By Mason Prince/reporter
Students at a Sept. 10 session on SE Campus had a chance to learn about how they can study in all the wrong ways and how that can be prevented.
Take this for example: “The night before exams, all textbooks should be closed,” said psychology professor Vince Lembo, who led the session.
Effective Study Strategies was aimed at informing students of unhealthy study habits while subsequently helping to install more efficient ones.
Lembo urged students to stay away from rote memorization while studying. Whether the object of study is just a run-of-the-mill quiz or the final, base memorization is the quickest route to a mediocre grade.
Instead, students should strive to attach something meaningful to the objects they are memorizing. Much like the “ribbon on the finger,” Lembo emphasized that when students attach some significance to what they are studying, then the information is more likely to stick in their minds.
“Reading does not always equate to studying,” he said.
While reading through the chapters, one tends to mentally “zone out” and can’t recall the last few paragraphs or pages of what was read.
Therefore, chapters should be read over a few times, and key phrases and definitions should be written down and reviewed.
Students who transcribe information directly onto flashcards often use them the wrong way, Lembo said. When terms are written on one side of a flashcard with a paragraph of definitions written on the other, students end up wasting time and paper when they could just memorize the definitions out of the book.
Instead, students should condense the information on the notecards into an understandable shortened version.
Another topic brought up was sleep patterns. A full eight hours of sleep are needed to pass through the necessary REM patterns. This means students shouldn’t stay up until the wee hours of the morning trying to cram.
Lembo also said alcohol can interfere with REM sleep. Students who tend to drink alcohol regularly or on weekends at parties have a harder time paying attention to their studies because alcohol prevents a proper amount of rest during sleep.
One of the last things the speaker suggested was the use of a study buddy. This method helps to increase the social skills of each student while allowing ideas and questions to be bounced off one another. This results in information being more firmly embedded into the students’ minds than if they were to study alone.
A couple of the students said they left the seminar learning things they had not known or thought about previously.
SE student Jesse Chalmers said he hadn’t thought of the fact that merely reading isn’t studying since that’s what he’s done since high school. Chalmers said that he was glad to find out that there was more to studying than rote memorization.
Another SE student, Chidi Ekeke, said most of his teachers told him to practice rote memorization while studying for tests. Therefore, he was surprised to learn that it is an unhelpful study technique.
