4 Simple Ways You Are Messing Up Your Study Sessions

What 5 years of tutoring experience has taught me

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Learning is serious business, it’s the basis for our understanding of everything around us. There are good study strategies and bad ones, and you’d be surprised how many trends emerge when you’re able to work with so many students over the years. It’s true that different age groups have different problems, and each student has specific needs, but I’ve noticed that there are some consistent trends across groups. I’ve found four tangible strategies to improve your study sessions that should help you feel in control of your learning.

I’ve been working as a tutor for five years now. It started out as something I did on the side in college to help make ends meet and it’s now my full-time job. I’ve worked with school kids, college students, and adults in their 60s. It’s always fun to work with people and see what they’re learning in their courses. There’s a unique sort of joy that comes from being able to work with someone and see them transform over the course of your time with them. I’ve had some shocking turn-arounds with some of my students; we’re talking F’s to A’s here. Student resilience is such a surprising thing, and often times it just takes someone who cares enough to help out to foster that in someone, regardless of age.

1. Rushing

You may be surprised but the number one thing I found that tripped my students up was their desire to just get it over with. I would sit there and watch them barely skim an article they had to read for a class and retain nothing. I would ask them what the article was about and they would, without fail, just restate the title of the article because they hadn’t actually read it.

I know it’s frustrating, but the number one recommendation I have for my students is learning to take their time. For reading, this looks like stopping frequently to ask yourself what you just read. Every chapter, every section, every paragraph if necessary. If you had teachers like I did, they made you write a one-sentence summary of each paragraph you read as notes. While for some of us this might be overkill, it’s a great place to start if you don’t know how to slow yourself down. Doing so helps you check for understanding, and leads to it being much easier to summarize what you read effectively.

For math, this means checking your answers. Once you find the answer to a question, plug it back in. Does it work? Even before that, you can really study the question. Write out each part of it to ensure you know what the moving parts are. Typically, what’s most important is that we slow down and really process what we’re being asked to do in a math problem, especially a word problem. Here’s an example:

“Alexis has eight friends coming to her party this Friday, she wants to order enough pizza so everyone can have at least three slices. A pizza, each of which costs ten dollars, has eight slices. How many pizzas, minimum, does Alexis need to order, and how much will that cost her?”

Woah, that’s a lot of words right? Let’s start by breaking it down into “variables.”

• 9 people (8 friends, plus Alexis)
• 3 slices per person
• 8 slices per pizza
• 10 dollars per pizza

Let’s then ask ourselves what we actually need to find:

• The least amount of pizzas she can order
• How much that will cost her.

Now let’s see how many slices that is. 9 people times 3 slices equals 27 slices.
Okay, how many pizzas is that? This is division, How many pizzas do we need for 27 slices? (27 divided by 8 equals 3.375 pizzas, so we round up to 4 pizzas)

So how much does 4 pizzas cost? 4 times 10, 40 dollars.

Check it: 40 divided by 10 = 4 pizzas. 4 times 8 = 32. 32–27 = 5 leftover (ie not enough for another pizza)

So, as we can see there are a lot of steps to this problem. Writing out each step and working our way through it, and then checking afterward is a good way to make sure we haven’t made any mistakes and artificially makes us slow down, ensuring that those mistakes are less likely.

2. Not Having Good Notes, or Not Using Them

Oh, my god. So many of my students, past and present, don’t take any notes! It baffles me. For some of them, their teachers tell them not to, which I feel is to their detriment. If you are going to have to use information from a lecture, you should be taking notes. Even if those notes are sloppy short-hand. Notes are essential to working your way through your assignments and study sessions because just relying on the textbook or your own brain’s memory is terribly inefficient and ineffective.

One of the larger issues is that most people were never taught how to take good notes, and so they have a hard time telling what’s important information and what’s not. While this is a much bigger issue in and of itself, there are a few tactics you can use while in a lecture, meeting, or just reading from a book to figure out what you should write down:

• Keep the overarching topic in mind. How does the information apply to the general topic? Is that piece of supporting evidence necessary to remember, or does it just sound interesting?
• What does the author/speaker put emphasis on? Write that down.
• If it’s a statistic, a formula, or other piece of data, it’s probably important.

Once you have notes, you can then use them. Keeping your notes organized, rewriting them shortly after the event to make them legible, or to help you clarify what you meant while taking notes can really help make your notes effective. Any time you sit down to do homework, write an essay, or review what you’ve done in a particular subject that day or week, make sure you have the relevant notes on hand. By doing so, you are able to reference what you talked about in class, and in the case of any math-related subject, you probably have practice problems that you can use as a jumping-off point for doing your homework problems.

