1 thing I recommend to students," Willingham says. To gauge whether you've studied enough, explain the material to someone else or create a test for yourself, he says. You may feel well-versed in the social psychology theories you learned in class after reading over your notes several times, but familiarity doesn't mean you'll be able to recall the material for a test, Willingham says. 3) meta-analysis of 30 years of research, we aren't very good at assessing how well we understand something. According to a Journal of Memory and Language (Vol. When you're studying, you may even need to disable your Internet connection and turn off your cell phone, she says.ĥ. "If you ask any graduate student what they do first when they sit down to study, 99 percent say they check their e-mail, and then the next thing you know, an hour has gone by," Miller says. It takes extra time to shift mental gears every time you switch tasks-that means when you sit down to work, close your e-mail program so it doesn't distract you. Many students pride themselves on their ability to attend to several tasks at once, but multitasking undermines efficiency, according to a 2006 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (Vol. 7), showed that omega-3 fatty acids, which are found in salmon, walnuts and kiwi fruit, improve learning and memory.Ĭhicago clinical psychologist Alison Miller, PhD, author of "Finish Your Dissertation Once and For All: How to Overcome Psychological Barriers, Get Results, and Move On with Your Life" (APA, 2008), recommends incorporating fresh fruit and vegetables into your diet at least once a day and keeping dried fruit and nuts on hand as an alternative to candy and other junk food when hunger strikes.Ĥ. And a 2008 meta-analysis of 160 studies examining food's effect on the brain, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (Vol. 2) linked memory loss to a diet high in saturated fat and cholesterol. A study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (Vol. Yet the high-fat, empty-calorie foods they often choose don't provide the energy needed to work effectively, and can also take a toll on the brain. With both time and money in short supply, graduate students often skip lunch when rushing to class or hit the vending machine for a late-night snack. The authors found that when participants studied at two different points in time, they recalled a greater percentage of the material than when the same amount of study time was nearly uninterrupted.ģ. 3) meta-analysis of 317 experiments examining the spacing of student study periods. Willingham's claims are backed up by a 2006 Psychological Bulletin (Vol. One is that your brain doesn't make that association because the knowledge is cued and retrieved at many different points over time. There are several reasons why distributing your studying throughout the semester is more long-lasting. That's bad news for crammers, as most tests aren't handed out at 2 a.m., wrapped around Red Bull cans. When you pull an all-nighter, your memories of the concepts you're studying become associated with a particular time and environment, making them harder to retrieve, says Willingham. 3) study, students who asked themselves "why?" at the end of each sentence while reading a factual passage about a university were significantly more likely to remember important points than students who were simply told to read the passage and remember it.Ģ. In a Journal of Educational Psychology (Vol. This might be something as simple as taking notes on important points, outlining how journal articles fit together or spending a moment after reading a paragraph to reflect on how it fits into a piece's bigger picture. Instead, he suggests students find a more active strategy that forces them to think about the meaning of what they're reading. That's because they don't require students to engage with the material. Dog-earing pages and highlighting journal article passages are popular but worthless exercises when it comes to helping you remember information later on, Willingham says. "But once you're in graduate school, this is your career, and cramming isn't really a very adaptive strategy anymore."Īccording to psychology faculty and other experts, here are the top 10 habits that hold grad students back:ġ. "If your whole goal is to do well on the test tomorrow and you don't care if you remember it at all, cramming actually kind of works," he says. These behaviors may have cut it in college, but graduate school calls for a better set of strategies, says University of Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham, PhD. As an undergraduate student, you probably got A's despite less-than-ideal study habits: reading in front of the television, staying up all night cramming, checking e-mail every 10 minutes while working on a paper.
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