Home | Educational Psychology | Updated 02/18/05

Study Tips

This is page is intended to provide a list of common study tips that students and other learners may find useful. As time allows I'll update the page and provide appropriate references, as well as provide a short discussion of the "whys" behind the ideas presented here. This page also contains rough notes that I'll incorporate as time allows.

Managing Your Mind

The following notes are taken directly from Butler, G., & Hope, T. (1995). Managing Your Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. I've also added additional comments from other sources as well such as the Slacker Manager.

Chapter Summary - Chapter 28 - The Fundamentals of Effective Study

• Regular study can be fun and rewarding
• The principles of effective study are simple, but often ignored even by experienced students.
• The law of mass effect is central to study: even if you study efficiently, you still need to put in the hours.
• Four ways of making it easy to start:
  • Make yourself an inviting work environment.
  • List the tasks to do beforehand.
  • Keep the benefits of study clearly in mind.
  • Leave your desk inviting for the next time
    
• Make study fun
• Use your best time of day
• Use the chocolate box approach by keeping study periods to bite-sized chunks, and by giving yourself variety.
• Study with your main purpose in mind.
• Supply the salami principle: regular small slices of study will add up to big achievements.
• Complete your projects.
• File and tidy up at the end of your study projects.
• Reward yourself for each completed study period
  

Chapter Summary - Chapter 29 - Key Study Skills: Reading, Taking Notes, and Using the Material

• Reading is a key study skill. Use the four prong approach:
  • Preparation (browsing)
  • Overview
  • The closer reading
  • Review
• Notes.
  • They should be personal and as short as you need for the purpose
  • Why are you making notes?
  • Note-making is an active process
    • There are different types of notes:
      • Underlining and highlighting of text in the book
      • Marginal notation of important ideas
      • Linear and hierarchical lists (like this summary)
      • Spider diagrams / mind mapping
    • It may be useful to condense notes at repeated intervals
• Work with the information
• Practice skills
• Draw a diagram to represent information
• Explain your subject to someone else
• Relate what you have learned to someone else
• The multimedia approach: make use of several modalities
  • Write
  • Speak
  • Dictate audio tapes
  • Listen to tapes or radio
  • Use color in your diagrams
• Give yourself a boost: a little and often.
  • Carry a notebook and look at it at odd moments
  • Listen to a cassette of your notes in the car
• Use a revision strategy if studying for an exam.
  • Rehearsal
  • Timetable
    • Include a revision of the revision
    • Build in slack time
  • Practice
  • Reward yourself after the exam
• Examinations nerves are normal
  • Learn how to manage them
  • Prepare yourself for whatever the future brings.

Restak, R. (2003). The new brain: How the modern age is rewiring your mind. Emmas, PA: Rodale. (1669).

• Premise: The brain is fundamentally plastic. It changes in response to the environment around it. Moreover, it can't help but change. That is its very nature.
  • Change in the brain is easy to see in infants in that the changes are made manifest in the motions and life of the child as it grows and learns to master its environment. Beyond changes in a child's behavior, how do we really know that the brain is changing in response to the environment? Recent advances in medical technologies have made it possible to image the brain as it goes about the business of solving problems. Before and after images give show us the changes that occur at a gross physical level. We still don't have a picture of change at the cellular level however.
    So, the brain is plastic; it changes as a response to the environment as a result of experience. The changes are readily visible in children, but less so in adults. However, even in adults, the changes can be found as they accummulate over a life-time.
    The plasticity of the brain is both a blessing and a curse. A curse because the brain automatically responds to the distractions inherent in the environment, typically without our conscious mediation or interpretation. A blessing because when we choose, we can control how, where, and when we expose ourselves to environmental stimuli.
• Learning 101.
  • Voluntary change takes place, expect to need about 3-4 weeks of practice at a new behavior in order to get it wired. I guess the advertisements that state "Try our wonder-product for just 21 days and you'll be hooked" had something going for them.
    • p.13 - "This general principle of reinforcement through repetition has practical applications in everyday life. For instance, if you want to learn a new skill or make use of new knowledge, you must change your brain. You must engage in repetitive exercises that set up the relevant circuits and sharpen their expression."
  • Expert Performance. The difference between the expert and novice in their performance is that the expert has a vastly deeper information base about a topic. As a result they can rely upon their memory to find a solution. In contrast, the novice relies upon algorithms and shallow knowledge in order to solve problem sets. If you want to be an expert, learn more about the topic. It doesn't matter what the topic is: sports, academics, hobbies.
    • p.17 - there is a "similar pattern of intense solitary, deliberate practice among superior performing athletes, chess players, and mathematicians." The same ideas apply to all other domains as well.
  • Focus. A key aspect in achieving superior performance is that you must counter-act the impulse to gain automatic performance as soon as possible in your chosen domain. The learner must consciously focus and concentrate on the subject they are attempting to master. One can't continue to coast along on knowledge that has gone before.
    • Metacognitive processes seem to be at work here. Learn enough to know when you know something and are aware of how to process information in the field.
  • Practice only as long as you can focus. When you loose focus, stop working on it - distributed practice.
    Final Point: p.28: "Select a field of endeavor that appeals to you and then work with sufficient intensity to bring about major reorganizations in your brain's circuitry"
  • On Intelligence.
    • p.31 - "General intelligence (g) is also closely linked to the amount of gray matter in the frontal lobes...... On average, people with more gray matter in their frontal lobes tend to perform better on intelligence tests."
      This suggests a heavy genetic component involved in the development of intelligence.
      The good news is that intelligence is modifiable in that we can rewire our brains if we put in the time and effort.
  • Mirror-Neurons.Mirror-Neurons in monkeys fire as readily when they perform a task and when they see another monkey perform the same task. Do we have similar neurons and can those neurons be recruited for expert performance? See Kosslyn's idea of reality simulation.
    The presence of mirror-neurons also argues that we often take on the perspective of those with whom we associate - For Good or Bad. This further argues we should be choosy about who we associate as we will have a tendency to take on their perspectives.
    • p.37 - "If you want to accomplish something that demands determination and endurance, try to surround yourself with people possessing those talents."
  • Multi-Tasking.
    Don't try multitasking. We aren't good at it. Moreover, anything in the environment that requires / demands processing, detracts from our overall ability to process information.
    Multitasking comes with a cost.
    • p.58 - "the brain is designed to work most efficiently when it works on a single task and for sustained rather than intermittent and alternating periods of time
• Control the images we put in our heads.
  Watching TV and Movies, or other images. NIH research has shown that TV and other images are very effective at destabilizing the "thinking" and "feeling" brain. (see p.67). Importantly, visual images are not mediated. The brain directly responds to images as if they are reality. The downside is that children haven't learned to clearly differentiate reality from the illusion of "entertainment." Equally unfortunate, adults don't do nearly as good a job as we may think. Verbal images on the other hand, are mediated. We have time to make sense of them and understand them in context.
  • p.82 - "Either watching violence or just imagining it decreases the modulating influence of the prefrontal lobes on the limbic system" - i.e. if we watch violent behavior we are more likely to be involved in violent behavior. Additionally, one's perception of the environment is similarly affected as well - images of violence influence the perception of threat in the environment.
    • Bottom line: Get rid of television.
• Treatment of Stroke Patients. Constrain Induced (CI) Movement Therapy forces the injured portion of the brain to recruit new synaptic connections / neurons and regain previous functions.
• Phonics. Training with phonics retrains the brain to acquire appropriate decoding skills needed for reading. In retraining, a previously "abnormal" brain becomes normal.
  Question - can we reprogram other "abnormal" behaviors?