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SOP - Study skills
Authors: SOP team.
Studying is also learning.
You may now be in a moment when your academic results have not been as satisfactory as you expected, and you may be thinking about what you have not done properly. This material aims at being a guide of different aspects that may affect your academic achievement. You should check them, revise your resources, and incorporate those you think can help you with your learning system.
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Study preparation
Study place
You should analyze the place where you study, in order to favour your concentration and your progress during study time. The place should have the following conditions:
- With a spacious and orderly table.
- Avoid distractions.
- It should be quiet, without radio or TV.
- With good lighting: natural or artificial (with two light sources, one indirect and the other direct).
- You should be comfortable.
This place can be at:
- Home.
- A classmate’s home.
- Library.
- etc.
Control of tests and assignments
One of the most important aspects to be learnt is to plan your work. You should, first of all, keep a calendar with all the dates of exams and assignment deadlines, as this will allow you to plan, know what is more urgent, and foresee what you will have to do. You should diversify your weekly work in accordance with the prevision written in the calendar.
Study planning
Many students start preparing assignments and exams just a few days before, which implies that they are prepared in an improvised manner, without time to collect necessary information, to prepare it properly and, consequently, to attain minimal requirements or not even attain them at all. For this reason, it is important to have a working plan prepared, which implies:
- Having a calendar with assignments and tests.
- Having decided and written a working schedule with tasks to do every day, always bearing dates in mind.
- Organizing study by starting with a moderately difficult task, continuing with a bit more difficult task, and then the least difficult one, as you will be more tired.
- Studying by applying information elaboration techniques.
- Collecting information, selecting and necessary material.
- Expansion of notes (other notes, books, dictionaries, etc.).
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While studying...
while studying...
- Motivate yourself! Try to find sense, interest and usefulness to what you are studying. It is basic to relate new learning with achieved knowledge, and to use creativity to make studying pleasant (for instance, you can record a topic in a CD or tape and listen to it at ease later, repeat a topic in front of a mirror, explain a topic to another person, use material to represent situations, etc.).
- Set your daily objectives and then congratulate yourself on what you have achieved, and give yourself a reward with some pleasant activity (going out with friends after a hard day of study, going to the cinema, going for a walk, etc.), with a limitation of time.
- Combine study periods with rest periods. For example, after achieving some study objectives, allow yourself some rest time (you have to take into account that there is a high individual variability).
- While studying, you have to bear in mind some habits that have a beneficial effect on study: having a balanced diet, sleeping necessary hours (between 7 and 8), including the day before the exam, avoiding coffee, tea, glue, and smoking too much (nicotine is also a stimulant) and, finally, doing physical exercise, as it reduces anxiety and increases good mood.
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How do you study?
Information processing
Comprehensive reading:
Finding main ideas and key words. You should learn to find main ideas from a text; this will allow you remember its content and get some idea of the most important aspects.
How can you do it?
By underlining
What is it useful for?
- To concentrate better.
- To help you grasp basic ideas.
- To help you review.
What kinds of underlining can you do? (1)
Structural underlining: this is using marginal notes to show the structure of the text; from this, you can do an OUTLINE.
Underlining key words: words suggesting written content are underlined; from this, you can draw a MIND MAP.
Lineal underlining: sentences that express the text’s main ideas are underlined; from this, you can write a SUMMARY.
Enhancing underlining: it means using signs or words to introduce one’s own opinion; useful to read the text critically.
Remembering information
Once comprehensive reading, underlining and, therefore, the outline, the mind map, the summary or others, are finished, you have to fix this information in your memory. To do so, you can follow this sequence:
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- Divide the text into small parts to study them separately. You can do it by headings, paragraphs, or questions.
- Repeated recitation. It means to read the first separate part twice consecutively, out loud or quietly, and then try to repeat the content without looking. You can also write what you already know in a piece of paper. After, you check whether you said it correctly. If that’s the case, you can continue with the next block.
- Review. You have to review what you have learnt several times the next day and the following six days. It means to check whether you can repeat the content of the text without looking. If you have forgotten something, you can study it again as explained in sections (a) and (b).
- You can also make up assessment questions and see whether you are able to answer them.
- Do you know everything? Then, you have already achieved your goal.
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after studying
Expressing information (1)
There are different ways of expressing information (Camús et al., 2001) that we already know:
- Oral presentation.
- Oral tests.
- Written tests.
- Assignments.
Before carrying out any of these actions, you should check a series of aspects:
- What do I have to do?
- Who is asking me?
- What period of time do I have?
- What do I know about the topic?
- When do I have to hand it in?
- How should it be presented?
- Where do I have to carry out this task?
- Do I have a prepared guideline (with introduction, development, and conclusions)?
- Do I have all the material prepared?
- Have I rehearsed (for instance, recording myself in video)?
While carrying out the action, you should:
- Revise what you have done so far.
Reflect on mistakes or doubts.
Control time.
You can add or change some things.
Watch out your spelling.
Watch out your sentence construction.
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during the exam...
Right before:
- You should not go to an exam with an empty stomach.
- You should practice breathing and relaxation techniques.
During the exam:
- You can also practice breathing techniques for a short time.
- What you think is very important and affects your performance on the day of the exam, as inhibiting thoughts can arise, such as incapacity, blocking feelings, or sensation of not having enough time, which you should try to replace with facilitating thoughts, which are personal and short, such as: “I’ll make it,” “I will answer all the questions little by little,” “on other occasions I was nervous at the beginning but then I got more and more calm,” “concentrate on what you are doing,” “some level of anxiety helps to improve,” etc.
- You should assess the time you have to answer the questions. You should distribute the exam time for every question or topic you are asked. You should write outlines of what you will answer in the questions.
- If you go blank in some question, you should try to do as follows. If you have the feeling of freezing completely, you can write something in a separate piece of paper. If you know the answer, this will come to you at some moment.
- If time allows, you have to revise the exam before you hand it in.
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want to know futher?
want to know futher?
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- Monereo, C. (Coord.) (2002). Aprendre a estudiar a la universitat. Barcelona: UOC.
- Monereo, C (Coord.) (1998). Estratègies d’aprenentatge. Barcelona: UOC.
- Arnaiz, P. et al. (1990). Mòduls de tècniques d’estudi. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya. Departament d’Ensenyament.
- Riart, J. (Coord.) (1994).PAHE: Programa d’autoavaluació d’habilitats d’estudi. Barcelona: EGA.
- http://www.xtec.es/~cdorado/
- http://www.xtec.es/orienta/estudiar.pdf
- Monereo, C. (Coord.) (2002). Aprendre a estudiar a la universitat. Barcelona: UOC.
