10 Student Study Tips for Academic Success
What really brings students academic success? Is it just being able to just memorise and regurgitate material, or is lifestyle an important part of the process?
Studying is an important part of college and university life. At a minimum, people spend 13 years in education between the ages of 5 to 18 in the UK.The problem that I have seen time and time again as a leadership instructor and ESL teacher, is students studying too much.
That’s right, students on average believe that knowledge intake and, therefore, academic excellence, equates to the time they spend studying. The problem is, that simply isn’t the case.The increasing pressure that students face in the twenty-first century in the academic environment has had an increasingly negative impact on student mental health.
By encouraging students to adopt an ethos of working smarter not harder, the academic environment would be a far more enjoyable place. To this end, I’ve researched 10 study tips that promote mental health and a healthier lifestyle while enabling students to study effectively to achieve academic success.
1.) Strike the balance between text and tech
Although technologies such as tablets, laptops and phones are convenient and portable, research suggests that they are not always beneficial for studying.
In fact, traditional print has been found to be preferred by many students.
Although engaging in interactive habits such as clicking, scrolling and tapping have their benefits according to researchers, there are many benefits of sticking to print too.
The act of reading from a physical book while note-taking has the benefit of physical as well as mental activity. There are, however, a number of benefits that technology offers the educational environment. These include educational videos on YouTube, playful learning through games and quizes, online tutoring lessons from experts, as well as a wealth of information on the internet at student’s finger tips.
In the long term, reading from physical books has less of an impact on your eyesight than technology, but as a student striving for academic success, striking the balance between text and tech is essential to make the best use of what is available.
2.) Listen to music while studying
When students study, personal preference plays a large part in the environment that they work in. While some students can only concentrate when they work in silence, others prefer listening to music.
Listening to music when studying has been shown to have a positive impact on the brain and its ability to maintain productive output.
Researchers have found that listening to classical music such as Mozart can improve concentration levels and cognitive performance while studying. While drowning out the outside world, the benefits of classical melodies while studying have been shown by researchers to be supremely beneficial.
While music with lyrics may distract and detract from studying, listening to Latin or Classical music genres greatly improves student’s productivity levels and cognitive abilities.
To learn more about this topic, have a read of this interesting article on Research Gate that explains the benefits of listening to music on the brain while we study.
3.) Exercise before studying
We’ve all been told throughout our lives about the importance of exercise for our physical and mental health.
Exercise is incredibly beneficial for the body and the brain, as well as having an incredible ability to improve the human memory.
Research undertaken by the University of British Columbia has highlighted the benefits that exercise has on the brain and our ability to retain information because of it.
Researchers have found that regular aerobic exercise — the kind that gets you panting, sweating and the blood pumping — increases the size of the hippocampus. This has an amazing impact on our memory and actually improves it.
To read more about the benefits of exercise, check out the Harvard Health Publishing website for more interesting articles. For those looking to improve their academic performance, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and incorporating exercise into your daily routine is very important.
4.) Relax! (Don’t [always] do it)
Relaxing is an important skill (yes, skill), and it is an essential one to be able to study effectively.
Stress decreases student’s ability to focus, negatively impacts sleep quality and actually makes students angrier. All three of these things reduce the ability of students to study productively.
Relaxing, but more importantly, being able to relax is essential to academic success. We work best after we have taken a break and we are at our happiest when we continue to do the things that we love.
Stress hinders our ability to create and store memories by engaging our corticotropin-releasing hormones. Even just a few hours of stress can cause our ability to focus to decrease remarkably.
Taking time to relax by doing something that we enjoy — that could be anything from doing exercise to art or meditation — enables us to decrease stress levels and refresh our minds.
5.) Study when you’re tired, then rest
Studying when you’re tired might seem like a totally pointless exercise but scientists have found that it does, in fact, have some benefits for learning.
When it comes to learning new skills such as learning a language or playing an instrument, being tired can in fact aid in the retention of knowledge.
Although learning dense new academic material may not be such a good plan before bed, revising material that has been covered already can be a great way to retain knowledge.
It has also been found that listening to a recording of yourself talking about a subject before falling asleep in bed, can help you to literally learn as you sleep.
Although it might not be a great idea to rely solely on this method, it could be beneficial when you feel exhausted but want to go through some content one last time.
6.) Get a change of scenery
Psychologists have suggested that getting a change of scenery can be an excellent way for students to learn and work effectively.
