ON HOW TO STUDY ON HOW TO STUDY 
How to Study by Ronald Blue
Permission granted to duplicate for non-profit educational or research purposes.
Countless times students have asked me what is the best way to study. While the recommendations that I am about to make to you are no guarantee of success, I believe they will optimize your chances of success.
Perspectives on the Problem:
Research shows that the average student will study for a test. The average [high school] person will study four hours for a daily quiz, four hours for a weekly quiz, four hours for a major test, four hours for a midterm, and four hours for a comprehensive final. The outcome of this four hours of study will vary from an A for a daily quiz to an F for the comprehensive final. This means that in high school grades are strongly determined by intelligence since everyone studies the same amount of time.
College is different. Most of the students are highly intelligent and some are highly motivated.
In almost all college courses if you have a poor vocabulary and do not really like to read, you are in serious trouble. If you can succeed with your weird teachers, then you can succeed with your even weirder bosses. Your study habits formed in high school may vector you toward failure because you have never experienced what it takes to perform at the college level. That is why the freshman year is the hardest year you will ever experience in college.
It takes about one year to learn how to learn at a college level. Most people never learned to learn at a college level. They then encourage their children to get the education they never got. They rarely read and talk about intellectual ideas, thereby predisposing their children for low academic achievement.
You should break the pattern. There is no gain in life without some pain.
Based on my extensive observation of student performances on college tests, I recommend the following study time per test:
22 hours for an A or 6 hours per week 16 hours for a B 4 hours per week 14 hours for a C 3.5 hours per week 10 hours for a D 2.5 hours per week 0 hours for an f 0 hours per week
An hour of study is defined as studying for 45 minutes and a break of 15 minutes. Ten hours of continuous study without a break is defined as one hour of study.
The brain does not process and store information the way students prefer studying. Occasionally, some succeed by studying at the last minute, but they are exceptions to the rule. Some people's brain and life experiences reduces the time required to learn particular types of material. In other types of material they have to spend more time to master the material.
Research suggests that the slowest 10 percent of the students may need 5 to 6 times as much time to learn the same material as the fastest 10 percent. Each person is highly likely to have strengths and weaknesses. Overcoming your weakness increases your strength.
In other words, you can succeed if you pay the price necessary for success.
The price of success:
The price is too high you say. Or I would like to succeed but don't have the time. It isn't fair you say.
Life is not fair. Reality is not your parents. There is no free lunch. Anything of value requires great effort. If you pay the price, the price required of you in the future will be less. In the past a college degree has meant about
$100,000 to $250,000 more in a lifetime than no degree. Each college test is worth about $36 per hour of study or $800 over your life.
If you were offered $1,000,000 if you had an A in a college course, could you accomplish the goal? Probably. You do not have to be a genius to graduate from college. You have to work hard, be persistent, and pay attention to details. These traits are ultimately why a college degree is valuable, plus the capacity to learn.
How to get started:
Believe you can succeed. Be willing to pay the price. The price is always what you don't want to pay. Make success in college your number one goal. You cannot have multiple goals. Everything comes in its own season. There is a time to learn; a time to play; and a time to work.
Failure begins in an excuse, a short cut. There is no royal road to learning or achieving excellence.
Do the following without wavering.
Survey:
Before you start your learning task, read over the major headings and summaries of the chapters in the textbook. This gives you a feeling for the whole picture and to what material you should pay attention to while reading the chapters. Research shows that students who do this make higher grades, and this simple step is the most powerful thing you can do.
As you read the material, you must take written notes and underline. Use only the left half of the page. Transfer to the right side of the paper comments your teacher made about the material during lecture. You must always be ahead of your teacher in your reading.
Research shows that the more different ways you present information to the brain the easier it is to learn. In other words hear it, see it, say it, write, practice it, highlight it, quiz it, etc.
Underlining is a skill that must be developed. The tools of underlining should vary based on your preference. Use highlighters or colored pens. I recommend red and blue Flair pens. If you use these, you need a plastic ruler for underlining. Use a drafting plastic triangle and have it cut off at the three ends about one inch each.
Now spray paint the underlining ruler with flat black paint. This reduces or eliminates glare from light when reading and underlining.
At first you should underline approximately 85 percent of material. Later on as your skill increases, you should reduce the material underlined.
Use red and blue Flair pens for underlining important material as you read. Use red for extremely important material or to offset important material, and blue for moderately important material. You should use a pink and yellow highlighter when reading the material a second time.
The process of reading and deciding if the material is important enough to be underlined increases memory for that material. It is the decision and thinking that creates the memory.
It is best to over predict your instructors at first. It is easier to cut back on the material to be learned than to increase the amount to be learned. Use stars to arrange the material in hierarchies of importance. Three stars (***) would be more important than two stars (**).
