by
Thomas E
,
02 February, 2017
Read 1809 times
So you’ve started back at school and you want to make the most of the year. You may have exams at the end and want to perform as well as you can, or perhaps you just want to be more efficient to free up more time so you can enjoy your weekends. Whatever your motivation it’s important to set goals, have a plan and stick to it. Additionally there are some other things that will make your life easier and stress a bit more tolerable.
The first thing to do, and early on is to set goals. These goals should align with your priorities and be something that you work towards for the whole year. It may be achieving a certain mark in one subject or perhaps demonstrating a certain improvement in another. It may even not be academic with goals you can set in any aspect of your life. Regardless of what these goals are, you should try to make them SMART. SMART is a system of goal setting that helps to achieve results. Thinking this way goals should be Specific, so clearly articulated with an objective outcome, Measureable so that progress towards the ultimate goal can be assessed, Achievable within the time and ability constraints that you have available to you. Results oriented so that it is easy to Track and will give you something to aim for. It will also give you something to build on when it is achieved and time bound to a specific deadline to provide the motivation to keep up consistent effort.
The important thing to facilitate these goals is to have a well thought out and specific plan for consistent effort to achieve those goals. The best way to do this is to work out when the deadline for achieving these goals might be. At the same time, take the sum of all the efforts you will need to make in order to achieve that goal. You then want to incrementally break those efforts down into smaller and smaller portions until they are essentially individual tasks, and then plan to space those equidistant from the point you are now to the point you want to achieve your goals. This isn’t all however as you will likely not only need to cover any material once, but revisit it somewhat frequently throughout the duration. This is where learning theory can come to your assistance.
The concept of learning at first glance seems quite amorphous, and rarely is an effort made to teach people any particularly good way to do it. Left on their own to work out their “learning styles” people are often left with poor habits and ineffectual practices. But if one does to a little bit of research there are techniques for learning supported by evidence that would create a more effective routine. For the finer details on these concepts, head over to the blog here. However, to give you a taste, here is a summary of the techniques that can be used to good effect here.
Calibration: Aligning your assessment of your own competence with real world indicators such as past exam papers
Generation: Try to answer questions before looking up the answers, and then go on to look them up afterwards.
Retrieval practice: Practicing recalling information through practice questions rather than simply putting information in.
Spaced repetition: Utilise increasingly less frequent revisitations of information, but ensure that you do revisit it on a regular schedule.
Interleave Practice: Rather than doing blocks of a single type of question or single topic of material, intersperse your study with all different styles of question and information.
Elaboration: Apply your knowledge to new scenarios and try to explain it in order to add levels of understanding
Reflection: be sure to reflect back on your practices to see if they are effective or what could be done better.
The final thing that you should take care of when you’re in a high stress year and you have expectations weighing on you is yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself then there is no way that you can perform at your best. What that means is you eat well, eat healthy. Make sure you get those 7-8 hours of sleep. And don’t neglect your mental health either, be sure to always make time for the things you enjoy and the people you love. And pick up some habits and skills to build resilience and reduce stress like mindfulness meditation.