You all realize how each day of your routine study empowers you in achieving an excellent result and the role of teachers towards that end. Furthermore, let’s develop effective tools of understanding, underlining and learning.
- Unleashing the power of association:
Human memory works on the principle of association. A new piece of information has a high probability of being memorized if it can, in some way, be associated with the stock of information already present in the brain. Once internalized, this newly learnt information will allow newer pieces of information to be associated with itself and consequently, learning expands.
This is where the technique of drawing a Mindmap or a Tree Structure helps us. It not only helps us to identify the landmark topics in a chapter, but also helps to associate one topic with another in a coherent manner.
So, the prescription here is that before you start detailed reading of a chapter, you should first skim through it to identify and enlist the landmark topics contained in it. These topics, once logically arranged, present the most effective tool of learning - the Mind Map (or the Tree Structure). It has potential to serve as an axis of understanding the chapter, learning it and also of a last-minute revision before the exam.
- The art of underlining:
To make your underlining purposeful, you need to inculcate alacrity or gameness of an amateur fisherwoman. With a fishing rod submerged in water, she's keenly observant of the slightest movement and at first notice of it, briskly pulls out the rope along with the catch.
Similarly, as a reader you must discerningly read the text and as soon as you discover a valuable point (one that adds a new dimension to the topic), you must immediately highlight the same. This way, in subsequent readings, you need not loathfully trail behind each and every word. Rather tracing the underlined portion, you can enthusiastically hop from one value point to another.
If effectively underlining is made the starter of your learning expedition, miraculous results are sure to follow!
- Effective learning technique:
The golden rule of learning is - ‘We learn by repetition’.
By mindfully (and not mindlessly) repeating the content once, twice, thrice or even more number of times, we would eventually learn the content - once and for all!
We do not have any ‘universal constant’ for the ideal number of repetitions that facilitate learning. It varies from student to student. Moreover, different topics may require different repetitions for the same student.
So how do we know that the content is internalized and requires no more repetition?
Here goes a simple test - You will be woken up from your slumber in the middle of a night and will be required to answer a question. Without rubbing your eyes if you're able to enlist all the details right the very first time, it is certified that you've learnt the content!
The moral of the story is that it is by recalling that we can test our learning. Recalling unearths pockets of ignorance or tentativeness in our learning which can be individually worked upon for a perfect take.
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It is said that success involves 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I hope that this blog provides you the inspiration required for embarking on the laborious yet rewarding journey of academic excellence!
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