How to Study
Modified: 2026-08-16 5:51 PM CDST
- What should you do BEFORE you take a test?
- Where can you get help in preparing for a test?
- Are all tests created equally?
- Will I get better at taking tests?
- How do I improve my memory?
- How do I reduce test anxiety?
- Are there tricks for improving test taking?
- What are some specific types of test question and how do I handle them?
The Long View
- Before the Test
- Ask your instructor
- Plan your time wisely
- Work on your study habits (see below)
- Physical Prerequisites
- Sleep regularly
- BBC Human rhythm test
- Test yourself. Are you a morning person or evening person?
- Sleep hygeine
- Child: (dinner, bath, story, sleep) repeat
- You: try to come up with a schedule. (I'm in bed by 9:30 pm, up by 6:00 am, at work by 7:30 am)
- Exercise regularly (walking is good)
- Peleton is selling like crazy now, why?
- Don't forget to walk the Farm Road
- Eat healthy
- Breakfast is important!
- Freshman 15
- As a freshman I weighed 165 pounds, as a sophomore 190, won't tell you what I weigh now...
- More likely with social isolation and Covid-19?
165 pounds!
??? pounds
The doctor said I had lost 10 pounds since my last check up six months ago.
- Social Help
- Join or start a study group
- Find a tutor
- Be Ready Emotionally
- Know the material
- "A little learning is a dangerous thing"--Alexander Pope
- In other words, try to overlearn (see below). Think about a musician flawlessly playing a song from memory. How did that happen?
- Learn how to relax
- Have a positive attitude
- Believe you will pass the exam, graduate from college, get that good job, be admitted to grad school or professional school
- Math and Science Tests
- Know rules
- Calculators? Does instructor allow those?
- Formula sheets? Again, does instructor allow?
- Work homework problems
- Recent speaker said that he learned his math courses by working the problems
- Understand homework problems
- Because many of the homework problems will be similar to the test problems
- Be careful with details
- Watch your signs (+ and -)
- Check your work
- Use instructor's outlines
- Aim high
- Be prepared
Other Study Strategies
- Review sheets, mind maps, and more
- Summaries
- Read everything that will be on test
- Try to predict test questions
- Analyze the material
- Look for connections
- Select, condense, and order
- Write a draft summary
- Review draft summary
- Test yourself
- Leave time to review and self-test before taking the test
- Exam plans
- Make a plan to prepare for the test, include:
- type of test
- material on the test
- type of questions
- how you will prepare
- study sessions (self or with others?)
Improving Your Memory
- You can't change your memory, but you can learn to use your memory better
- Parts of memory
- Encoding
- Putting items into memory
- This is what you do when you study
- Storage
- Holding those items until needed
- Repetition helps storage last longer
- Retrieval
- Finding the items you stored
- This is what you do when you take a test
- Mnemonic Devices
- Acrostics (sentences)
- "Every good boy does fine." (EGBDF, the order of the notes on the treble clef from bottom to top.)
- "On old Olympus's towering tops a Finn and German viewed some hops." (Each first letter is a cue for the order of the 12 cranial nerves.)
- Acronyms (words)
- FACE (the order of the notes in the spaces of the treble clef from bottom to top)
- HOMES (not going to tell you but, it's geographical, involves lots of water, and are in North America, got it?)
- Loci
- locus is Latin for place and loci is Latin for places
- here, the idea is to put items to be remembered in familiar places (e.g., the rooms of your house
- imagine a grocery list, imagine the items in each room and then make an association
- milk on list, "put" in bathroom, imagine taking a shower with milk
- cookies, imagine your living room furniture made of cooking boxes
- flour, imagine making curtains from old flour sacks for the kitchen
- steak, imagine sleeping on a rib eye mattress in the bedroom (ugh)
- sugar, imagine spilled sugar in the dining room and you can feel the grains with your bare feet
- Link
- here the idea is to link all of the items together into a bigger concept
- Peg Word
- This is a more complex encoding system where you learn the following rhymes:
- one-bun
- two-shoe
- three-tree
- four-door
- five-hive
- six-sticks
- seven-heaven
- eight-gate
- and many more
- The idea is to link associations using the rhymes
- Keep a list (no encoding)
- I always carry pen and paper
- I always carry a smartphone
- I can write on either
- Summary
- Chunking game
- hard to do online: I would ask you to guess what word I was thinking, then write the correct letters:
- argumenta___ How might this word end?
- hors_ Easy one (you can ride it)
- universi_You are in one
- I'd also cheat:
- xykpro... (no such word in English)
- FYI, that's why you should NOT use words as passwords
- Also works for sentences:
- You can lead...
