Learning strategies

Every process to control your study behaviour is called a learning strategy. They refer to both the act of learning, as well as all measures you take to make learning possible. The following text will offer you different strategies regarding cognition and useful supporting strategies. Most likely not all of the suggestions will work for you but just choose those that seem helpful to you.

1.       Motivation strategies

Motivation is an important factor to keep up your concentration and attention to make it through a long exam period. If you have an interest in the material you need to study, this will be much easier for you. Think back to your favourite subjects in school. There it was probably a lot easier to study for those favourite classes and you had better grades than in the ones you didn’t like. So it can be a good idea to check the material and see if there is anything in there that interests you. This might be easier with some degrees than others. But I still want to encourage you to try to find interesting things for you, even in classes that you like less. This will make your learning experience a lot better.

Treats and breaks are great strategies to keep your motivation high. You can already integrate treats in your study plan. The size of the treat should be in relation to the effort of each task. Good treats can be a coffee date with friends, exercise, a good meal, two episodes of your favourite show or anything that comes to your mind. You won’t be able to study successfully without breaks. You should get off your desk at least once an hour and do things like some stretches, bringing out the trash or filling up your glass of water. Every three hours you should take a bigger break of an hour. This is the only way to spend six hours of studying efficiently. But it is important that you limit your breaks. If you meet a friend in the library who you want to talk to longer, it is better to arrange a meeting for lunch or dinner.

A great learning strategy to stay motivated is the Pomodoro technique. This technique helps you to really use your learning units well. The only thing you need for that is a timer (there are also different apps for the Pomodoro technique). You set the timer for 25 minutes. In these 25 minutes you do nothing but studying your material for the exam. When the time has passed, you get a five-minute break (25 minutes work + 5 minutes break = 1 Pomodoro unit). You then set your timer for another 25 minutes and continue studying. After doing that four times you take a longer break of half an hour (4 Pomodoro units = 1 Pomodoro cycle). The most effective thing about this technique is the shift of interruptions. You move all activities into your breaks and that way you don’t need as much willpower. You know that you can deal with other things in 25 minutes. You decide whether your Pomodoro units are 25 minutes, or whether you start with shorter or longer units. But you should take a short break after a maximum of 45 minutes since you might run out of energy too quickly otherwise. As you have probably noticed, the Pomodoro technique is a great strategy to stick to your breaks.

Extra tip: There are a few good apps to help you studying. One example is the ForestApp.

 2.       Self-control strategies

Distractions and temptations are everywhere. You will need strategies of self-control to be able to study anyway.

First, you should remove all distractions from your view, along the lines of: out of sight, out of mind. If you are in the library, you should better leave your phone in the locker and if you are at home, you should put it in another room. It is also best to not have any other distractions in your field of view. If you are working with a laptop, you should block all websites that could keep you from studying. There are a few apps that can help you do that.

It is a fact that you are struggling less with distractions if you planned your study goals realistically. Specify concrete weekly and daily goals in your study plan.

Another very useful strategy is to always start with the least favourite task. After establishing this habit successfully, this will be forever helpful for you.

To be able to stay focused on your study material, it can be a good idea to have an extra piece of paper on the table to write down things that you think of which you need to do as well. Just write down the thought and go back to your studying. After a successful day of studying, you can attend to the things on the extra paper. This is a way of keeping possible distractions out of the way. Everything on that paper can now no longer distract you from studying as you will attend to these things later and you cannot forget them, since you wrote them down.

Extra tip: If you have a phase where you absolutely cannot concentrate on your studying, then maybe this is a way of your body telling you to take a break. If nothing works, you should take a day off and return the next day completely relaxed.

3.       Organisation strategies

Strategies of organisation are all learning activities that transform existing pieces of information into a form that is easier to work with.

Part of that is the organisation of your study documents. It is completely up to you which system you use there. You can make a file for each subject or you can organize all documents in a folder for each semester. You can print all lecture slides of your professor and add notes by hand or you can write down all important facts by hand or on your laptop again. Whatever helps you to find important information quickly and to keep a good overview over the subject, is the best strategy for you. But you should definitely avoid having a pile of lose pieces of paper.

Further organization strategies are the following:

• You can highlight important facts with colours in your notes.
• You can summarize technical terms and definitions in separate lists, which you can hang up in different places in your flat or you file them on top of your documents.
• A summary of a big amount of material can help you to filter the most important facts. Towards the end of this period you can make an ultimate summary of catchwords. But this is only helpful if you really understood the material.
• An outline, like the contents in a book, is a good strategy to get an overview over a topic.
• Very similar, but not in a hierarchical structure, are mind maps. You can add images to some points of the material to appeal to the visual learning process.
• Charts, diagrams, sketches and timelines are great to structure the content in a new way.

