How To Study

Where should I study?

• Declutter and clean up your desk. Because you will be sitting most of the time, choose the best chair you can afford and make sure you try a few out before making a final purchasing decision.
• Ideally, choose a place with some form of natural, rather than artificial light. If you must have artificial light, avoid fluorescent lighting, choose always incandescent over fluorescent light.
• Have a convenient place to study and do your homework where there is enough silence, privacy, and comfort to get the job done. It should have a comfortable temperature and fresh air.
• Study always in the same place. Good study habits are key to academic performance and success.
• Tidy up your space to reduce distractions and gather all the study materials before you start, including textbooks, articles, index cards, calculator, ruler, eraser, stapler, pencils, markers, etc.
• Avoid noise. Use earplugs and noise-canceling headphones, and/or listen to classical, instrumental, background music or white noise, anything else with lyrics is likely to be a distraction.

When and how much should I study?

• Establish a daily routine where you study a minimum of three to five hours per day, five or six days per week.
• Make sure to rest one or two days per week or, at least, one day every two weeks.
• Take short breaks. Taking breaks from studying every 75 to 90 minutes usually improve both focus and attention.
• Manage your time efficiently. Schedule a time to study and stick to it. Find the time when you have the most energy to focus, study, and get things done, and you’re least likely to be interrupted.
• Make a habit to study regularly. Do not procrastinate. Give yourself time ahead to prepare for your exams and succeed. If you leave things to the last minute, you end up cramming too much information into a short space of time. Besides, you are likely to be stressed, which is unhealthy, unpleasant, and detrimental to remembering information. It also prevents you from studying in shorter bursts over a longer period, which is far more efficient.

How should I study?

• Quit smoking, drinking, and taking drugs. Live a more active lifestyle, do more exercise and outdoor activities, and watch less television. Eat a more balanced and healthy diet. Disconnect from mass and social media, your smartphone, and video games.
• Maintain an adequate body posture.
• Remove distractions and noise. Do not check your mobile phone, email account, social media, or messaging app. It is not the moment for watching television, playing videogames, or reading a newspaper either.
• Study with a positive attitude and determination. Count and celebrate your blessings, not your problems. Being able to study is an incredible privilege. Education is the key to success personally and professionally and learning is an opportunity to grow emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually.
• No pain, no gain. There is nothing worth having that comes from a silver plate.
• Avoid caffeine and energetic drinks. They may help you in the short term, but not in the long run. Drink water and take short breaks.
• Sleep seven to eight hours on average. Lack of sleep severely impairs a person’s ability to focus, learn efficiently, and recall information.
• Strive to acquire meaningful knowledge, not merely memorizing definitions, facts, dates, and events.
• Study alone is normally better because you are less likely to get distracted by others and you can decide on when, where, how, and what to study. A great benefit of studying in a group is being able to ask your classmates questions if something does not make sense.

Meaningful learning

Meaningful learning is learning in which new learned information is completely understood, comes from prior, related knowledge, and can now be used to make connections with other previously known knowledge, aiding in further understanding. Information is stored in a network of connections, so it can be easily accessed from multiple starting points depending on the context of recall.

• Meaningful learning is active, constructive, and long-lasting. The learner is fully engaged in the learning process, and not a simply passive recipient of information.
• Avoid rote learning, that is, the memorization of information based on repetition.
• Use graphic organizers, such as maps, concept maps (schemes), diagrams, charts, graphs, timelines, etc., to visually depict the relationships between facts, ideas, or concepts.

Let’s see an example. The United Kingdom is located in the north west of Europe. It is separated from continental Europe by the English Channel. The UK includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many small islands. It is bordered to the north by the Atlantic Ocean, to the east by the North Sea, and to the south by the English Channel.

