Learning Techniques to Take to College

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Our world is constantly evolving and because of this, new skills and disciplines arise each year. With as much as there is to learn and as little time as we have to learn it in, using the right techniques for learning is critical. 

 

But here’s the thing – most of what you learned in school about learning wasn’t right. 

 

In fact, most of the techniques college students use every day are completely ineffective. To help you with whatever it is that you need to learn, here’s a look at a few techniques that can really help you retain that information.

 

Best Learning Techniques

 

It doesn’t matter if you’re going to a psychology school or barber school, you’ll need to have a few techniques to help you learn. Many people may go with those basic techniques like highlighting and reading. What if those things are worthless? You see, your brain needs to have more than that in order to retain information.

 

Distributed Practice

 

Remember when you were in college, and you knew you had a big test, so you’d pull an all-nighter to help you pass it? You may even have tried brain games to help you retain information. Well, the chances are good that when you took that test, you didn’t remember half of what you thought you would.

That might work fine in a setting where you only want to retain the information to pass that exam, but what about if you’re attempting to learn a skill? See, in college, especially psychology school, you might think you’re just passing exams, but there are more benefits, such as critical thinking, insight into behaviors, research skills, and a deeper understanding of how we work. To retain all of that, you need time to perfect it, like you would when learning to play an instrument, and considering personalized nootropics for brain fog can help enhance your cognitive abilities.

With distributed practice, you’ll need to space out your education so that a certain amount of time goes by before you begin learning again.

 

Practice Testing

 

Practice testing is more powerful than you may realize. In the practice test method, you literally put away practice sessions and studying in order to challenge yourself to remember what you’ve already learned without any sort of aid. One of the interesting things about this is that you often do rather poorly on the practice test, but once you’ve made your mistakes, you go back and get the correct information and then you can remember it.

 

Interleaved Practice

 

The next technique may be one of the most interesting techniques for learning because it gives you a reason to learn more than one thing at a time. See, with interleaved practice, you practice or revise something alternatively. So, for example, you’re learning something in your psychology class. 

 

On one day, you won’t practice that all at once. Instead, you’ll study some psychology, and then switch to studying something else before going back to psychology again. That might seem like it makes it harder for you to remember something, but we all know that the harder it is to learn something, the better we retain it.

 

The thing about these different techniques is that fixating too much on any one of them can cause issues. That’s because you’ll make yourself too rigid in the approach you have to learning. See, people who are successful have a bit of fluidity to their character. They’re able to mold and adapt to any given situation. Depending on what it is you’re trying to learn, you might need to utilize more than a single learning technique. That means that you’ll need to know more than one of them and be able to adapt.