Study Skills for Student Success

Study skills are an important part of learning in an effective manner. As a student you are probably juggling work and social life with study. In short you have a busy life so you need good skills to maximize the use of your time.

Here we provide you with study skills that use your time efficiently, and take advantage of the way information is encoded in memory.

• Prime time. When do you work best? All of us have a time when we work best or when we are sluggish and tired. This all has to do with our body cycles and the body’s biorhythms. Research suggests that we are more productive and alert in our prime time. For a student, ensure that you are doing your most important work in this prime time.



• Readings. Do your readings before you go to lectures or tutorials. By reading before the class you will be able to contribute to the classes and also link pre-existing knowledge structures to the content that is in the lecture or tutorial. This will enhance your long term memory and the retrieval of information from your long term memory – which is useful in exams.



• Review.Reviewing your notes on the same day as the lecture allows you to reconstruct the lecture and ideas to memory. By doing this on the day of the lecture you maximize the content that you are able to meaningfully encode into memory.



• Plan. It is important to plan your work and then to work your plan. This means having a plan for when you are going to read your notes.



• Reread. Your notes should be re-read each week. By reading each week you are more likely to commit your ideas to memory by the process of repetition. This will also reduce your exam study time significantly.



• Tutorials. Be an active participant in tutorials. Test your understanding of ideas and the subject content.



• Take active breaks. Try to take breaks for 5-10 minutes every hour. By taking active breaks you stop your concentration for flagging.



• Study different subjects.Try not to spend more than 2 hours on a subject each day. If you do, then try to do at least a couple of distinct tasks. This will keep your concentration higher than if you slave away on one task all day.

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