Test taking strategies, the reality. make good choices. knowing yourself is key, both in studying and test taking. Obviously, we all have our own unique personalities, pension for anxiety, methods of study. And so just knowing yourself and being honest with yourself about what you can achieve how you need to achieve it sort of lays the groundwork for preparation. Repetition is key.

You want to be active when you study your memories dynamic. And when you're actually recalling information, you're causing neuronal changes inside your brain. And so, a piece of information is ingrained in the fabric of your brain. By incorporating different factors such as, location, sense smell, a variety of things are laid down with a specific memory in so by By actively recalling pieces of information, your brain learns to triangulate and locate this information and pull it out when you need it. And that's very helpful. Put away the highlighter.

I've worked with students over the years that have essentially an army of highlighters, and you can hear them squeaking away during lectures, they're highlighting and re highlighting the same thing they highlighted. Coloring a word is not an effective way to ingrain that into the fabric of your memory. It may be useful to highlight some key concepts in a large volume of material. But once that's done, put away the highlighter and focus on actively learning the material, not coloring it. Read carefully. rereading an entire chapter.

Entire textbook is overkill for a lot of people. There are certain facts and pieces that you may want to reread and highlight but just simply rereading them from color to color and coloring them and underlining them again, is not an efficient way to learn and it doesn't really involve an active type of learning and active phase of learning. And we'll get into more of that in a bit. But you want to be active. This is the really the best way for you to improve your understanding and recall of material you're laying down as I mentioned before the the neural connections that all allow your brain to retrieve information from the long term memory, which is where you want to store it. This is opposed to just cramming, which is particularly just putting information in the short term and doesn't really create any real significant level of learning.

So what to study. This is often a challenging questions for students when they're faced with large volumes of information. Ask, you can ask the instructor you can ask other students, you can ask a teaching assistant, so don't hesitate just to to ask for help and explore there. Maybe some old tests out there, which, you know, if your institution doesn't frown upon that you can get to have an idea, not only the material that was was covered in the in the section that you're preparing for, but also you'll have a pretty good handle on how that instructor rice questions, how they formulate answers. And by seeing the question choices, you'll have a pretty good idea about how they try and trip you up and cause you to, you know, choose the wrong answer. But a word of caution there, beware of studying for the last exam, and what I mean by that is, don't necessarily memorize an old exam.

Certainly you may find some information that's very helpful. But if you're just purely memorizing answer choices, be aware that you are preparing for an exam that was given a year or maybe even several years prior, which can be a recipe for failure. organizing your mind sort of the functional way memory is organized falls into three Sort of methods or strategies or categories, there's the basics and definitions of a concept. There's a central core concepts which are critical to understanding processing, and being able to successfully apply and recall memory and facts, and then the application of that. And so we'll cover all these in detail. basics and definition.

This is just basically simple recognition of memorization. You're just taking facts and putting them in your memory and trying to associate them with other facts, grouping things into clusters. And the use of mnemonics here is particularly helpful with this, this initial groundwork, part of the process of memory. Moving on to the central core concepts. This is where you really kind of hone the long term memory being able to explain meanings and concepts and how they're used. It creates a Cross linkage between different facts and different parts of your brain that allows you to effectively recall concepts and facts and information when you need it.

By being able to explain how a particular fact is used or how a mechanism works. Just being able to explain in your own words goes a long way to solidifying your learning. The practice of recalling concepts helps you to find other related concepts basically, you're establishing connections to other concepts. By cross linking all these together, it really creates the fabric of, of long term sustained learning. You can reconstruct various parts by knowing one fact. For example, you might know you know the general formula for a particular problem, but not really Call the others.

But by knowing that your brain will be able to triangulate and find those related formulas, those related facts and pull them out, diagrams and tables and pictures are particularly helpful in this, this setting, creating a variety of ways to learn not only just reading the Word, but saying the concept aloud, rephrasing it yourself, looking at a pictorial or graphic representation of that concept. Using a variety of modalities and senses to learn goes a long way to solidifying long term memory. Being able to to elaborate on how things fit together really is key here. And lastly, the application This is probably the most often overlooked part of learning and test taking. It applies more to to things that require a deeper level of processing. There's a formula or concept related to physics or mathematics or biology, as opposed to just recalling a number or date in history, it's often overlooked because it's time consuming and sometimes tedious.

