As someone who is interested in the subject of psychology, I hope to share my hobby with everyone in Engineering in a meaningful and interesting fashion. Last issue, I offered some ideas for activities to help you reduce feelings of stress. With final exams rolling around, I would like to share some strategies for effective studying.
First and foremost, you should know what type of learner you are. But maybe you’re still not sure.
If you notice that you remember oral instructions very well, or you are good at explaining concepts yourself, you’re an auditory learner. As such, you would benefit from reading your notes aloud when you’re studying. Alternatively, you could record yourself reading your notes once, then listen to the recording every subsequent time that you study that set of notes.
If you find that you learn and study more effectively by reading your textbook, you’re a visual learner. Thus, you would benefit from taking lots of notes, using flashcards, doodling to accompany your notes, and colour-coding your notes.
If you have trouble sitting still during lectures and learn well using models or doing hands-on activities, you’re a kinesthetic learner. Therefore, you would benefit from using flashcards, studying with peers, and studying in short sessions.
However, most of us have characteristics of these three different learning styles, so I recommend trying different strategies during the term to see what works best for you.
Make a studying schedule for yourself. Prioritize your studying based on your final exam schedule, and the subjects that you find most or least challenging. Remember to schedule in breaks, meals, exercise or other self-care activities, and sleep—probably the second most important activity of them all, after studying.
Start studying early. An important part of studying is to prevent the loss of information. A revolutionary theory in the field of psychology is the forgetting curve, which was first hypothesized by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. With only one repetition of newly learned information, the participants of the original experiment only remembered 40 per cent of the original information. With two repetitions of newly learned information, the participants remember 65 per cent of the original information. You can imagine the good that three, four, etc. repetitions can do for your memory.
Mix up your subjects during your longer study sessions. This challenges the natural occurrence in your brain of learning, forgetting, and relearning information. Some also argue that it challenges students to compare and contrast the different subjects that they are learning, which allows them to not only comprehend the material from a shallow understanding, but also at the roots of the subjects themselves. Most realistically, the problems that you are bound to come across in your professional careers will involve multidisciplinary knowledge, so mixing up your studying from now on will get you used to this reality.
Exams in the Faculty of Engineering tend to focus on applying knowledge. Take advantage of the Engineering Society’s Exam Bank on their website for additional practice aside from your past tutorial problems, lecture examples, and past exam papers that your professor or TAs might give you. Don’t simply practice these problems repeatedly; aim to understand the concepts that are applied to solve them. If you don’t understand one step in a multistep procedure, ask a classmate, your professor, or your TA. You do not want to experience the snowball effect of not understanding a concept that you learn early on to haunt you later on in a more complex topic.
Based on these practice problems, think beyond them: What else could your professor ask you on the exam? I remember that I did all the practice problems and assignment problems for one of my courses in 1B. However, for each question on the final exam, we had to make multiple assumptions, whereas in the tutorials and assignments, we had to make only one assumption—at most, two.
I hope that these strategies will help you. As someone who is only just going into 2A, I can still remember the anxiety that I felt before heading into finals. A bit of anxiety beforehand isn’t a bad thing,—it should motivate you to study hard and study smart—but don’t let these emotions deter you from believing that you will perform your best on final exams.
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