Category: Study Skills

Posted on

Music While Studying: Does It Motivate Or Distract?

By Marissa Corder

Can music help you study more efficiently? Unfortunately, this question is not easy to answer, and research has yielded contradictory evidence. The effect of music on cognitive performance depends on a multitude of factors including tempos of songs, types of cognitive tasks being performed (such as reading comprehension or solving algebra problems), and prior listening experiences. The arousal and mood hypothesis proposes that music’s influence on cognitive performance is a result of physiological responses (1). This hypothesis was developed to explain the “Mozart effect” – the popular misconception that listening to Mozart makes you smarter; that is, after Mozart-listening sessions, participants scored higher on spatial abilities compared to silent conditions or listening to instructions on relaxation (2). Later research found supporting evidence for the arousal and mood hypothesis and thus, “busted” the erroneous conclusion of a causal relationship between music and intelligence.

Continue reading “Music While Studying: Does It Motivate Or Distract?”

Posted on

Chunk Your Life Together

By Laken Barlow

Congratulations! You’re going to college! Or you may already be there, still good for you. Going and getting into college is an important milestone in many people’s lives. It prepares you for your future career. College is also a time to figure out who you are as a person and to help you grow. It can be intimidating sometimes, I’m not going to lie. You’re put in a completely new environment where you have to make new friendships and completely start over in sports and other organizations. You have to create a positive image of yourself to your peers, all the while under the pressure of doing well in your classes. The whole reason you came to college is to prepare yourself for your future, so you need to learn how to balance out your social and academic life. A key component to managing your academic work is your study habits.

Continue reading “Chunk Your Life Together”

Posted on

You Know What They Say About Assuming: The Likelihood Principle and Unconscious Inference

By Hannah Schultz

Have you ever taken a class in which on the first day, the professor immediately initiates actual learning? You take your seat, and all of a sudden there is a Power Point presentation on the projector and you’re supposed to be taking out your notebook. All the while, you’re wondering why there’s no entertaining ice breaker to let everyone introduce themselves. It is from this day forward, you know this is going to be a class that requires immense effort, and your professor even says, “There is a lot of material to go over, so I will start class at exactly 8 a.m. and end exactly at 9:30”.

 

We have all experienced our fair share of classes such as this, and if you haven’t yet in college, you will. However, proceed with caution because when it comes to studying for an exam, most students decide to wait until the last minute to cram as much information as possible. While going over the twelve chapters of content, you are more than likely skimming over the information and relating it to other subjects in order to remember. Due to Helmholtz’s likelihood principle, we should alter how we study. Continue reading “You Know What They Say About Assuming: The Likelihood Principle and Unconscious Inference”

Posted on

It’s Not a Generation Thing: The Generation Effect

By Sydni Neal

The Generation Effect

For individuals wishing to improve their grades on tests and quizzes, the generation effect may come in handy. The generation effect, an effective memory strategy which allows an individual to remember information better, is rather simple to take advantage of. The generation effect is simply the act of creating, or generating, information and materials that an individual needs to remember in order to enhance the process of encoding within the memory. However, according to research, the effectiveness and usefulness of the generation effect is different depending on the situation, but, as a whole, is an effect study method.

Continue reading “It’s Not a Generation Thing: The Generation Effect”

Posted on

Study Techniques: Mass V.S. Distributed Practice

By Eva Diaz

It can be a scary and exciting experience to enter college. All new experiences and people you meet can be overwhelming at some point. Student life can differ from what high school taught you. There are many things that you have to learn during your first semester school: how to write proper notes, how to follow the speed of your professor, but most importantly how to study. It may open up your mind greatly, but it could also bring many questions to life. What does this mean? What is the professor talking about? Am I doing this right? Who am I again? Although I cannot answer who you are, I can give you tips on studying for your classes as you prepare for the semester.

Continue reading “Study Techniques: Mass V.S. Distributed Practice”

Posted on

Learn How to Study by Using the Method of Loci

By Rachel Poignant

While entering college as a freshman, it is normal to have different feelings go through your head. Some of the feelings you may experience are stress, anxiety, depression, and the feeling of being overwhelmed. In college, the professor will usually put more than just one chapter on the exam. As a freshman college student, you are used to the exams in high schools only covering one chapter. As your first exam is approaching, you are probably thinking “How am I supposed to study?” I am here to explain an atypical way that you can use to study. The approach I bring to you is called the method of loci.

Continue reading “Learn How to Study by Using the Method of Loci”

Posted on

Don’t Let Your Brain Interfere With Your Studying

By Will Compton

“For every credit hour you’re enrolled in, you should be spending two or three hours studying outside of the classroom”.

Sheesh, what a nightmarish sentence. Yet, it’s a sentence that most college students have heard before. Speaking from the experience of a junior, I can say with confidence that studying can be cumbersome at any stage of your college career. This is especially true if you have trouble keeping all the information straight in your head. When we’re studying a wealth of information and subjects within close proximity of each other, we tend to experience interference – an incident in which information hinders the recollection of conceptually similar information. There are two types of interference. In proactive interference, previously learned information impedes the retention of new information. In retroactive interference, new information impedes the recall of old information.

Let me help you out with a few tips to avoid this nagging interference.

Continue reading “Don’t Let Your Brain Interfere With Your Studying”

Posted on

Making Better Decisions in College

By Yuchen Yang and Taylor Walker

Every college student will be challenged with making decisions at some point during their college career. The decisions made by college students impact their relationships, family, career trajectories, jobs, education, sex, health, money, living situation, diet, friends, beliefs, and drinking.

However, compared to upperclassmen, college freshmen are likely to experience a hard time making these types of decisions because their lack of knowledge about new environments like college.

Some common questions asked by college freshmen are:

“Should I go out for drinks tonight or should I stay in to study for my exam on Monday?”

“Should I take this course because it seems easy or should I take a different course that challenges me?”

“Should I choose my major based on salary or should I choose a major that interests me?”

Continue reading “Making Better Decisions in College”

Posted on

Rethink Your Reasoning

By Annie Clark and Drew Kinsella

In college, incoming freshman can often get swept up in the overwhelming amounts of school work they suddenly have to balance. With the increased workload, learning effective and productive studying habits is essential for success. Although many people know the typical studying tips (spacing out studying sessions, not cramming, and using a variety of techniques to help memorize new facts), one area that does not receive a lot of attention is the actual cognitive processes that occur when new information is presented. An essential mistake that many people make while reasoning with new information, is belief bias. Though not often thought about directly when dealing with study techniques, it is important to  be aware of the types of errors you can make when trying to learn information to help avoid them.  

Continue reading “Rethink Your Reasoning”

Posted on

Make It About YOU: Learning with the Self-Reference Effect

By Marissa Wurster & Daniel Ilagan

You know how you’re mom told you while you were growing up to stop being selfish and stop making things all about you? Well we’re here to tell you to forget that! In terms of improving memory and encoding items, relating things back to yourself can actually be really helpful! Students spend hours every single day trying to comprehend new material, but often times they waste that time because they fail to relate the material to themselves. Evaluating incoming information relative to the contents of one’s self schema can lead to enhanced elaboration and organization of the newly learned material (1).

Continue reading “Make It About YOU: Learning with the Self-Reference Effect”