What happens here is by applying a concept to actually proving to yourself that you understand the concept, working through a sample problem working through a set of questions that require the application of that knowledge is a key element for success. This tests your reasoning ability, your understanding of the concept, and the final task is choosing choosing the correct answer, which is what this course is all about choosing the correct test, answer and so by practicing using practice exams, practice questions or working through formulas, just creating your own problems, you will solidify your your learning in your ability this is really the hardest hardest stage of preparation but it's very central in Key to moving to the next level of academic success. A little bit about studying, organizing your space itself. It's quite evident that most people don't learn as well in a sort of chaotic and stressful environment.

By that I mean sitting at a desk that's covered with paper, in distractions and in debris. Oftentimes, will will pull part of the attention and focus away from the task at hand. Put your cell phone in your in your backpack or bookbag turn it off, just give yourself the benefit of the doubt give yourself an hour to focus on the task at hand. an hour is is documented for variety of reasons it's been proven scientifically, that most people can compartmentalize their efforts into blocks that can with practice, maybe stretch out to 90 minutes but most people cannot concentrate effectively for more than an hour. So take breaks and the key here with breaks is finally On called anchoring. And so, it's been shown that learners remember things at the beginning and at the end of study blocks more effectively than things at the middle.

And this is partly just because of how our memories are formed. But every hour, take a break, take a 1015 minute break. And if you need to take a break before then that's fine. Give yourself give yourself permission. Get up, walk around, have something to drink, you know, stretch, do a few sit ups or push ups whatever you want just something to to interrupt the process and allow you to have more anchor points or bookmarks if you will, at the beginning and at the end. Identify your weaknesses.

Find out where your most weak in a particular subject and develop a strategy to address that. Read carefully talked about this in the previous section about reading and rereading. If you don't get a concept you Can reread the section if you still don't get at that point you might want to ask for help. That's part one. Part two is rereading. Don't waste your time, rereading entire textbooks and entire sections.

Limit your sources, find a few good sources and stick with them. I've seen several students get into trouble when they've picked four or five different sources for the same material. It's been all their time reading material that's already been covered in a previous source. I think multiple sources may be helpful for particularly complex or confusing subjects. But for the most part, one or two resources is probably enough. And I would suggest just picking one main source to review for subject.

If you're trying to master a bunch of books and sources, it's really time consuming and you're sort of shooting yourself in the foot. So effectiveness hacks active learning, I mentioned this before active learning is actually participating in the learning. It's not just reading your notes, reading the textbook, or listening to a lecture mindlessly and hoping that some of that information is laid down in your long term memory, some of the will. But if you're active, that's the most effective way, and most efficient way to get the most bang for your buck, getting the most learning in putting it into the long term in the short amount of time. It's about being efficient and not about time. It's not about brute force, hours and hours and hours of study for something that could have been accomplished in a single one hour study block.

And so that might be hard for some of you to conceptualize, because a lot of us were brought up with the notion that, you know, studying it just takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of repetition, and that's partly true. But don't confuse reading and rereading your notes is active learning. posing questions to yourself is a valuable way to make sure you understand the information. And by rephrasing a concept or topic, it creates a different memory inside your brain. So not only are you getting the initial concept when you read it in your textbook or your notes, also the concept in the memory of when the instructor or professor presented in class, and then subsequently, you're rephrasing it, and proving to yourself that you know the information. So in essence, you have a single topic that you've already hit three different ways.

An effective method is to use index cards to take some key notes, or maybe even write down a few key questions that you can later quiz yourself on. By restating the concept, it really improves your long term memory and recognition, charts, graphs and pictures. This again is triggering a different memory different part of your vision. cortex by looking at a graphical representation of a concept, just added another method of recall, you may not recall the professor talking about it in class, you may not recall looking at it in your notes, but you might recall the graphical representation you found in a source. And that may help you get the few extra points you're looking for on the exam. multiple choice questions, these are the most common types of questions asked throughout all exams.

