A lot of kids will struggle with studying when they first start college. Some kids may have gotten by with their study habits in high school but most of the time, these study habits don’t quite help anyone in college. College is so much different in that there aren’t many small assignments that help you to make sure you understand the material like there were in high school. There are lectures, quizzes, participation, papers, presentations, and exams and that’s pretty much it when it comes to grades in college. For me, I tried to take on high school by myself whenever I could but that will not go will with you for college. I highly encourage any freshmen coming in to immediately start going to some study groups or just collaborating with at least one person that you can count on.
There are days where it is hard to make yourself get out of bed, go to school, or complete an assignment, but these are tasks that need to be completed in order for success. Every student is responsible for their own success, and this includes having goals and doing things we may not want to do to reach those goals. Being a first-year college student can be intimidating in itself, and you may wake up one day and ask yourself, “Do I really want to go to class today?” You may enjoy lying in bed all day catching up on your favorite TV show, but you must control those thoughts and make the choice that will ultimately benefit you in the long run. By overriding these thoughts and still getting up to go to school to achieve your goals you are participating in the use of cognitive control and self-regulation.
Are you cramming for exams? Do you drown in flashcards? There’s a science-backed lifeline that could change the way you hit the books. It’s called maintenance rehearsal, not your average study hack. It’s a brain-tuning, memory-maxing method that could turn your study woes into wins.
Did you know concrete examples and concrete thinking are used throughout everyday life? Concrete examples are defined as real-world, or illustrative, examples of an abstract or declarative concept (Rawson et al. 2015) (1). Concrete thinking is a very specific way of thinking. People from all ages use concrete thinking. From early childhood, concrete thinking is developed from when you are a baby until you are about the age of 7 (2). During the early years of school, specifically the ages from 7 to 12, concrete thinking is a major part of the way kids think when it comes to school at these ages (2). From age 12 until adolescence, kids begin to analyze, generalize, extrapolate, and empathize more (2). Lastly, from adolescence until adulthood, people are experienced when it comes to concrete thinking. People begin to use concrete thinking in their personal experiences and observations that will eventually lead to a solution about things that go on in their life and pertaining to school and work (2). When applying concrete examples and concrete thinking to studying, this makes people study more specific and to the point and apply examples to the concept that happens when studying for a class. Let’s use a concrete example in mathematics. For example, if you have six bananas and take two, you have taken one-third or 33.33% of the bananas. This takes a generalized problem and by someone using a concrete example, in this example it being bananas, and this helps them with remembering a simple math problem. Concrete examples and thinking are a good way for young incoming students in college to take an abstract concept that they may or may not know and apply it to a real-world, illustrative example that helps them better understand the course material.
Have you ever sat down to do homework, study, or to focus on a topic and realized that it is difficult to ignore distractions around you? Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult to filter out distractions, even though you desire to be productive? At several points in a student’s academic career, most people often struggle with truly remaining focused while doing schoolwork and other important tasks. There can be many aspects of why a student cannot stay focused, especially if they are preoccupied with other events in their life.
What is Selective Attention?
One main reason that students can become so easily distracted is that selective attention is an obstacle that every student faces. Selective Attention is the process of having an ability to focus on a particular subject in their direct environment for a specific amount of time. For a student to be truly productive with their work, they must put in effort with this process and actively ignore all other distractions around their working environment. For this process to be a success, a person must be selective in their own attention and realize what they must drown out in the background. For a lot of young people, it can be a challenging task to drown out distractions such as their phones or other technology that is not helpful to be used in the moment.
Trying to learn new information while having to remember old information is hard, especially the thought of coming in as a first-year college student. The thought of trying to learn multiple classes and courses at once at a high level can be stressful, especially coming out of high school. The class schedule in college is confusing within itself. Trying to figure out how you will study for your psychology of learning exam on Monday and your cognitive psychology exam, also on Monday. When you go in to take your cognitive psychology exam, you completely forget everything you studied from earlier chapters, but can only remember everything from recent chapters. This is what is called retroactive interference (RI). This process occurs when learning a new task that then impairs the previously learned task (1). As you continue throughout the exam, you remember stuff from chapters from the start of the year. As you start remembering those earlier chapters, you cannot seem to remember anything from the chapters you just learned! This is what is called proactive interference (PI). This process occurs when the old task you learned impairs the ability to learn or remember the new task (1). There are some ways to stop these interferences from occurring for you little newcomers. To stop these from happening you need to fully understand which interference is which and what they fully mean. Here is a little acronym trick for you, Proactive = Old, Retroactive = New (“P.O.R.N”).
Entering college can be stressful, overwhelming, and confusing. Often you are bombarded with so much information in so little time. You may be told by different professors about various study tips like making flashcards, using Quizlet, highlighting main points, and much more. What if I told you there is a compressed and more effective way to learn? You could use interleaving.
As an incoming freshman studying is the one skill, I hoped you learned in high school but if not here is an idea of how to study!
Use the recency effect! Now you may be wondering what exactly that is but let me explain slowly. The recency effect is the tendency to remember most recently presented items (1). Now an example of this is if you are trying to remember a list of items it is most likely you remember the items you last studied (1). Now using this effect can help move items in short- term memory to a longer-term memory. You would have to constantly revisit the items the same way you learned them.
While studying, everyone has experienced the need to snap back others, listen to music, and browse Instagram. We laugh when we communicate with others, we groove to music, and we stay connected when we browse Instagram. We run the risk of drifting from our study goals when we engage in these activities while studying. It is all fun and games until we get a bad grade on that important test or the homework assignment that is half of the final grade. I understand how difficult it might be to resist temptation when your phone is so close. I find myself picking up my phone to put on music or snap others back. But when I do this, I find that I start singing along to the music, which diverts my attention from my studies. Why is this a task so hard to complete? Divided attention, or multitasking, is the term used to describe this. When this occurs, I typically end up with a low grade or find it difficult to respond to an important quiz question. This causes an excessive amount of worry and self-doubt.
It is quite difficult to start college. There are several issues that must be resolved, the most important of which being how to comprehend and absorb the content in the best possible way. One of the many worries that accompany beginning college is learning how to use elaboration when studying new material. According to cognitive psychologists, elaboration is a very useful technique for enhancing learning and memory retention (1). Elaboration is the process of bringing new information to life by connecting it to what has already been learned or by creating meaningful connections. Students can improve their comprehension and retain more information by using the elaborative encoding method. Study skills mastery is essential to achieving academic brilliance. Elaboration is shown to be an effective tactic for boosting understanding, fortifying memory retention, and encouraging in-depth learning (1). Elaboration makes study sessions more lively by enticing students to actively interact with the content, draw connections, and develop ideas (2). Students that integrate elaborative processing into their study regimens open the door to an abundance of knowledge that is just waiting to be discovered and comprend (3).
