Teaching Students Effective Study Strategies
You may have read our post on changing our focus from teaching to learning. In it, I talked about recent brain-research about how students learn and how a teacher can focus on that in order to help students learn. How many times have you said "I taught that, why don't they know it?"? Teaching and learning are completely different things and what you teach is not always learnt.
I give very little homework. However, every day my homework says "study...." and I give them some specifics. I am constantly telling my students to look over the notes and re-do activities from class. I ask them to rewrite questions that we practice in class and then try to answer them. Do they do this? Maybe not...Probably because they don't realize the importance of these strategies.
Students come to me for extra help (for my class and my advisees come to me about their other classes as well) and tell me "I studied so much for xyz quiz and I blanked when I got to the quiz". I ask them how they studied and over and over again they respond by saying "I read the notes for hours" or "I looked at the vocabulary".
Here are the top 3 tips that I give students on effective studying based on brain-research:
1. Quiz yourself: constant low-stakes quizzing is one of the most effective ways to make sure that you know the information. We took a look at this infographic from the Association for Psychological Science about the 10 most effective practices to study and quizzing yourself is number 1 on the list of "high utility" techniques.
How can we help students quiz themselves?
It's important for teachers to give students practice tests, quizzes that they can redo as practice, study guides full of questions for them to answer. But it is also important to teach students how to make these resources for themselves as well. Quizlet is a great tool for this because students can put vocabulary words or essential questions on one side and a definition or a synonym or an answer on the other and quizlet will essentially use that information to create tests and games to quiz them.
2. Spread out your studying: It is so important that students study a little bit at a time. Research has shown that cramming for a test does not develop long-term learning.
How can we help students space out their learning?
Helping students develop a calendar for studying can be one strategy. A tool that I like to use is quizlet plus long-term learning. Students add their quizlet sets that they make to a folder and then study the folder a little bit each day. The algorithm they use is set up to give students questions multiple times until they "learn" the material and it is in their long-term memory.
3. Don't just study one piece of material at a time: This is called "interleaved practice". For example, in Spanish we teach stem-changing present tense verbs, go verbs and regular verbs separately. However, once we have taught one of these concepts and students have had a little bit of time to study and learn that concept, they need to practice that concept WITH other concepts. At that point, they have to decide what the concept is. They have to figure out whether the verb is stem-changing or regular without being told because the practice is all mixed in, or interleaved. We as teachers need to give students this practice but it applies to how students study as well. They need to mix up their practice, because the test will probably not have just one concept on it.
How can we help students interleave their practice?
Again, we can make study guides to help students practice with interleaved material. However, students can also understand this concept and make sure that they do not just study one chapter at a time for example. They need to be able to pull it all together.
Do you use these strategies? How do they work for you students? Do you have any other advice that you give your students on HOW to study?
