The 10 Study Hacks That Transformed My Son From 13th to 1st Place

“If you are not doing well in class, the reason is you are not doing enough questions”

Unknown

I am walking towards the school gates to pick up my son. It’s the end of term, and my son’s examination results are in. I walk up to him, and he starts smiling. He jumps up and shouts, “Daddy, I did it, I did it. I was first in class”.

Tears started flowing down my cheeks, and he asked why are you crying? I said, “We have worked so hard to achieve this.” He said, “I know. I was 13th only last term”.

How could my son achieve such a remarkable feat in such a short period? The answer lies in effective learning techniques.

Here are my son’s ten best study techniques:

1. Power of Questions: Testing yourself is the most powerful way to study any subject. The logic is simple. Your final exams will have questions. Therefore, why not work on questions during your learning process? Work your questions, past questions, and class exercise questions—work as many questions as you can.
2. Active Recall: When revising, the trick is to look away and ask yourself whether you can recall what you have learned. A practical example would be reviewing all the Textbook questions after finishing a chapter.
3. Focused Practice: Nothing beats practicing precisely what you will be tested on. If you have a driving exam, you practice driving. If you have karate exams, practice karate kicks. Therefore, you practice questions on the subject if you have an exam.
4. Space Your Learning: Another powerful and effective way to imprint more information on your long-term memory is spaced repetition. It is how to move things from the short to the long term. It would be best if you learned subjects over time to allow your brain to imprint them slowly. I call them passes. You need at least 3-4 passes or more per subject to move it to the long-term memory. And, of course, each pass would involve you testing yourself (Active Recall).
5. Writing to remember: An effective technique to help us remember what we are reading is to write it down by hand. Writing notes make you remember more. Answering questions by writing them down makes you remember more of them. Repeated writing something you want to remember helps ingrain the concepts in your mind.
6. Working at your brain’s peak time: The best time to work and get difficult things done is during the mornings to mid-afternoons. Your body and mind are wide awake and ready to be creative. Understanding new material you are trying to learn in the morning is much easier. It seems your body begins to wind down when the Sun starts to set.
7. The brain as a muscle: You can view your brain as a muscle. Like with exercise, doing a little daily compound your gains. Consistency is the superpower of the brain. Learning a little daily is the best way to extract maximum benefit from your brain. You will be amazed at your eventual outcomes.
8. Taking Breaks: Doing all your studying in one sitting is a recipe for non-productive work. Your brain is not made that way. Your brain needs to have breaks in between studying. A good study technique is the Pomodoro Timer. You learn for 25 minutes and relax for 5 minutes. You can use a digital or analog clock to set up the Pomodoro timer.
9. Sleep for consolidation: There is no learning without sleep. It is through sleep that most of the new concepts you have learned get to stick. During sleep, your brain moves things from short-term to long-term memory.
10. Knowing You Understanding: A clear-cut way to know you fully understand something is by explaining the idea to yourself. Can you explain the new concepts to yourself or someone else? The benchmark is explaining what you have learned to a 5-year-old. If you can explain something to yourself or others, you understand it.
11. Bonus Tip: Turn off Distractions: There is no such thing as I can watch a movie and learn. There is no such thing as I can have a conversation and learn. You have to limit all distractions to a minimum. Notifications on phones and computers should be turned off.
12. Bonus Tip: Last Minute Study: Waiting until the last minute to study is a recipe for disaster. Your brain needs time through spaced repetition to encode your learning into long-term memory.

Hopefully, you have found this useful.