Christopher Tan
Head Coach, SOE
Are you wasting your time and potential sticking to unproductive ways?
If your current study method has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese, do something! It is senseless to continue to stick to ineffective methods that both ineffective study methods that consequently will restrict both your leisure activities and blunt your social lives. Studying becomes pointlessly repulsive when you have to bury your head into thick books and even more so, when you have to repeatedly and mindlessly rewrite material as if you are being punished for something.
Put it this way, if you cannot see the class whiteboard clearly, would you go to the optician to get prescription glasses to improve your vision? Or would you rather live with it because someone told you that wearing prescription lens will make you dependent on them and worsen your vision?
For the record, squinting and straining your eyes in order to focus to see properly, is the main reason why myopia advances more rapidly in people who do not wear prescription glasses than those who do.
Many students do not upgrade their study methods even when these methods in question becomes outdated as they progress to higher educational levels. They tend to stick with their previous methods that give them illusions of productivity, even though their eventual examinations yield poorer academic results. It becomes a vicious cycle when students put forth their best efforts and still do not obtain the desired results. In time to come, they begin to lose interest in the subjects and blame the content for being too impossibly difficult and dreary.
So, which are the scientifically-proven ineffective study methods? If you can identify and differentiate the good from the bad, you can more easily put forth steps to rectify the situation. It is like trying to kill that pesky mosquito, which had already probably extracted enough blood from you to fill a blood bank. More annoyingly, it is continually buzzing around your head in a show of defiance. The problem is not which exterminating method you can use to annihilate its wretched life from existence, it is how you can first find the super mosquito born with innate stealth abilities in the dark!
Common ineffective study methods:
Re-reading of material:
Re-reading the textbooks over and over again and praying that it will stick is a popular study method that is used by vast majority of the students out there.
Studies have shown that this method is highly ineffective for learning and retention. Re-reading is a passive form of learning so it does not engage the brain to process information deeply enough. Interestingly enough, many think that this is actually the best study strategy that they can use.
Cramming just before exams:
Voraciously cramming in loads of information just before the examinations also does little to improve performance, but this method is still being used by many procrastinating students.
Some students even believe that cramming at the very last minute helps to keep the information fresh so that they can more easily regurgitate it out for their examinations.
Stressing and tiring the brain by force-feeding it excessive material at one go critically diminishes the likelihood of achieving good scores. Moreover, students are unlikely to be able to retain the material for long.
Highlighting and colouring material:
Highlighting, underlining or colouring is yet another ineffective method that many students use as a mainstream study method. While highlighting or underlining feels productive, it does not help in memory retention.
Making summaries of textbooks and notes:
The effectiveness of summarising your textbooks and notes is debatable as it is dependent on how skilled the student is at making notes.
Students would need to have practised and trained significantly over the years to have developed their summarising methods into effective study weapons that they can use in in examination preparations.
However, if the summarising of the study material does not involve any form of Active Recall, it is very likely to be of low use. For example, many students tend to summarise notes by simply copying down lines in the textbook that they perceive to be important. While they appear to have cover the content, the truth of the matter is that they had only passively copied down certain lines of texts or inertly drawn up diagrams. Though this is the first baby step for most students to begin their revision, a vast majority of them do not follow up on or even make any time to memorise their summaries.
Re-writing of material:
Re-writing the material over and over is a form of Rote Learning that many students use to study as well. It is mentally taxing in the sense that it feels like punishment and a waste of time.
Imagine that you work in an aquarium and you have been tasked to fill up fish tanks using a small bucket. At first, everything is fine because you only needed to fill up small tanks. However, when those fish tanks get bigger to accommodate bigger fish, the game becomes harder and you cannot continue using the same little bucket to fill up those huge tanks. In theory, you actually still can, but it is very much inefficient to do so.
If you have been struggling with your academic work and examinations, it is time to upgrade your bucket too. If necessary, you may even have to completely redesign or overhaul your current study attitude, routine and systems. It is high time to throw any outdated and ineffective methods that you have been using, out of the door to make way for new and better ones.
Think hard about how you are going to study from this moment henceforth. If you continue using the same methods that do not work for yourself, you risk getting the same results that do not work for you again. Sift through the study methods and find the ones that you can use most systematically and effectively. Learn how to learn. You know that you have to. 😊
