5 Bad Study Habits You’ve Probably Been Following

You hear a lot of platitudes when it comes to
studying: "Make studying a priority. Review your
notes early and often." "Read all the textbook
chapters and do your homework." "Practice makes
perfect. So practice as much as you can."

First off, all the students who have ever been in a
classroom just collectively rolled their eyes.

Second, most of this stuff we hear, though well
intentioned (maybe), is just plain wrong. A lot of
bad study habits are spread in the guise of helpful
advice.

Here are 5 of the most common bad study habits
that parents, teachers, and advisors teach, and
why they're actually hurting your GP:

1. READ THE CHAPTER BEFORE LECTURE

Here's something we've all heard teachers say at
the end of class: "Read chapter 12 on the Law of
Cosines before class tomorrow so that we can
jump right in."

And you probably wanted to say, "Wait a sec… isn't
that your job?"

Anyway, no one does it (except maybe that guy
who always sits in the front row). Even if we tell
ourselves we're gonna "get organized" and prepare
before lecture, no one ever does the reading. And
if you do, it's usually a lackluster skim effort.

But would it actually help if we did? Should we
actually care about "getting organized" and doing
the reading before class?
Research suggests that this is a waste.

An initial
review period is necessary to learn something
new, but further review becomes less and less
effective.

So why would you review something twice? Well,
because repetition improves your ability to recall
something later. Practice makes perfect.
Not so fast. While it is useful to get a quick "lay of
the land" on a new concept before going into
lecture completely cold, beyond an initial
introductory period to a new concept, your ability
to remember, recall, and use that information
does not improve with review.

What you need instead is testing and use. So that
valuable time before lecture is much better spent
quizzing yourself on the information from the
previous lecture. Stuff that you'll eventually see on
the midterm or final, rather than some arcane
explanation from a textbook.

Use the lecture the way it was intended: to
introduce you to new material.

2. GET A STUDY BUDDY

As you walk through your campus library, you see
them everywhere: books scattered across tables,
empty energy drink cans, and problems scribbled
on pieces of paper or whiteboards.
Study groups.

Some people can't stand to sit with other students
for hours on end racking their brain over chemical
reactions or Freudian psychology, but others can't
get enough of it and seem to find any excuse to
meet up and "go over" the latest lecture notes.

So who's got it right?
Studying with someone else can help you stay
accountable, but that's pretty much all it can do.

Yes, knowing someone is waiting for you at 4pm at
the library is motivation enough to get your butt
out the door, and crack that notebook that
otherwise would stay on the floor in the corner of
your dorm room. But doing practice problems
with another person is the quickest way to fool
yourself into thinking you can reproduce it
yourself on an exam.

It's one thing to watch someone solve a tough
physics problem and nod along saying "oh yeah,
got it." But it's a completely different thing to
actually reproduce that problem-solving method
during crunch time, staring at a blank sheet of
paper.

So definitely still make friends in your classes, and
keep each other accountable. But limit working on
problem sets together to those couple of sticking
points you still have after working through
everything yourself. Then go back a day or two
later and make sure you truly understand it well
enough to reproduce it yourself.

3. REVIEW YOUR NOTES AFTER CLASS
https://www.flickr.com/photos/
pedrosek/9911370254

Passive review of your notes is not only time-
consuming, it's also been shown to be completely
ineffective. And yet, this is what most teachers
recommend. It's what "good students" do.

But as with habit #1, this robotic type of study is
not suited to the way the human memory system
stores new information. Again, it's far more
effective to test yourself instead.

Try to re-create the key concepts or solve a few
practice problems without referring to your notes
from class. Do this again a day or two later.

Studies have shown that this self-testing method is
a much better use of your time than simply
"refreshing" a dead page of text. The only time you
should touch your notes is when you're going to
try and re-organize and consolidate them into a
more simple and compact form.

4. FIND A QUIET SPACE AND MAKE IT A DAILY HABIT

"Turn off the music! How can you concentrate with
that on?"

"Stay still and be quiet. Just sit down and focus."
Sound familiar?

This motherly advice is typically in response to
multitasking teenagers who text, listen to music,
have Facebook open, and are Skyping with a
classmate while doing their homework.

So yes, in that case they may have a point. But the
other extreme actually may be detrimental to
future performance on exams.

Routinely studying in exactly the same quiet place
is the best way to ensure that you can only recall
that information reliably in that one spot. In
essence, you're training yourself to completely
blank on that information when test day comes,
when you're thrown into an anxious mental state,
under time pressure and sitting in a foreign
environment (unless you happen to have one of
those chairs in your apartment with the desk so
small you can barely fit a piece of paper on it).

What you should actually do: study in widely
varying contexts.

Studies have show that learning new information
in different environments, at varying noise levels
and even mood states, can significantly improve
your ability to recall that same information when
test day comes.

So mix it up. Quiz yourself on the treadmill.

Lecture your roommate while playing Call of Duty.

Do practice problems standing on one foot, using
a fountain pen, while listening to ACDC.

And even better: go to the classroom where the
exam will be held, pick out your seat, and do a
practice exam in the same exact amount of time
allotted for the test. Now that's context-specific
learning.

5. REFRESHING TOPICS IN YOUR MEMORY OFTEN

"If I can just keep reciting my study sheet for the
next 24 hours, I'll have it on the tip of my tongue
during the exam."

The problem with always feeling like you're on top
a new concept is that you're committing what
psychologists call the "fluency illusion."

Just
because it's easy to recall piece of information
now, does not mean you won't forget it later.

And in fact, the easier it is to recall, the less likely it
is that you will be able to remember it in crunch
time.

Studies show that some level of forgetting is
actually necessary in order to improve the
"retrieval strength" of a new memory. Bjork's study
recommends looking for a level of "desirable
difficulty" with learning new information—e.g. it
should be hard to remember how to solve limits
using L'Hopital's Rule if you really want to make
sure you can remember it on test day.
So do this: Learn it once during lecture.

Then give
yourself a self-test later that night, without
referencing your notes.
Then wait two days. You'll feel like you've forgotten
everything. But resist the urge to study your notes
again.

Instead, test yourself again and struggle through,
trying to pull as much of the material as you can
from the depths of your memory. Each piece of
information you can recall becomes more and
more bulletproof to forgetting on the exam. And
even wrong answers have been shown to benefit
you.

Then, and only then, go back to your notes and see
where you were right and where you were wrong.
Make the appropriate corrections and then repeat
the process.

Featured photo credit: Steven S. via flickr.com

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