5 Study Skills to Accelerate Your Learning

Don’t think that study skills are just about how to do well in school. A solid base of study skills and study tips is even more useful after you leave school, when you continue learning on your own.

Here are the 5 Study Skills to Accelerate Your Learning:

#1: Elaborative interrogation

A great way to learn is to ask yourself questions. Little kids know this intuitively, as they run around asking “Why, why, why?” A great deal of research has proven that the kids are on to something. Getting students to answer questions, such as “Why is this fact true?” aids learning.

The main reason asking “why” questions seems to work is that it encourages you to integrate the new fact with things you already know. Doing so improves your memory for the new fact by giving you more “hooks” to find it. Research also suggests that some ways of questioning yourself work better than others.

#2: Self-Explanation

The idea behind self-explanation as a reading strategy is to pause from reading your textbook periodically and explain to yourself what it means to you. You can do this after a section of text, or when studying an example problem. When trying to self-explain, you may find that you need to look back over parts of the text to fully understand what’s being said.

#3: Practice testing

The main idea behind practice testing is that actively testing your memory improves learning far more than passively reviewing material. Tests are not just for evaluation anymore.

Testing improves learning by exercising memory retrieval. When you answer a test question, you have to actively search your long-term memory. Doing so creates more and better pathways to the answer. This makes the answer easier to find the next time around. Scientists sometimes call it, “retrieval practice.”

Practice testing is easy to do. You can make flash cards or answer questions from your textbook. You can often find free practice tests online. Make sure you can get the correct answers. Practice testing works best when you can find out whether got the answers right or wrong.

#4: Distributed Practice

One reason distributed practice aids learning is that you have to re-start your memory for the topic during each study session. Once your memory for the topic is warmed up and moving, doing more is fairly easy. Like a car coasting downhill, it’s too easy. Stopping and starting is harder on your memory. That’s good (unlike the car), because it strengthens your memory.

Distributed practice seems to work regardless of how you go about studying. Yet, you can do best by combining it with practice testing. Don’t be mad at your instructor for giving you lots of quizzes. They give you a double dose of good learning. Try (and try again) to get in the habit of doing it yourself!

#5: Interleaved Practice

When studying math, you need to learn a few different kinds of formulas. For example, you learn one equation to compute the area of a circle. You learn another to figure out the perimeter. The idea behind interleaved practice is that you are better off mixing some area problems with some perimeter problems when you study.

The reason this works is that you need to learn a bit more than how to apply each formula. You also need to learn when to use one formula and when to use another. When you see a new problem, you first have to figure out what kind of problem it is. By interleaving the problems during your study sessions, you give yourself practice at telling the problems apart.