By: Rich Wang
Ah, studying. One of the most boring and mind-numbing activities one will ever have to perform. The pain only worsens when one spends many hours studying, he still gets lower than the grade than he wanted. Perhaps this is due to a lack of concentration, or maybe because the student simply studied the wrong way. Regardless, studying more efficiently is something that everyone wants to do. Below are five amazing tips to help YOU study much more effectively!
1. Prepare More
Almost all of us students hate excessive studying. It’s boring, tedious, and all the information you learn will likely be forgotten the next day anyways. However, it is no big secret that the more you do it, the more likely you are to perform better on your next test. If you just cannot seem to get above a certain score, perhaps try studying for an extra 30 minutes or an hour than normal. If that doesn’t work, maybe you just need someone to help you, like an online tutor which you can find on KidsTeachKids!
No matter the method you choose to study, if you cannot perform as well as you wish to, you should definitely study more. And of course, know that overpreparing is always better than underpreparing (within a reasonable limit, of course).
2. Ask Your Teacher
Although there are a group of teachers who are just mean monsters who dislike questions, some may be surprised to find out that a majority of them are extremely nice, and willing to help you with any issues you might have. Most of the time, it is worth a try to ask your teacher for extra practice, or any tips that they may have for mastering the current material. And of course, since they are the teacher of that subject, their tips are sure to be excellent.
Do note that some teachers may discourage question asking during class, but you can also try asking them after or before a class has ended, when they are not on a tight schedule to finish presenting material.
You can also ask them certain details about the test, such as the number of questions, how classes in the past years performed on it, or anything along those lines. The more details you have about the test, the more prepared you will be, which will likely result in less testing stress.
Of course, if your teacher has made it clear that he or she does not wish to be asked anything, then do not push them.
3. Do a Practice Test with Your Homework
Something I’ve found useful in several of my classes is to use homework as a practice test. This works especially well on subjects such as math and physics, where how well you do isn’t purely based off of memorization. It is worth noting that even if you teacher takes up your homework as a grade, or you don’t have homework to do this on, you can still go online and search up some practice questions to do this with. You can also ask your teacher for extra practice and use that as a test.
So, now that you have some questions that you can test on, just set a timer and try out the questions! When you are finished, check your work and see what “grade” you got. If you got a bad score, don’t be discouraged, as this is just a practice! Try and see what caused you to get such a low score, such as silly errors, going too slow, or just because you didn’t know some of the material. You can then try and correct these errors, such as by checking you arithmetic calculations more, trying to answer each problem just a bit quicker, or reading more about the topic. Using this information, you can adequately adjust your testing style and speed during the test, allowing you to score much higher than you would have otherwise! Just think about it, if you hadn’t taken the practice test, there’s a chance that your practice score (which may have been bad) would have been your real score!
Of course, if you score well, it likely means that you are on the right track. Still, even if this happens, at least you know that you are ready to take the test, and have the ability to perform extremely well!
4. Read the Textbook!
We’ve all had that teacher who always seems to put questions on the test that were not on the review. You study so hard, only to be stumped by some random question that your teacher never even mentioned. But the thing is, all teachers have to follow some sort of curriculum, and their questions have to line up with it as well. Furthermore, this curriculum must line up with the textbook.
Although it may seem that textbooks were made to help people fall asleep, you unfortunately must suffer through this at times. If your teacher provides you with inadequate study material, you must go to the textbook and make sure you understand everything that might be quizzed over. Remember that textbooks were written to supplement the teacher’s learning and help a student understand the material, and it is very likely that almost all of the testing questions can be found in there.
Do note that it may contain a lot more information than what is necessary, so this may be extremely time consuming. However, sometimes sacrifices are necessary to boost your grade.
5. Review your Old Quizzes and Tests!
We’ve all been in that situation where we cannot believe we got the grade we did. We think that there must have been an error in the grading, or perhaps you just miswrote or made some silly mistakes… yet…
What use is taking a quiz to measure your knowledge if you’re never going to know what you did wrong? It’s likely that information on a quiz is going to show up again on the upcoming test- you’re going to want to know what you did wrong before it comes up. There is nothing worse than missing the same question twice on two assessments. Yet if you know that there is always a chance of this happening, why not just review your old quizzes and tests to see what you did wrong? It allows you to see your mistakes, and if a question that you missed comes up again, at least you’ll know the correct answer this time, and be able to redeem yourself! Furthermore, since information from a prior quiz has a chance to show up again, in some form, it is good to review the previous questions that your teacher gave.
Not only this, but although it may not seem like it, based on their sometimes mean behavior, teachers are humans as well! They’re not perfect robots; they make mistakes all the time. There’s a chance that they misgraded your paper, or accidentally entered/wrote down the wrong grade! You never know; maybe when reviewing your paper, you’ll notice that you’re teacher made some errors while grading!
And well, hopefully you found these five tips to be helpful! Although following these bits of advice may seem tiring and even tedious at times, just know that your need to study isn’t going to go away; delaying it will only make it even worse. The image above is the exact opposite of what you want to do. Studying will only be efficient if it is done over a long period of concentration. And now, with everything ready, we’re sure that you’ll ace you’re next test! 😀
Of course, if you really want to do better… you could always ask us at KidsTeachKids for some help 😉
