How do study

Eat healthy, nutritional foods while you study instead of foods filled with sugar and fat. Go for energy boosting foods, like fruit, or foods to make you feel full, like vegetables and nuts.

If you need something sweet, eat dark chocolate. Drink water to keep you hydrated, and drink tea if you need a caffeine boost. Avoid foods with high amounts of sugar and carbs, like instant noodles, chips, and candy. Don't drink energy drinks and sugary sodas; they contain high amounts of sugar which will cause you to crash.

If you drink coffee, skip the sugar-heavy drinks. Part 3. Try a five step approach: survey, question, read, recite, and review. This is called SQ3R or SQRR and is a study method that involves active reading which helps with comprehension and learning the material.

The method gets you to preview the material and actively read so you are more prepared when you read a chapter or article. Start with Survey, which means to glance through the chapter to look for tables, figures, headings, and any bold words.

Then Question by making each heading into a question. Read the chapter while trying to answer the questions you made from the section headings.

Recite the answers to the questions verbally and any important information you remember from the chapter. Review the chapter to make sure you include all the main ideas. Then think about why this is important. When you are beginning to study a new chapter, it will make the information it contains much more meaningful and easier to learn if you preview the chapter using THIEVES. Start with the title.

What do you already know about the topic? What should you think about while reading? This will help you frame your reading. Scan the "headings" and subheadings. What do these headings and subheadings tell you about what you will be reading?

Turn each heading and subheading into a question to help guide your reading. Move to the introduction. What does the introduction tell you about the reading?

Read the first sentence of every paragraph. These are generally topic sentences and help you think about what the paragraphs will be about. Look at the visuals and vocabulary. This includes tables, graphs, and charts. More importantly, look at the bolded, italicized, and underlined words, words or paragraphs of a different color, and numerical lists. Read the end of chapter questions. What concepts should you know by the time you finish reading the chapter?

Keep these questions in mind as you read. Look at the chapter summary to get a good idea of what the chapter is about before going on to read the chapter as a whole. Highlight important details. Use a highlighter or underline the most important points in the body of the text, so that you can spot them more easily when you review the material.

Instead, only highlight the most important phrases and words. You can also read just these portions in order to quickly review the material you have learned while it is still fresh in your memory, and help the main points to sink in. If the textbook belongs to the school, then you can use highlighted sticky notes, or a regular sticky note beside the sentence or paragraph.

Jot your notes on a sticky note and paste it beside the paragraph. It's also a good way to periodically review in this manner to keep the main points of what you have already learned fresh in your mind if you need to remember a large amount of material for a longer period, like for a final examination, for a comprehensive exam in your major, for a graduate oral, or for entry into a profession. Summarize or outline the material. One good way to study is to write the material in your notes and in the textbook in your own words.

That way you can think about it in your own terms instead of textbook language. Incorporate your summaries into your notes, if there is a connection. You can also make an outline. Organize it by main ideas and only the most important subpoints. If you are an aural learner, or learn better when verbalizing it, then this method could help you. If you're having trouble summarizing the material so that it sticks in your head, try teaching it to someone else.

Pretend you're teaching it to someone who doesn't know anything about the topic, or create a wikiHow page about it! When making summaries, use different colors. The brain remembers information more easily when it is associated with color. Make flash cards. This is usually done with index cards. Place a question, term, or idea on one side and have the other side contain the answer.

These are convenient because you can carry them around with you and study them when you are waiting for the bus, for class to start, or have a few down moments.

You can also just use a regular piece of paper folded vertically in half. Put the questions on the side you can see when the paper is folded; unfold it to see the answers inside. Keep quizzing yourself until you get all the answers right reliably. Remember: "Repetition is the mother of skill.

Make associations. The most effective way to retain information is to tie it to existing information that's already lodged in your mind.

Using memory techniques can help you remember difficult or large amounts of information. Take advantage of your learning style. Think about what you already learn and remember easily--song lyrics? Work that into your study habits.

If you're having trouble memorizing a concept, write a catchy jingle about it or write lyrics to the tune of your favorite song ; choreograph a representative dance; draw a comic. The sillier and more outrageous, the better; most people tend to remember silly things more than they remember boring things.

Use mnemonics memory aids. Rearrange the information is a sequence that's meaningful to you. It's much easier to remember a sentence than a series of random letters. If the list is short, link the items together using an image in your mind. Organize the information with a mind map. The end result of mapping should be a web-like structure of words and ideas that are somehow related in the writer's mind. Use visualization skills. Construct a movie in your mind that illustrates the concept you're trying to remember, and play it several times over.

Imagine every little detail. Use your senses--how does it smell? Break things into smaller parts. One way to study is to break things into smaller sections. This helps you learn the information bit by bit instead of trying to understand everything at once. You can group things by topic, keywords, or any other method that makes sense to you. The key is to lessen how much information you learn at one time so you can focus on learning that material before moving on.

Make a study sheet. Try to condense the information you will need into one sheet, or two if absolutely necessary. Bring it around with you and look at it whenever you have downtime during the days leading up to the test.

Take your notes and the chapters and organize it into related topics and pull out the most important concepts. This can help if you are a visual learner. Part 4. Take breaks. If you are studying for a few hours at a time, take 5-minute breaks every half hour or so. This helps your joints by moving them around after sitting for a long while; it also helps your mind relax, which can help you more effectively remember the material.

