxious or nervous thinking about the final exam in their hardest course?
You do not need to memorize entire textbooks. There are many dynamic, enjoyable techniques that can help improve your performance and make the most of your study time.
Here are tips and techniques to help you face your next exam season calmly and optimistically.
The "testing effect"
This technique involves working through practice rather than theory. Where possible, if your subject allows exercises, tests, or practice exams, these will greatly help you use active memory to get used to the tension of a final test and avoid stress.
This practice is increasingly used in textbooks, and teachers should actively participate in these study techniques. An Abbott study spanning more than 100 years, since 1909, provides evidence supporting this idea.
Distributed practice.
Generally, it is only a few days before each exam that you pick up your notes and books to prepare, increasing nervousness and making your study efforts less effective.
Distributing and spacing out study topics as much as possible before your exam will reinforce content in your memory and increase confidence. To implement this technique, we recommend that as soon as you know the exam date, take time to distribute content, including a final questionnaire as a rehearsal for the final test.
Formulating questions
This technique pushes you to seek the best explanation by asking: Why is it this way? Someone once said: "The best answer comes after asking the best question."
Everyone absorbs information differently, so encouraging each person to generate the questions they need is valuable, making the answer as individualized as possible.
Formulating questions is a highly effective technique for creating personal answers and thus a firm anchor for memory.
We particularly like this study method because it seeks to stimulate memory in the most personal way. The more personal the question, the closer it comes to the appropriate answer for each person's understanding.
The key is to ask yourself questions. Seek the "why behind things" during studying, and understanding will be yours.
Interleaving subjects
This means studying two or more topics that are related or can complement one another.
Start with distributed practice, then add another set of topics from the same subject or another subject that tends to stimulate creativity between the two.
For example, sciences —physics, biology, chemistry, or computer science— and mathematics. Studies show that interleaved practice helps retain information better and longer, but above all develops greater reasoning and understanding.
Obviously, this is not the same for everyone, but implementing it and combining it with distributed work does help students discover for themselves what works best.
Self-explanation
Self-explanation is a technique similar to formulating questions. It requires students to reach a conclusion themselves and explain the problem or theory in their own words.
It usually draws on existing knowledge to complement new study, building a personal store of knowledge.
It is more effective in the initial stages than after the subject has been learned. However, it seems more complicated than the other techniques.
On the other hand, its great advantage is that it applies to almost any subject or issue. We find this technique very interesting, since it can be approached through highly educational paths—for example, helping others understand the subject.
If you can explain the material to a classmate in your own way, you are drawing out your own reasoning, meaning you understand and integrate what you read well.
As we have seen in the paragraphs above, proactivity, practice, and creative reasoning are keys to learning and memorizing, and thereby making the most of all the knowledge taught in class.