4.       Memory strategies

There are a number of memory strategies that are good for remembering specific terms or vocabulary. One example for that is the so-called Method of Loci. Here you connect familiar paths or rooms (this is where we speak of the so-called mind palace) with the terms you need to study. In your mind these terms are added at significant points of that familiar path. So, when you have to remember the terms you just mentally walk along the path to “discover” all the terms again. This can be very useful when you have to learn long lists by heart.

Other examples for these memory strategies are mnemonics or creating acronyms (where the first letters of words make a new word). Especially mnemonics are a sign of creativity, which can help you to remember different things. The funnier or crazier you save the study material in your brain, like using weird anecdotes or funny associations, the easier these will stay in your mind.

It doesn’t matter which strategy you use but you won’t be able to get on without using any memory strategies. Crucial for your success are the number of repetitions and the distance between those intervals of repetition. You should repeat the study material at least seven times, where the kind of repetition can be different each time. You don’t have to read one book seven times that would be rather ineffective. Read the material; highlight important things; take notes; summarize with your own words; create an overview; repeat it aloud; try to answer exam questions; speak in a study group; critically question the content; all these are possible ways of repetition. You have a wide range of options to choose from.

In the beginning you should repeat in short intervals and these can get longer with time. How long these gaps have to be, depends on you and how quick you forget what you learned. That way the repetition doesn’t frustrate you because you see what you already know and that there are only a few things you still need to work on. To find good gaps between those study intervals, you have to refer to your reflexion of your study behaviour.

5.       Transformation and reduction strategy

This deals with the handling of the study material. In most cases it won’t be enough to just read the presentation slides or textbook over and over. This would be inefficient and doesn’t allow you to properly understand the texts. It is suggested to transform the material to an easier version and at best to reduce it as well.

But you still have to start by reading everything first. Get an overview of the material. How much is it going to be, are you looking forward to it, what could get tricky? Which topics belong together? What is familiar? Here you could already organize the material by using a mind map. In a second step you start reading attentively. You can highlight important parts, which is only good when you actually understood what the text is about. Otherwise you just highlight random things and are wasting your time.

The actual transformation and reduction takes places when you are taking notes of the study material. Writing down notes by hand in your own words provides a deep processing of the material. Useful preparation is half the battle. That includes creating categories and generic terms and to file partial aspects under these. This helps to compromise the study material and to separate the important from the unimportant. You should also make connections between the new things you have learned. What is related, where do you see similarities and differences? You can take these notes on a normal piece of paper or on cue cards. Both options have their advantages, depending on your personal preferences.

Cue cards allow a study format that is very close to the exam. You write down a question or a headline on one side and the answer or the correct material on the other side. When you are studying, you only look at the front first, so you only visualize the questions, just like in the exam. But you have to give the answer without any clue. It is harder to cheat or to leave out topics that “you actually already know”. You are constantly checking what you know and what you still have to repeat because the hesitation in answering a card is a clear sign of lacking knowledge. Even if you already know everything by heart, you can still use the cue cards for repetition. You can also use these in a study group where you ask each other questions. If you have a terrible handwriting, it would probably be better to work digitally on that one. There are a number of apps that can help you create cue cards or other learning strategies (like ExamTime or Quizlet).

Effectiveness of learning strategies

Learning strategies dealing with the study material have different levels of effectiveness and time investment.

Repetition

The classic way of repetition, to verbally repeat information or to write it down over and over, has a long tradition in the human history. Repetition is also the first learning strategy that you might have used growing up. You learned first poems and songs by heart and memorized where you live and what your parent’s phone numbers are. There is nothing that speaks against repetition. But if you only use this strategy, you are doing the so-called bulimia studying. Here the materials you are studying are only saved in your brain for a short time and it is harder to recall that knowledge, as it is lying around in your brain completely alone and disconnected.

Organization

Organization as a learning strategy refers to connecting new pieces of information by reducing them to the essentials, in order to interrelate them in a way that is comprehensible for you. With a good organization strategy, this can be a very effective strategy. Part of the organization strategy is creating mind maps, overviews, summaries and charts.

 Elaborate

Elaboration strategies are very effective and lead to a very deep processing of knowledge, which is rooted in the long-term memory. They require a higher effort and are tedious, but they also offer a more sustainable learning success. With the help of this strategy it is possible to achieve a deeper understanding of the content by connecting the new information with pre-existing knowledge, the so-called foreknowledge. This succeeds if you ask why-questions about the material, summarize it in your own words or make connections between the new material and your existing knowledge.

A successful study plan consists of strategies of all three categories.