This also helps keep you from losing focus. Do something physically active to get your blood flowing and make you more alert. Do a few jumping jacks , run around your house, play with the dog , do some squats, or whatever it takes.

Do just enough to get yourself pumped, but not worn out. Try integrating standing into your studying. This may mean walking around the table as you recite the information to yourself or standing against the wall as you read your notes.

Use a keyword to refocus yourself. Find a keyword related to what you are studying, and whenever you lose concentration, feel distracted, or your mind wanders to something else, start saying that keyword repeatedly in your mind until you come back to the topic at hand.

The keyword in this technique is not a single, fixed word but keeps changing according to your study or work. There are no rules to select the keyword and whichever word the person feels that it will bring back his concentration can be used as a keyword. For example, when you are reading an article about the guitar, the keyword guitar can be used.

While reading, whenever you feel distracted or not able to understand or concentrate, start saying the keyword guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar until your mind comes back to the article and then you can continue your reading. Take good notes in class. When in class, make sure you take the best notes you can. This doesn't mean going for neatness or writing everything in complete sentences.

You want to catch all the important information. Sometimes, you may write down a term the teacher says, then go home and copy the definition out of your textbook. Try to write down as much as you can. Taking good notes in class will force you to stay alert and pay attention to everything that is going on in the class.

It'll also help keep you from falling asleep. Use abbreviations. This helps you so that you can quickly jot down words without spelling anything out. Ask questions in class as they pop into your brain, or make a contribution to the class discussion. Another way to question or make a connection is to jot it in the margin of your notes. You can look the question up when you get home, or you can piece together the connection when you are studying that day.

Rewrite your notes at home. When you take notes, focus on recording the information over understanding or neatness. Rewrite your notes as soon after the class as possible, while the material is fresh in your mind so that you can fill in any gaps completely from memory.

The process of rewriting your notes is a more active approach to studying by making you actively engage your mind with the information. You can easily zone out if you're just reading. Writing them makes you think about the information. Consider your in-class notes a "rough draft. You may find it easier to keep two notebooks--one for your "rough draft" notes, and another for your rewritten notes. Some people type their notes, but others find that handwriting enhances their ability to remember the notes.

The more paraphrasing you do, the better. Same goes for drawing. If you're studying anatomy, for example, "re-draw" the system you're studying from memory. Make things interesting. Logical arguments will not give you motivation to study. Thinking, "if I study hard, I will get into a good university and get a good job," will not interest you.

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. You could do lots of problems on the volume of a wedge. Then you could answer more batches of questions, with each set dealing with just one shape. Or, you could figure out the volume of a cone, followed by a wedge. Next you might find the volume for a half-cone or a spheroid.

Then you can mix them up some more. You might even mix in some practice on addition or division. Rawson and others had groups of college students try each of those approaches. A year earlier, Sana and others showed that interleaving can help students with both strong and weak working memory. Working memory lets you remember where you are in an activity, such as following a recipe. Pay attention to diagrams and graphs in your class materials, says Nebel.

He and Dung Bui, then also at Washington University, had students listen to a lecture on car brakes and pumps. One group got diagrams and was told to add notes as needed to the diagrams. Another group got an outline for writing notes. The third group just took notes.

The outlines helped students if they were otherwise good at building mental models of what they were reading. But in these tests, they found, visual aids helped students across the board. Even goofy pictures might help. In one study back in , she and others gave cartoon drawings to college students along with information about five scientists who studied intelligence.

For example, the text about Alfred Binet came with a drawing of a race car driver. The driver wore a bonnet to protect his brain. Students who saw the drawings did better on a test than did those who got only the text information.

Abstract concepts can be hard to understand. It tends to be far easier to form a mental image if you have a concrete example of something, Nebel says. For instance, sour foods usually taste that way because they contain an acid.

On its own, that concept might be hard to remember. Indeed, it helps to have at least two examples if you want to apply information to new situations. Nebel and others reviewed studies on this in July Their Journal of Food Science Education report describes how students can improve their study skills. Ask why things are a certain way. How did they come about? Why do they matter?

Psychologists call this elaboration. Elaboration helps you combine new information with other things you know. And it creates a bigger network in your brain of things that relate to one another, she says. That larger network makes it easier to learn and remember things. The strong man helped the woman. The brave man ran into the house.

And the students remembered a whole lot better when they had to answer questions about why each man did something. Make sure you can explain the material. Better yet, he says, see if you can explain it to someone else. Many students know they should space out study periods, quiz themselves and practice other good skills. Often, they fail to plan ahead. Back when Rawson was a student, she used a paper calendar for her planning.

She wrote in the date for each exam. Try to stick to a routine, too. Have a set time and place where you do schoolwork and studying. It may seem odd at first. Allow yourself short breaks. Set a timer for 25 minutes or so, suggests Sana. Study during that time, with no distractions. When the timer goes off, take a five or 10 minute break. Check your phone. Maybe drink some water — whatever. Afterward, set the timer again. Also, it is easier for me to manage their behavior since I have to monitor several groups rather than twenty-five to thirty students.

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