Students of all ages can hone their study skills with these tips that teachers wished they knew when they were students.

Tip 4: Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing. It means: summarize, re-word, interpret, translate, and/or restate. It’s a key study skill.

When it comes to studying, paraphrasing is the opposite of memorizing. That’s because it helps students make sense of the material. It helps students to understand, which, when it comes to learning and studying is crucial!

Scenario: it’s study time. The books are cracked open, and you’ve got a pen and paper ready to go. You’re in the process of making study notes. You’ve created some mnemonic devices to remember lists and you’re in the process of creating a Fake Test.

But how do you turn the act of making study notes into actual studying? That’s where paraphrasing comes in.

It’s a simple five-step process:

1. Grab your textbook or notebook and Read a passage.
2. Cover the passage with a book or a piece of paper.
3. Recite what you’ve just read using your own words (paraphrase)—don’t look! No cheating!
4. Check. Re-read and check that what you’re reciting is accurate.
5. Repeat. Keep reading, reciting, and checking until you’ve got it 100% right.

Bonus Tip:

If you’re having trouble putting it in your own words, imagine that somebody is asking you this question “what does that mean?” Try to answer that question in your own words. You can also try using, “in other words” before you paraphrase.

Related:
Tip 3: The Fake Test
Tip 2: Mnemonic devices
Tip 1: Review with a Pen and Paper

Students of all ages can hone their study skills with these tips that teachers wished they knew when they were students.

The Fake Test

There’s a test coming up. How will you do?

One way to find out is by taking the wait-and-see approach. The other is to practice taking the test until you’ve got it perfect! This is a take-charge approach to studying that helps students anticipate test questions and discover how well they’ll perform on the actual test.

Here’s how it works:

1. As you read over your notes, use a separate sheet of paper to write down questions about what you are reading. (This uses the pencil-to-paper style of ACTIVE studying that keeps students engaged during the study process. See Tip 1)

Bonus tip: keep track of where to find the answers to your fake-test questions.
For instance: Q: When did Christopher Columbus sail for the New World and what were the names of his three ships? (page 37, first paragraph)

2. As you read, pay special attention to the challenging concepts. Create more questions for these concepts. Really test yourself. After all, that’s what a test is designed to do—assess how well you understand something. So dig in and ask the tough questions. Go for those bonus marks!

3. Now that you have read over all of the study material, and have a sheet filled with questions—what’s next? Put the fake test aside and wait a day or two. Then, when you sit down to study next, begin with your fake test. Did you pass or fail? How many questions did you answer correctly? How many were you unable to answer?

4. Go back and study some more, and focus on the questions that you answered wrong or that you were unable to answer.

5. Start early! Building a fake test that really challenges your topic knowledge takes time. You won’t be able to properly test yourself if you left studying to the last minute. The extra time required to get organized and create a fake test pays off. As the saying goes: practice makes perfect.

Related:
Tip 2: Mnemonic devices
Tip 1: Review with a Pen and Paper

Students of all ages can hone their study skills with these tips that teachers wished that they knew when they were students!

Tip 2: Mnemonic devices

The term “mnemonic device” is just a fancy way of saying, “trick to help you remember.” While understanding is always better than memorizing, there are times when you’ll need a few tricks to help the brain remember. Usually these times involve long lists, dates, or examples.

Do you remember the names of all five of the great lakes? Ummm, Ontario… Superior… The mnemonic acronym HOMES will help you remember them all, lickety-split! H.O.M.E.S (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.)

What about the planets? My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nuts (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.)

Mnemonics generally work on word associations, or are built on acronyms, but there can be other forms as well, such as poems and rhymes.

There are plenty of classic mnemonic devices that exist, but students shouldn’t be afraid to come up with their own—it will help them remember. Memorizing a pre-existing list is helpful, but creating one of your own is better!

Here’s how:

1. Take the first letter or a key word of the item to remember and write it down.
2. Repeat for all items.
3. Create a sentence. Pick the first words that pop into your head. It doesn’t have to make sense!
4. Write the sentence out a few times while saying the words that the acronym refers to.
5. Practice reciting the items and the created sentence together until you’ve got it memorized!

Tip! Keep the mnemonic device simple. There’s no point in creating extra work trying to remember a device that is more complicated than what you set out to remember in the first place. Don’t worry if the acronym that you created doesn’t make sense—if you remember it, go with it!

Study secrets that teachers wished they had time to teach

Let’s face it: teaching students the secrets to acing tests isn’t on the curriculum. In fact, there’s barely time for teachers to cover the basics, let alone spend extra time teaching solid study skills. So, it’s no wonder that students struggle when it comes to study time!

Without solid study skills, students are left to figure it out on their own. However, The Oxford Learning Insider’s Guide To Studying gives students the tips that the pros use. These are the tips that teachers wished that they had known when they were students.

Insider Tip 1: Review with a Pen and Paper

Before beginning to study, students need to know WHAT to study. So, the first step is to grab a pen and paper and read over all notes, writing down subject headings, subheadings, and bolded words. This helps to give a clear picture of the study material.

As studying progresses, students should continue to write down any and all meaningful keywords. This creates study notes, which can then be used as reference material during the study process. Rather than continually looking through a textbook, or flipping through notes, students can just refer to their own study notes.