Using the colors of red and blue, now make 3"x5" cards, putting the vocabulary of the course, long lists of items, experiments, and lecture on the cards. Key words should be written in red. If you have to be different, go with 1"x3" instead of 4"x6". One theory, concept, or vocabulary word per card.
The biggest problem with textbooks and lecture notes is that we cannot separate the material that we know from the material that we do not know. Because of this, we waste hours studying what we already know, rather than concentrating our valuable time on what we do not know.
The red tells your mind that this is extremely important material. Writing the material stores the information in the brain in a way that is not normally used. On the back of the cars is definition about the material on the front. After numbering the cards so you can put them back in order later on, you should start studying the cards until you feel you know the material.
Now then turn the cards over and try and answer your fill in the blanks orally. If you get the questions right, place the material into a "I know this material" stack. Now continue working on the material that you don't know until you can answer the questions on all the cards.
Now reread the material that you underlined in the book. Note that you do not read the material you did not underline. This is why over-prediction is important.
As you reread the chapter, bracket and start the material you believe is extremely important. Sometimes use a yellow highlighter for critical information.
Now reread the material you have bracketed or stored and high speed review the material on the 3"x5" cards.
The more different ways that the material to be learned can be experienced the easier it is to remember the material. If you have time, read the material that you have underlined to a tape recorder. Then play back and listen to the material. Some people are so good at learning by listening that this is the only way they have to study.
Overlearning:
The more you overlearn the material the easier it is to take a test with confidence and in a relaxed manner. In addition, the more you overlearn something, the longer you will remember it.
Special problems:
Some people have reading difficulties. Current research suggests that blue or gray sunglasses may help dyslexic people process and learn to read. Self typing of the material is another way shown to have positive benefits for dyslexics. The key concept is that learning requires work. Good nutrition helps learning. Research suggests that zinc and B vitamins are essential for learning.
TO TOP
Students frequently say, "I did not want to ask a stupid question". There is no such thing as a stupid question. If something is bothering you, you should eliminate it by asking a question about it and get on to other things. The only stupidity is in NOT asking the question and letting some possibly small point interfere with your study and learning. The following questions are not stupid, but are frequently asked. To save time, they are answered here.
1. Do I have to take notes?
Consider the possibilities:
- You have a photographic memory and have total recall of anything you see; then, there is no need to take notes.
- What I [the professor] do in class is done to dazzle and impress you and is not designed in any way to contribute to your understanding of the material; then, sit back, relax, be dazzled and impressed, but don't bother to take notes.
- The premises of '1' and '2' are false; then, take careful, detailed notes that allow you to reconstruct and study what you have been shown in class.
2. Are you going to collect the homework?
No! The purpose of homework is to practice and master the course material. You would not expect to master tennis solely by watching someone else play without practice. I do not need to see your practice work. It will be obvious from your performance on exams whether or not you practice. If you have some difficulty with your practice, I will be happy to look at the problem and help you with it.3. I was not in class. Did you do anything important?
Yes! Let us examine this question from my perspective. There is a limited amount of class time, and I try to use this time as effectively as possible. If I don't consider something important, I do not spend class time on it. Even if I am wrong about its relative importance, I consider all class material to be important. Absence from class as well as coming late and leaving early are detrimental to your success in the course.4. Is this going to be on the exam?
Let us understand the basic rules of the game. It is my job to coerce you into studying all the material I think is important. (This is related to FAQ 3) If I don't consider a topic important, then I don't waste our limited time on it. Therefore anything I spend time on I consider important. It is also my task to determine whether you have learned the material. I do this by giving exams in which I ask a representative set of questions. (I don't have time to ask every possible question.) If you have learned all the important material, you should be able to answer the representative questions. If I tell you in advance which questions are on the exam, it
spoils the surprise (akin to spoiling Xmas)
- tempts you to study only the material on the exam. (As hard as it is to believe, given the opportunity, some less motivated individuals will actually do this.)
- effectively decreases the content of the course.
This amounts to robbing you of the full content of the course for which you paid. I would never do this. To see that you can get your (and the taxpayers') money's worth, I will not disclose the detailed contents of any exam. To do so would cheat you of the full measure of your tuition.
5. Why do I have to learn this? It's so hard and I am NOT a chemistry major!
Just as one swallow does not make a spring, one chemistry course does not make a chemistry major. Further, we might recall the words of Sakini, the interpreter, in the play, "Tea House of the August Moon":
"Pain make man think, Thought make man wise, And wisdom make life endurable."
I am trying to help prepare you for an endurable life!