It is a sovereign state and a parliamentary monarchy whose head of state is Charles III. It consists of four countries: England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Its capital city is London.It is a large, cosmopolitan, and welcoming city. […]

• Two main learning tools to study Geography are globes and maps. We use a globe when we want to study the earth as a whole. A map is a symbolic representation of the earth, parts of the earth, or a planet, drawn to a scale on a flat surface. It says more than a thousand words. Maps allow us to navigate in space and extract a wide variety of information. They highlight the relationships between different elements in space.

Study Techniques

• You need to learn to learn, and do so quickly and efficiently.
• Set aside time to work on the things that matter to you, to grow and learn, every day.
• Since we all learn in different ways, study techniques do vary from person to person and from subject to subject.
• A study technique is a tool that facilitates the study and gives positive results. A basic study technique could be something as follows:

1. First, read the whole text carefully to get an overall impression, a general understanding of the big concepts and key ideas in the material.
2. Re-read it a few times. Take as much time as you need to thoroughly understand the material. Use different resources to learn the same information, such as videos, books from different authors, podcasts, images, dictionaries, to name a few.
3. Most information will fade away if you don’t recall it. That’s why periodic recall of it is absolutely essential if you want to retain it for a long time.
4. Schedule shorter, more focused study sessions to allow your brain to assimilate knowledge more efficiently. Avoid cramming all the information you need to learn in the last few days before an exam.
5. Avoid multitasking, noise, and distractions, e.g., calls, messages, emails, etc.
6. Avoid vocalizing, that is, uttering or saying words as you read them either loudly or saying them to yourself. This is basically because the speed at which you speak is slower than the speed at which you read. Read and study with a fresh mind.
7. Use highlighting to draw attention to the most important information and key concepts. Read the paragraph first carefully and then highlight it. Don’t highlight too much, be very selective. Highlighting big chunks of text defeats its purpose, namely, making a small selection of the most important parts of the information. Instead of highlighting whole sentences or paragraphs, highlight only key concepts and connections between concepts. Use color-coding, i.e., different colored markers to highlight different categories of information, such as names, key concepts, definitions, dates, formulas, etc.

   Circle any words you do not understand, look them up in a dictionary, and write their meanings in the margins.

8. Use the highlighted information to create concept maps, diagrams, flashcards, summaries, maps, etc.

Example of highlighting (The Solar System)

Geology is the study of the earth, geo means earth and ology means study of. It’s concerned with the solid Earth, its history, shape, the materials of which it is made, and the processes that are acting and have acted on it. Astronomy is the study of the universe. It includes Earth and everything that lies outside of its atmosphere, such as planets, stars, galaxies, comets, and black holes.

The Earth is the fourth planet away from the Sun. The Solar System is the sun and everything that orbits or moves around it due to its gravity. It is a collection of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, dust and gas. It is situated within the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

The Solar System includes:

• The sun itself. It is a 4.5 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star made mainly out of hydrogen and helium. It is, by far, the biggest and heaviest celestial body in the Solar System. It contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System. It is not passive, it has flares and coronal mass ejections which are powerful eruptions of plasma on the Sun’s surface. These eruptions can have widespread impacts on Earth, such as disrupting power grids and communications networks or damaging satellites.

• A planet is a spherical celestial body that does not produce light and orbits around a star. The solar system has eight planets which are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Moons are solid celestial bodies that orbit planets.

• Comets are small and icy celestial bodies that orbit around the sun. They are cosmic snowballs of frozen ice, rock, and dust. When they approach the sun, the ice starts to heat up and turn into gas. The water vapor and dust released by the heating process form their long tails.

• Asteroids are small, rocky worlds without atmospheres that revolve around the sun. The larger ones are called planetoids or minor planets. Despite their size, asteroids can be pretty dangerous.

• Meteorites are chunks of rocks or metal that have survived a fiery entry through Earth’s atmosphere and have made it to the Earth’s surface. They can be dangerous depending on their size and the location of impact with the Earth. Some scientists believe that a giant meteorite hit the earth, wiping out the dinosaurs.

Do you like astronomy? Read our article Astronomy Free Software that compiles and describes a list of educational apps, completely free that help you to learn more about the Solar System, the Milky Way, and the Universe.