Changing the environment around us while we work has been scientifically proven to affect our learning capability and our ability to concentrate.
It is also well documented that studying and sleeping in the same room consistently can have a detrimental impact on our ability to focus and study effectively.
Working in the library, a coffee shop or even the great outdoors increases our ability to study, therefore, getting a change of scenery on a study day will be a great strategic move when it comes to improving academic performance.
So, next time you think about just staying in your university bedroom studying all day every day, think again as it may not be the best thing for you.
7.) Teach someone else
As an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher and English tutor, this tip for achieving academic success is one that I absolutely swear by.
Think of it this way, when someone teaches you something really well, the reason that they are able to do that is that they know the subject that they are teaching well enough to describe it in an understandable way.
If I teach a student English and they cannot understand it, I know that I need to learn something more about that subject, or explain what I was trying to teach in a different way so that they could understand it more easily.
When you’re learning difficult academic subjects, it can be beneficial to teach a friend or family member what you are studying.
Firstly, being able to do so shows that you know what you are talking about and highlights if there are any holes in your knowledge on the topic. Secondly, the exercise of talking out loud is another brilliant way of revising material.
So, next time you are wondering whether you understand something correctly, why not call a friend or family member and teach them to check your own understanding?
8.) Exercise active recall
There has over many centuries been a focus on reading and re-reading material in books to study and revise for examinations. This may work for some people, but it doesn’t always work.
Although there are many factors that affect learning, there are a number of arguments that now call for students to exercise active recall.
This means that students should read from their books or textbooks, but that they should then shut the book and recite and/or write down what they can remember.
Hearing yourself recite the information and writing down what you can remember enhances learning by utilising more of the senses (hearing and visual learning).
The classic combination that helped me in my university studying days was always to read, say it out loud and listen to myself, write down what I could remember and link my knowledge — then repeat.
It’s important to remember that we each have our own method of studying and so one method does not fit all. When it comes to learning, however, utilising as many of the senses as possible to learn academic material will be extremely beneficial.
9.) Free your inner Feynman
Most people (unless they’re in the science world) won’t know the name, or at least won’t know much about Richard Feynman.
A few things that you should know about Feynman is that he was a physicist who pioneered the Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) field of study and he was an exceptional ‘jack of all trades’.
He was a physicist, but he was also a philosopher and a pioneer of what is now called the “Feynman Technique”.
Feynman was a deep thinker and believed that the best way to learn was to disassemble knowledge, record everything that you know about a subject and to connect ideas so to highlight where your knowledge is lacking.
The process essentially goes like this:
1.) Identify the subject you want to learn about.
2.) Write notes plainly and simply so that even a child could understand it.
3.) Identify gaps in your knowledge.
4.) spin notes together into a story that you can remember and understand.
This is a very useful technique to learn for those students who want a proven way to achieve academic success.
To learn more about the Feynman learning technique and to find out more about its creator, have a read of this Medium article.
10.) Make connections between ideas
When we learn, we don’t remember information that is singular and has no real purpose. Well, some of us do but over time we’ll forget that piece of information if it has no real meaning for us. Most of the information that we remember in our long-term memory is combined and linked to other pieces of information.
Making connections between ideas is an important aspect of the student learning process as we build up our knowledge on topics and commit it to memory.
The importance of linking ideas has been known by the smartest among us throughout history. That includes not only modern thinkers such as Feynman (mentioned above), but also ancient Philosophers such as Plato, Socrates among many other historical figures.
When learning new information, try to ground that knowledge and link it with other facts and figures to embed the knowledge more effectively.
The key to academic success is committing information to memory for later use, therefore, set yourself up for success by connecting the information and ideas for effective knowledge retention.
To conclude…
These 10 student study tips for academic success provide some useful information for those that want to implement a sustainable study ethos.
Being able to work smarter and not harder is an important skill for students at every level, particularly for physical and mental well-being reasons. Studying is an important part of life but it doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy it.
There are a number of ways that we can achieve academic success. These tips were things that I found especially useful during my four years at the University of Exeter.
Mental health and wellbeing is far more important than studying constantly. It may sound a little cliche, but “your health is your wealth” is an important thing to remember when immersed in the academic environment.
To increase study efficiency and effectiveness, try implementing these 10 tips to achieve academic success. These might be useful whether you’re starting University this September, starting at College or continuing your studies.