- You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink
- That dog won't...
- A stitch...
- A stitch in time saves nine.
- All of these are aphorisms or common sayings
- And, you recall them as sentences, not words
- See HERE for more such aphorisms
- Flashbulb memories
- Sometimes something so shocking happens that people remember it as if they had taken a flash picture:
- Pearl Harbor,
- Kennedy Assasination,
- Challenger explosion,
- 9/11
- Can also be personal: when you opened that fat admission letter to Harvard Grad school
- The fat letter means you were admitted. It contains the paperwork you need to fill out.
- The thin letter means you were rejected: "Thank you so much for applying to Harvard, we regret to inform you that..."
Specific hints
- Filter out unwanted information and focus on your classwork and homework
- Once is NOT enough!
- Analyze your successes and failures on previous tests
- Say things aloud
- Visual register-lasts about 2 seconds: everything you see before it disappears in 2 seconds, psychology fact
- Auditory register-lasts about 30 seconds: everything you hear, lasts longer, about 30 seconds
- When I'm alone in the office I use this, I say things aloud to myself, they last longer
- Information on sensory registers
- Think about related facts when you get stuck
- Take notes on your notes (I'm not kidding!)
- When I write, first I read, I take notes while I'm reading, after a put all of those notes together in front of me (I have hacksaw blades and magnets attached to my reading lamp so I can put 5 pieces of paper next to each other at the same time). At some point, I know what I want to write and get to it. I strive for 500 words at a time.
- Overlearn
- Overlearning means going beyond shallow knowledge
- Think of learning script in a play or a play in football or basketball
- "I came to shoot craps, let's shoot craps." a line from a play I was in in 1977 (Guys and Dolls) I was big Jule from Chicago. Overlearning example.
- FYI, there is a thing as TOO much overlearning, so watch it. After a while the overlearning effect helps less and less
- Join a study group
- But, join to study, not to party
- Red Bull ad (not a study group!)
- Be organized
- Pick the right place to study
- Avoid TV, bed, loud friends
- Use the Internet, but be careful
- Avoid stress
- Holmes and Rahe Stress Questionnaire
- What was your score? (Don't tell me.)
- The Holmes Rahe is written for adult stress
- The CUSS
- Renner, M. J., & Mackin, R. S. (2000). A life stress instrument for classroom use (pp. 11-12). In M. E. Ware, & D. E. Johnson (eds.), Handbook of demonstrations and activities in the teaching of psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- Take the College Undergraduate Stress Scale
- Both give you a way to operationalize your stress
Taking Tests
- Relax first
- Success on Tests
- Write your name down on test, do it first thing
- Read the test directions, ask if you don't know
- Watch your time, most tests are timed
- Don't the let the harder questions slow you down
- Stay focused and don't panic
- If you finish early, check your answers, look for careless mistakes
- Essay Question Success
- Watch your time (who has a watch?) I do, just got my first Apple Watch but I sleep with my Seiko Automatic while Apple Watch charges
- Many now only rely on their cell phones to keep time. What about you?
- Write a brief outline first (it can even be written on the margin)
- Be sure to answer all the parts of the question
- Organize your answer (don't ramble)
- Know what the following words mean
- analyze
- compare and contrast
- critique
- define
- describe
- discuss
- evaluate
- explain
- interpret
- justify
- narrate
- outline
- prove
- review
- summarize
- trace
- Multiple Choice Success
- Beware of the words: always, never, and only
- Look for the words: not, except, and but
- Try to predict the answer before looking at the choices
- If two choices seem correct, look for "all of the above"
- If none of the choices seem correct, look for "none of the above"
- Fill in the Blank Success
- These are similar to multiple choice questions
- Fill in the blanks are usually harder than multiple choice
- The answers may be listed or not
- True or False Success
- Don't look at the pattern of true or false answers
- Watch for words: always, never, and only (usually false)
- Often and frequently may signal true answers
- Matching Success
- Matching questions are hard
- Look at all possibilities first
- Match the questions you are sure of first
- Use elimination to work out remaining questions
- Sometimes it is possible to double match (see demo below)
| Question |
Answer |
| 1. dog |
A. feline |
| 2. cat |
B. ungulate |
| 3. deer |
C. rodent |
| 4. rat |
D. marsupial |
| 5. kangaroo |
E. canine |
Suppose you know that: 1 is E, 2 is A, 3 is B, but you don't know 4 and 5. You could answer: 4 is C and 5 is C ( or 4 is D and 5 is D) Get it?
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