And talk a little bit more about this in the individual question types in a lecture all by itself, but one of the key points about multiple choice questions is they're often looking for the key differentiating feature of a group of related facts. And so you can use that information when you're studying instead of learning every particular nuance about a particular type of butterfly, so to speak in biology realm, you may want to cluster together a group of related insects, their geographic distribution, their lifecycle, their molting patterns, whatever. And when you're presented with a group of facts on a multiple choice question, you'll be able to recall the features that actually differentiate one from the other as opposed to every little nuance. Don't get hung up on the answers. I put DDD here is had a number of students over the years just out think themselves. Yes, exam questioners are supposed to have a roughly equal distribution of test answers.

But as a question writer myself, sometimes you create a block of questions and the answers are all D or E or B. And so when students see that they've picked five questions with the answer D on a test They get freaked out and panic and sometimes just randomly change one at the end or even during the process of answering the question because they just cannot conceptualize in their mind that, that all the correct answers could be D. And so just ignore that just move on. Group studying. Studying as a group is an effective way to, you know, move on to a higher level of learning. It's sort of the herd mentality. It's not a brag fest.

It's not a situation where you're trying to show everybody what you know, it's to really define gaps in your knowledge by asking each other questions and concepts. It will become crystal clear whether or not you have a firm grasp on the material you are studying. And it's very valuable to reinforce concepts. Planning, your study sessions is key. You want to map out your study sessions and certainly include some time to devote to concepts that you were particularly weak at some of those weaknesses that you identified early. On in the learning and studying process, make sure to devote some time to that and distribute your materials throughout.

Don't just plan on cramming it all into one session, you're not going to lay down the long term memories that you want for test success and review regular. We know from a scientific basis that the more exposure you have to material, the more likely you are to form long term memory and to be able to recall it. And again once want to reiterate this point, again, avoid simply rereading, just sitting mindlessly and rereading your notes four or five times is a bit of a time waster and it's not an active learning process. You can be much more effective and much more efficient in get the information you want and answer more questions correctly by actively participating in the study process. I hope that makes sense. Use practice questions.

When you finish a question, set a practice question. Know why you got it right or why you got it wrong? Did you misread the stem? Did you miss read the one of the answer choices? Or did you just not have a grasp of the concepts presented or the material required to answer the test that'll have a significant bearing and can direct you back to what you need to study and refocus on. timing of practice questions is key.

Certainly, there are pre tests and post tests. But really the best use of your time is to study first and then take the practice questions. If you take the practice, practice questions first, and you happen to guess right a bunch of times you may interpret that falsely as mastery of the subject material presented. And so a better use of your time is to study make sure that you have a decent grasp of the material and then take a practice test. memorizing unused questions. That's a waste of time.

Don't take a practice test and sit down and try and just memorize the answers and hope that that's what's going to be tested. That's a waste of your time and it doesn't really solidify any mastery or knowledge of the concept presented. later than sooner This is around goes around to the timing of practice tests. Again, don't don't take a bunch of time at the beginning of your study session to work through practice questions. It's really not effective and it's it's a waste of time. And it can be discouraging, you might do poorly and think, wow, I really I really stink at this material.

I'm not gonna get it. Or it might give you a false sense of confidence. Test knowledge versus learning. The key here is learning you're trying to learn the material so that you can recall it in a variety of formats when it's time for the exam. That's key. Just knowing the correct answer to a question doesn't necessarily guessing the correct answer doesn't necessarily mean that you have the knowledge.

I would discourage using practice tests as study methods. Some people will work through a practice test, and then go back and look at the answers and try and just memorize them and associate them with the stem of the question. That's a little bit, maybe a little bit confusing the way I worded it there, but it's a better use of your time to learn the concept behind the question as opposed to just memorizing the answer given in the the sample test or sample question. Because that may not even be a choice on the real exam. And it doesn't really guarantee that you have any, any mastery of the topic at hand. So that wraps up the section.

I think they'll probably some questions about the material I presented. I've got a lot more data on that. Just wanted to try and keep it the more simple and straightforward and we're going to move on into the different types of questions, how to tease apart what is actually being asked and to help you pick the right answer. Even if you know nothing about the topic