Having your own notes that make sense to you is essential. Remember, your notes aren’t about capturing the speaker verbatim, but rather they’re about having a tool for yourself to make sure that you can recall and remember what the important and useful parts are.

3. Not Being Organized

I hate to pull a Type A personality trait to the forefront of discussions on tangible efforts to improve one’s learning, but honestly, while being organized may come naturally to certain people, it’s definitely a skill anyone can learn. I’m not saying you have to reorganize your entire life, I’m just saying you should consider figuring out where you absolutely could benefit from being more organized and put your effort in there. That “there” in this context is in your notes, your homework, etc. You can do this by keeping an agenda, categorizing your notes, and making sure all your work is in its proper space.

Keeping an agenda that tracks what you have to do that day, week, or month may sound tedious and soul-sucking to some of you, but please just try it. Having something you can reference that reminds you what you want/need to get done is a wonderful tool for those of us (myself included) who would forget they had to go to work if it didn’t pay their bills (and even then it’s a miracle I make it to work on time regularly). So, whether that’s using the calendar app on your phone or computer, using a program like calendly.com, or some good old physical print and pen, I can’t recommend having something to remind you of your duties enough. (Psst, try programming alarms in your phone for recurrent meetings, it’s literally saved my life countless times)

Organizing your notes and other important pieces of information is wonderful because it means you can find what it is you’re looking for! Don’t just categorize your notes by subject, consider also organizing them by topic. For example: in a language class you often cover vocab, grammar, reading, writing, etc. off and on. You are constantly revisiting old topics as you progress. So, organize your language notes based on what they match with: conjugation sheets with other grammar notes, vocabulary sheets with other forms of lexis. That way, when you need to revisit something old that you don’t quite remember, you don’t have to hunt through your notes in chronological order. Instead, you can find them based on the relevant topic. Organize your notes in a way that not only makes sense to you but also makes them convenient and accessible to you. You know, so you’ll actually use them. (I rewrite my in-class notes from language courses into small notebooks based on category: So I have five or so Romanian language notebooks. One on grammar, one on vocabulary, et cetera)

Making sure your work is in its proper space is also important. The stuff you produce with your notes should be easily accessible. This isn’t just because you have to turn that stuff in, but also because you may actually want to go back and look at it again later. As someone who is currently applying to graduate school programs, and needs to give an example of academic writing that I have done, I feel so much better knowing that I kept all my undergraduate papers stored in a Google drive, categorized by semester and the course I wrote it in, making it much easier to look back through all my old writing to see what might make a good writing sample. Just because something is over and done with for a course doesn’t mean it’s worthless to you, your teacher’s markings on a paper or worksheet can be used as part of your studying, for example.

4. Not Knowing the “Why”

So many of my students don’t quite understand why they are doing what they are doing on a homework sheet, or why they are writing a paper for a certain class. They mostly think of it in these terms: my teacher said to do it that way. Memorizing things for the sake of memorizing them isn’t helpful, and thankfully many teachers are starting to move away from the memorize-without-understanding-why model in favor of one that helps students work through the logic of what they are doing. Whenever you read something, ask yourself “why is this important?” and “why is this useful?” If you can’t answer those two questions then you haven’t fully understood the “why” of what you’ve read. Similarly, ask yourself “why” a mathematical formula is the way it is. There’s a reason! Math is based on logic and there’s nothing arbitrary! There’s always a reason for a formula to be the way it is.

This is an invaluable skill to have. If you can get yourself to think of the why in everything you do, not only are you deepening your understanding and creating more neural pathway connections between pieces of information, you are also framing information in how it can be used, instead of just memorizing it. I challenge you to think of the why in everyday life. But, for the sake of this article, I recommend starting with understanding the why behind your homework, readings, lectures, etc. Make sure that your why isn’t just “because X said so.”

In Conclusion

Something that’s not emphasized enough in life is that learning is a personal experience. One size does not fit all and even attempts to encapsulate differences in learning like auditory versus visual only tackle a tiny part of the larger issue. Education needs to be personal to be effective, and our own personal engagement and logic need to be applied to what we learn for it to make any sense to us. That’s why I like being a tutor so much: I get to work one-on-one with students and really get to know them. By knowing the students, I can figure out what sorts of explanations work for them, and I can help them with their hurdles, whether they are the four listed above or others.

So many articles out there touch on the psychological blocks we have when learning and studying: from tackling feelings of “I can’t”, to test anxiety, to stress in general. It’s important to understand our feelings towards subjects, I agree, but ultimately finding tactics to make information more accessible to us, and to overcome our own hurdles to education is super important. Put these tactics to work, I dare you. When we prime ourselves with patience and preparedness, good ways of studying and working just fall into place.