Tips to improve your study habits.

Having good study skills is always helpful. But it’s even more important now during the COVID-19 pandemic.

For more than 100 years, psychologists have done research on which study habits work best. Some tips help for almost every subject. Here are 10 tips to improve your study habits.

1.Space out your studying

Cramming before a big test can leave you exhausted. But you will learn and remember material better if you space your study sessions over the course of several days.

Kornell a psychologist compares our memory to water in a bucket that has a small leak. Try to refill the bucket while it is still full, and you can’t add much more water. Allow time between study sessions, and some of the material may drip out of your memory. But then you will be able to relearn it and learn more in your next study session. And you will remember it better, next time, he notes.

2.Practice, practice, practice!

Musicians practice their instruments. Athletes practice sports skills. The same should go for learning. “If you want to be able to remember information, the best thing you can do is practice,”

3.Don’t just reread books and notes

As a teen, we study by reading our textbooks, worksheets, and notebooks. “Over and over and over again,”Rereading is like looking at the answer to a puzzle, rather than doing it yourself, he says. It looks like it makes sense. But until you try it yourself, you do not really know if you understand it.

3.Test yourself

A student called kate had her test .Before big tests, her mom quizzed her on the material. “it  knows that was retrieval practice,” she says. “It’s one of the best ways you can study.” As kate got older, she quizzed herself. For example, she might cover up the definitions in her notebook. Then she tried to recall what each term meant. Such retrieval practice can help nearly everyone, “Try to quiz yourself the way the teacher asks questions,”

4.Mistakes are okay — as long as you learn from them

It is crucial to test your memory. But it does not really matter how many seconds you spend on each try. Check to see if you were right. Then focus on what you got wrong.

A secret of science: Mistakes boost understanding.

“If you do not find out what the answer is, you are kind of wasting your time,

Mistakes are a primary key to learning.

5.Mix it up

In many cases, it helps to mix up your self-testing. Do not just focus on one thing. Drill yourself on different concepts.

Your tests usually will have questions mixed up, too. More importantly, interleaving can help you learn better. If you practice one concept over and over “your attention decreases because you know what’s coming up next,”

 Mix up your practice, and you now space the concepts apart. You can also see how concepts differ, form trends, or fit together in some other way.

Try to solve problems and recall information on your own. Then check to see if you are right. Retrieval practice boosts your learning and memory, say psychologists.

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