6. Can we have an open book exam?
(For background, see FAQ 4.) Let us try to understand your request for an open book test. You would like me to ask questions, the answers to which you can copy from the book and submit as your demonstration of learning the material. You effectively want me to evaluate the author's knowledge of the subject and give you his credit. By such reasoning, any Xerox machine should receive an A for the course. Further, this again robs you of the full measure of the course for which you and taxpayers have paid.
7. Can I do a project for extra credit?
Let us understand the situation which frequently prompts this question. Your grades are something less than you would like. This reflects that you are having difficulty with the work already assigned, or haven't done it sufficiently to perform well on exams. You are now asking for still more work to do to get "extra credit" when you haven't gotten the basic credit already provided.
Further implied in the question is that you want me to give you some perfunctory task so that you can get credit that others do not get and thereby better your class standing to the detriment of others. This would be unfair to the others.
I cannot in good conscience make a special arrangement with you to the exclusion of others. I try to incorporate as many credit bearing exercises as possible to give every student ample opportunity of demonstrating to me that the course goals have been met, and that all the material of the course has been learned. To do otherwise would be unfair to other students.
8. Why are your questions different from Professor X?
Neither Professor X nor I are clones of each other. Additionally, at different times, some of my questions are different from other of my questions.
9. Why are you so unreasonable?
Just am.
10. Do you flunk anyone?
No! I do not take credit for the good grades you earn through your hard work and study. Neither do I take responsibility for your failure to do so. Where grades are concerned, I am the bookkeeper in the course, monitoring your progress or lack thereof. As an adult college student, you have the freedom to make the adult decision to study or not to study and to live with the consequences of your adult decision.
TO TOP
All of these many suggestions are potentially useful, but I think that they ignore the single most important activity a student can do in a chemistry course.
I give my students hundreds of problems (literally) every semester. Informal querying tells me that there is a high correlation between working all of the problems and doing well on exams.
If a student can do the problems, they have probably mastered the material, regardless of whether or not they have read it, made index cards, highlighted or whatever. If we are going to give exams, perhaps students should practice by answering questions and solving problems that they will encounter on exams. I presume that everyone out there is more likely to put an actual problem such as "Explain why reaction A is faster than reaction B" on an exam rather than a question that goes something like, "Describe each of the following chemical concepts as extremely important, important; or moderately important." If you have given then appropriate questions, they will at least intuitively figure out what are the most important concepts.
To paraphrase the wonderful foreword to students from the Solutions Manual to Wade's organic text: (my apologies to the author, but I don't have my copy with me ) "Are you a genius? Do you routinely rank in the top 1% of your clases while studying less than an hour a week? If not, do the problems! Do all of the problems. If you do half of the problems, you will be half-prepared."
I also note little emphasis on class notes, and a lot of emphasis on studying from the text. I advise my students to do the opposite because I will be writing their exams, not the author of their textbook. Obviously, the quality of student class notes often leads much to be desired, but we can help them by teaching them to take better notes. I routinely walk up to students in lab, or before and after class, or in my office, and ask them to show me their class notes and then go over the notes with a group of students. Surely the point of taking a course is that a student can learn more from the instructor than from simply buying the book and "studying". There are some very good texts out there but no text can adapt itself to different students and situations; an instructor can. I like to think that I explain things much better than whatever text I'm using because I have the advantages of knowing more than the text discusses, of having many other texts (and other sources) to look at and "pirate" explanations from, of knowing my students and how they learn, and of being able to try out different explanations on colleagues and present students and former students. And, if none of these is fruitful, I can use the text's explanations in class and therefore my worst scenario is being as good at explaining something as the text is.
I am very leery about giving my students a handout like this [RONALD BLUE'S]. Many students tend to treat anything from an instructor as gospel. Consequently a handout with absolute edicts, such as "you must underline" or "at first you should underline approximately 85% of the material" (no matter if you've given them a general disclaimer elsewhere), is going to make students for whom these precise instructions don't work feel that they're stupid when they are not when the problem is simply that this prescribed technique doesn't work for them.
Finally, I can't resist stating that I'm not a big fan of indelibly underlining and highlighting. Once you've done this, you can't change how you look at that section of a text and I suggest margin notes in pencil. My most effective solution for students who tell me that they can't understand a paragraph or section in the text and then show me a page so colored over that it strobes at me, is to send them away with a photocopy of the page form my unadorned text. It works surprisingly often!
TO TOP
Teachers used to feed me that line about there being no such thing as a stupid question. I knew it was bunk ever since the 4th grade when David Martineau asked "...So why didn't Columbus just pull out an Atlas and see that there was this big continent in the way?"
These are questions that people actually asked of Park Rangers around the country, proving once again that there is no known limit to the depts of human stupidity. (Source: Outside Magazine, May 1995, pp. 120-121)
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