Welcome to Study Strategies!
On this page, you will find information, which will help you learn – overviews of different study strategies and actionable steps, which you can take to improve your learning process. Study strategies (or sometimes they are called ‘study skills’) are the special rules that researchers say can help you study better. Feel free to browse through this section and select the strategies that work best for you! Don’t hesitate to ask your mentor for advice on how to use these strategies, once you have read about them.
Develop Comprehension
‘Comprehension’ means ‘understanding’. When we apply comprehension study strategies, we improve our understanding of what we are reading and writing. Some of the more common ways to improve understanding are to concentrate on main ideas, to identify text patterns, or to annotate. Read articles and watch videos from this section to understand more when you read or listen!
This is a complete video lesson by Khan Academy on how to identify and connect main ideas in a reading or listening passage. You can watch/read only a part of it or complete the whole lesson. Lessons by Khan Academy are a very engaging way to learn, so give it a try! Watch a lesson now!
Supporting details are the small ideas, which make the text more interesting. These ideas explain when something happened or who did something. Supporting details often contain names of people or places, dates, statistics, and other data. These ideas are used as an evidence to confirm what the author is saying. Sometimes students struggle to understand the difference between main and supporting ideas. This simple but very informative video on how to identify supporting ideas in a text will help you improve your reading and listening skills. Go to the video.
Develop Memorization
To study well, we often need to remember things. When we are learning, it is sometimes hard to focus on one thing, and we get distracted by our environment. If this happens, we forget some information that we learned. Additionally, our memory might not work that well because we don’t practice it in the right way. Both focus and the right technique are important if we want to memorize something well. Scientists say that we can improve our remembering (or ‘memorization’) skills by practicing these few methods.
How to stop looking at your phone when you are studying? How to read many pages of boring text without thinking about food or your friends? These are the things that students often think when they finally sit down to study. Improving concentration is hard, and managing different distractions is even harder! Gladly, if you follow these valuable steps, you can improve your focus and manage distractions. If it’s not enough – try Pomodoro technique – a great way to achieve more in less time!
Someone might say “I have bad memory”. This is a myth! Memory works almost like a muscle in our brain – if we do enough exercise, we get better. Knowing how to organize yourself to keep brain active and learn more is a valuable skill that can help you remember things better and longer. Look at this visual guide overviewing the retrieval practice – a technique for smarter learning!
Develop Critical Thinking
You might hear a phrase ‘critical thinking’ very often these days. But what does it mean? Does it mean that we need to criticize someone or something? Yes and no. Critical thinking is one of the ‘higher order’ thinking skills that includes being able to analyze, predict, and evaluate people, situations, events, and information. ‘To analyze’ and ‘evaluate’ means deciding whether something is correct or incorrect, reliable or unreliable, good or bad. To do this, we need to look at the evidence and make a decision. All of it can be quite difficult, but the more you practice these skills, the better you will get!
To be able to evaluate information that others share with us, we also need to be able to understand the quality of ideas. In academic style, information can be considered credible if the author provides concrete examples – facts that can be verified. Providing and recognizing concrete examples can help you improve many skills, such as listening, reading, and writing, but it also will help you make your own opinion about what you read or hear. Look at this visual guide and read this article to help you understand the idea of concrete examples.
Apart from providing examples, a person with developed critical thinking can explain things well. In fact, providing examples and explaining is often interconnected. It is because both of them are parts of critical thinking. Providing explanations is called ‘elaboration’. This name comes from the verb ‘elaborate’, which means ‘explain’. Take a look at this visual guide and read this article to learn more about how to elaborate effectively. Scientists also say that apart from critical thinking, elaboration can help boost memory. Learn how here!
Develop Time-management
Time management is a HUGE problem for many students. Especially, it is a problem for the students that are studying at university. This is because at university there are many different subjects with assignments that students need to complete independently – without their instructors. Learning to plan many things by yourself and following schedules is called ‘time management’. It includes making to-do-lists, timetables, organizing your work and following deadlines. To not feel completely overwhelmed by these tasks, learn about how to manage your time in this section!
One of the strategies that will help you plan your time better is called ‘spaced practice’. Science tells us that when we study a little bit, but we do it every day – we remember things better than when we study for many hours without breaks. Learn how to apply spaced practice with this visual guide and this article!
Time management is not only about planning. It is also about following through with what you planned. ‘Sticking to the plan’ (meaning, ‘following the plan’) is sometimes even harder than making it! This is because of different distractions that often keep us away from completing our tasks. Learning to prioritize and to manage distractions will help you succeed in completing your plans!
Follow these strategies and don’t forget to do independent research! This will help you be successful throughout your studies and when you start working!