The exam or exam is looming and you still have a lot to learn? Panic may seem appropriate, but it won't help you much. Rather, help your brain prepare well.
As with fitness, the result depends on the program you complete. A well-passed exam becomes the intellectual equivalent of summer strutting in a bikini or Speedo figure. Your brain is like a muscle: the more intensively you use it, the better it works. One strategy for learning is repetition: knowledge nodes are activated and are easily accessible when they are accessed very frequently. However, it is more effective to network the knowledge nodes well so that the brain can access them from many directions.
Study tip #1
Warm-up: Collect and form structures
Your first training session is a warm-up. You put together your learning load and record what you need to learn on index cards (this doesn't always have to be on paper, there are also very good apps that do this digitally): years, facts, historical sequences, formulas, definitions, etc. The highlighting of text passages hardly brings any training success - except for quickly finding a passage in the text. You write down in your words what is worth learning and write with a pen. This is how your brain processes everything in different regions: understanding, evaluating and reformulating, controlling the hand motorically and confirming success when checking.
You structure your index cards in the same way. This structure is suitable for historical topics:
- Header: time and description
- Location of the event, people involved
- Causes, process and consequences
- additional notes
For a theory-heavy topic, this structure is more suitable:
- Header: Name of the theory
- Who put it up and when?
- What is it and what use cases does it have?
- What dissenting voices were there?
- additional notes
Write down the sources on the back. Additional memory aids are situational notes, such as “thick blue book, library, January 12th, 2017, Jana interrupted in the middle.” By the way, you create cards like these for everything you read - so your base for the flashcards grows with each semester.
Study tip #2
Workout: Over and over again
Put together workout units: Distribute your stacks of cards into three to six piles of approximately the same height. You can create alphabetical blocks, group cards that are related in content, or all that have the word “and” in the fifth line. If you were to learn everything in one go, the information would be confusing and you would stumble in the exam. For best results, complete exactly one sub-batch each day. You look at the information contained on the cards, check for gaps, think about what questions an examiner might ask about the card, read everything several times and recite important passages out loud. You spend about an intensive quarter of an hour with each card.
You integrate these training portions into your everyday life: one card with your morning coffee, one on the way to college, one during your lunch break, three during your free period, and the rest in the evening. Difficult sub-topics require extra time for further research or practice tasks. You take breaks as needed, but 14 hours into the day you put the stack away, your brain needs a break from training.
Once you have gone through all the stacks, you have a day's break from studying and organize the next stage: cards that you know well form a stack, the remaining ones are sorted into new sub-stacks. You go through this work-out phase several times and each time ends with the “Can I” stack, after which it (hopefully) continues to grow.
Study tip #3
Stretching: get your brain going
Your brain knows countless tricks to network information better and therefore access it more easily. You can support it:
Think of good examples or images (metaphors, analogies) and write them down.
- Tell something as a story; biographical or historical anecdotes provide good anchor points.
- Imagine a coherent short presentation based on three randomly drawn cards or give it as an exercise.
- Learn in different places (library, train, park bench, desk, kitchen table), smells, acoustic and visual impressions serve as sensory memory aids.
- On each card, draw a small sketch illustrating some (even insignificant) detail.
Study tip #4
Circuit: forming new orders
Approaching a topic from a new perspective creates new connections in the brain. You can use mind mapping to structure your topic visually: Find a thematic center of your learning material and sort all the facts and subtopics around it. Connect aspects and subtopics as intensively as possible. This creates a branching network of ideas from the card titles. This reveals gaps and questions, so do your research accordingly.
Test your mind map by going through the following exercise three times: Start with an entry in the edge and give a half-hour presentation that takes you over each branch to the opposite edge. You can expand this:
- A friend receives your deck of cards and keeps asking questions.
- You draw a card from your deck of cards after every fourth branch and spontaneously integrate it into your flow of speech.
- Certain words or names are forbidden in the presentation, ideally one to three key terms.
Study tip #5
Aerobics: Train better together
If your fellow students have also put together their learning load, you can learn together. Explain to each other the three easiest and three most difficult cards. Then you exchange these cards and question each other.
To loosen things up, read some cards to each other. If you speak in absurd dialects or in a stilted tone of voice, you create effective memory aids. Give state-supporting Merkel speeches, loose hand-made speeches or embarrassing school boy speeches.
If you have a common topic, you build a mind map together. You discuss every placement, branching and connection; a (thematic, technical!) discussion can hardly be long enough.
Study tip #6
Cool Down: Long term instead of short term
The more often you deal with a topic and the more diverse your points of contact with it, the easier it is for the brain to access it. Don't just repeat stubbornly, but deal with all the pieces of information.
Get to know your brain well and find out which exercises work well for you. As with physical training, you don't acquire fitness in a few intensive sessions, but through continuous persistence. The sooner you start learning, the more relaxed you will be - and that alone acts as a learning accelerator.
With index cards and mind maps, the learning material can be better structured and mastered.