Get an Edge: Focus on writing down the ideas or concepts that are the most challenging, or that are the most difficult to remember.

Bonus! The physical act of holding the pen and writing makes study time active rather than passive. Reading over notes is passive; writing down keywords is active. Active studying is good studying!

Stay tuned…tip 2 is next.

Related: Study Tips for Exam Success

Know Your Roots!

Daily Writing Tips.com suggests that learning the root of the word can help writers better understand how words are written. After all, words are made up of pre-fixes, roots, and suffixes. Recognizing a familiar part of the word will help spellers not only identify a familiar part of the word, which makes spelling that much easier, but it helps them have a better sense of what the word’s meaning.

Identify Your Own Trouble Words

Keep a list of the words that your frequently misspell. Grammar guides and reference manuals have lists of these words, but it is more helpful to know the words that you have the most difficulties with.

Another great tip comes from Spellingfun.com (a site that sells a spelling system, but has many great tips on spelling) is to know the 100 most commonly used words in the English language because these words are used 70% of the time. If you know these words, then you are ahead of the game!

There’s no shame in not knowing the meaning of a word. There’s also no shame in not knowing if a word is spelled correctly or not. When you come across a word that you don’t know, take a moment to look it up!

The process of taking the time to investigate a word and teach yourself its’ usages and variations helps you to become more familiar with its sounds, patterns, and usages. Taking those extra few moments can make the difference in whether you remember how to spell it correctly or not.

Online dictionaries help poor spellers overcome the “how can I look it up if I can’t spell it?” problem by offering spelling suggestions and alternative spellings to make finding the correct definition that much easier.

The more familiar that you are with a word and the more that you use a word, the easier that word becomes part of your vocabulary and the easier it will be to spell that word.

Pick Up a Book

Reading mass quantities is one of the best-known ways to both expand your vocabulary and learn how to use words correctly. The more that you are exposed to words being spelled and used correctly, the greater the chance that you will actually spell and use those words correctly.

That’s because spelling and reading both use the same underlying knowledge about sound patterns and how letters work [PDF] by themselves and in relation to other letters.

Go back and read spelling tip one.

Spelling Tip of the Day

Last time, we looked at WHY English spelling is so difficult.

You can tell simply by the numerous commonly misspelled word lists out there that whether you are five or twenty-five, if you have spelling issues then you are not alone. But what can you do to IMPROVE spelling abilities?

Oxford Learning has put together a series set of Spelling Tips to help spellers of all ages to improve their spelling. Check back often to find an “improve-your spelling” tip that works for you. Or, and add your own tip in the comments—we’d love to hear from you!

Tip One: Create Spelling Tricks that Work For You.

There is no point memorizing formal spelling rules (even if they are cute rhymes) if they don’t make sense or if you can’t remember them.

Create your own rhymes, tips, and strategies and you’ll remember them always. The old stand-by “I before E except after C” is only helpful if you can also remember all the exceptions to the rule. A friend uses this modified version that is much more to the point: “I before E doesn’t work for me!”

Come up with your own strategies to remember correct spellings and you’ll have an arsenal of tools that work for you!

EG: DESSERT vs. DESERT. You can remember this one by thinking that you always want more dessert… there are more of the letter S in dessert, so dessert with double S is the treat after a meal!

There are many more unique spelling tricks out there. Check out these examples from Lifehack.org (Just scroll towards the bottom) Even little ones can come up with their own tips to spell words. Got a trick that works? Stick to it!

How to Study For Long-Term Memory

There’s a big test this week and you stayed up all night last night cramming all the information that you need to remember to ace the test.

Now it’s a week later and you’re wondering what happened to all those facts, figures, and dates that you spent so much energy studying? You did great on the test, but now that some time has passed you barely remember what class you were studying for.

All those eleventh hour study-a-thons and the eventual and inevitable forgetting should be giving credence to what you suspected all along—that when it comes to studying and long-term recall, cramming doesn’t work.

Developing top-notch study skills is one way of combating the so-called forgetting curve. Skills such as starting early, paraphrasing, and active learning can help you avoid a last minute cram-a-thons and hopefully help you remember what you’ve studied for longer than one week.

Planning, organizing, time management, taking notes—Man, studying is a lot of work! Wouldn’t it be great if a computer could tell you when to study so that you never forgot? According to Wired Magazine such a program exists.

The program was developed in response to decades of research into memory and optimal learning. What researchers found was that there is an ideal moment to review material that you have learned so that you don’t forget it. It’s called the spacing effect and it’s the best-known way to remember what you have learnt so that you never forget.

You don’t need a computer to master this skill (although a computer program can help). The trick is to be able to recognize the moment when you are about to forget something and review at that moment so that you don’t spend too long studying something that you might only forget later. If you wait too long to review, then you’ve forgotten the material. Too soon and there’s no point.

Practice the spacing effect and improve your study skills. Here’s how:

• Look up a word that you’ve never heard of
• Write down the word and the definition on a piece of paper
• Wait a day or so and try to see if you can remember
• If yes, choose another word and wait longer
• If no, choose another word and shorten the length of time
• Keep track of how much time passes before you begin to forget

The theory is that if you study at the moment that you are about to forget, you will remember better and for longer periods of time.