Learning at college requires processing and retaining a high volume of information across various subjects at the same time. That can be a daunting task, especially if the information is brand new.
College students often try out different approaches to learning – often drawing from their high school experiences and modeling what they see their peers doing. While it’s great to try different approaches to learning and studying for your courses, it’s smart to incorporate into your daily habits some learning practices that are backed up by current research.
Below are some effective learning practices suggested by research in the cognitive and learning sciences:
Take ownership of your educational experience.
As an engaged learner, it is important to take an active, self-directed role in your academic experience. Taking agency might feel new to you. In high school, you might have felt like you had little control over your learning experience, so transitioning to an environment where you are expected to be in the driver’s seat can be disorienting.
Here are four concrete actions you can take to assert ownership over your education:
- Attend office hours. Come prepared with questions for your instructor about lectures, readings, or other aspects of the course.
- Schedule meetings with administrators and faculty to discuss your academic trajectory and educational goals. You might meet with your academic advisor, course heads, or the Director of Undergraduate Studies (DUS) in your concentration.
- Identify areas for growth and development based on your academic goals. Then, explore opportunities to shape and further refine your skills in those areas.
- Advocate for support, tools, equipment, or considerations that address your learning needs.
Seek out opportunities for active learning.
Many courses include opportunities for active and engaged learning within their structure, such as responding to weekly discussion posts on Canvas. Take advantage of those opportunities to enhance your understanding of the material. If such opportunities are not built into the course structure, you can develop your own active learning strategies, such as joining study groups. Anytime you grapple actively with your course material, rather than taking it in passively, you’re engaging in active learning. By doing so, you are increasing your retention of key course concepts.
One particularly effective way to help yourself stay focused and engaged in the learning process is to cultivate learning communities, such as accountability groups and study groups. Working in the company of other engaged learners can help remind you why you love learning or why you chose a particular course, concentration, research project, or field of study. Those reminders can re-energize and refocus your efforts.
If you are struggling to stay engaged and active in your learning, visit our webpage on Motivation, or schedule an appointment with an academic coach at the ARC.
Practice study strategies that promote deep learning.
To keep up with the demands of college, many students learn concepts just in time for the test. The problem with this approach is that, for many disciplines (and especially in STEM), the concepts build on one another. Students survive the course only to be met at the final with concepts from the first quiz that they forgot long ago. This is why deep learning is important. Deep learning occurs when students use study strategies that ensure course ideas and concepts are embedded into long-term memory. Building study plans and review sessions in a way that helps create a conceptual framing of the material will serve you now and in the long run.
Here are some study strategies that promote deep learning:
- Concept Mapping: A concept map is a visualization of knowledge that is organized by the relationships between the topics. At its core, it is made of concepts that are connected together by lines (or arrows) that are labeled with the relationship between the concepts.
- Collaboration: You don’t have to go it alone. In fact, research on learning suggests that it’s best not to. Using study groups, ARC accountability hours, office hours, question centers, and other opportunities to engage with your peers helps you not only test your understanding but also learn different approaches to tackling the material.
- Self-test: Quiz yourself about the material you need to know with your notes put away. Refamiliarize yourself with the answers to questions you get wrong, wait a few hours, and then test yourself again. Use practice tests provided by your courses or use free apps to create quizzes for yourself.
- Create a connection: As you try to understand how all the concepts and ideas from your course fit together, try to associate new information with something you already know. Making connections can help you create a more holistic picture of the material you’re learning.
- Teach someone (even yourself!): Try teaching someone the concept you’re trying to remember. You can even try to talk to yourself about it! Vocalizing helps activate different sensory processes, which can enhance memory and help you embed concepts more deeply.
- Interleave: We often think we’ll do best if we study one subject for long periods of time, but research contradicts this. Try to work with smaller units of time (a half-hour to an hour) and switch up your subjects. Return to concepts you studied earlier at intervals to ensure you learned them sufficiently.
Engage in metacognition.
An effective skill for learning is metacognition. Metacognition is the process of “thinking about thinking” or reflecting on personal habits, knowledge, and approaches to learning. Engaging in metacognition enables students to become aware of what they need to do to initiate and persist in tasks, to evaluate their own learning strategies, and to invest the mental effort needed to succeed. When students work at being aware of their own thinking and learning, they are more likely to recognize patterns and to transfer knowledge and skills to solve increasingly complex problems. They also develop a greater sense of self-efficacy.
Mentally checking in with yourself while you study is a great metacognitive technique for assessing your level of understanding. Asking lots of “why,” “how,” and “what” questions about the material you’re reviewing helps you to be reflective about your learning and to strategize about how to tackle tricky material. If you know something, you should be able to explain to yourself how you know it. If you don’t know something, you should start by identifying exactly what you don’t know and determining how you can find the answer.
Metacognition is important in helping us overcome illusions of competence (our brain’s natural inclination to think that we know more than we actually know). All too often students don’t discover what they really know until they take a test. Metacognition helps students be better judges of how well they understand the course material, which then enables them to refine their approach to studying and better prepare for tests.