Study skills or study strategies are approaches applied to learning. Study skills are an array of skills which tackle the process of organizing and taking in new information, retaining information, or dealing with assessments. They are discrete techniques that can be learned, usually in a short time, and applied to all or most fields of study. More broadly, any skill which boosts a person's ability to study, retain and recall information which assists in and passing exams can be termed a study skill, and this could include time management and motivational techniques.
Some examples are mnemonics, which aid the retention of lists of information; effective reading; concentration techniques; and efficient note taking.
Due to the generic nature of study skills, they must, therefore, be distinguished from strategies that are specific to a particular field of study (e.g. music or technology), and from abilities inherent in the student, such as aspects of intelligence or learning styles. It is crucial in this, however, for students to gain initial insight into their habitual approaches to study, so they may better understand the dynamics and personal resistances to learning new techniques.
Historical context
Study skills are generally critical to success in school, considered essential for acquiring good grades, and useful for learning throughout one's life. While often left up to the student and their support network, study skills are increasingly taught at the high school and university level.
The term study skills is used for general approaches to learning, skills for specific courses of study. There are many theoretical works on the subject, including a vast number of popular books and websites. Manuals for students have been published since the 1940s.
In the 1950s and 1960s, college instructors in the fields of psychology and the study of education used to research, theory, and experience with their own students in writing manuals. Marvin Cohn based the advice for parents in his 1978 book Helping Your Teen-Age Student on his experience as a researcher and head of a university reading clinic that tutored teenagers and young adults. In 1986, when Dr. Gary Gruber’s Essential Guide to Test Taking for Kids was first published, the author had written 22 books on taking standardized tests. A work in two volumes, one for upper elementary grades and the other for middle school, the Guide has methods for taking tests and completing schoolwork.
Types
Rehearsal and rote learning
Memorization is the process of committing something to memory, often by rote. The act of memorization is often a deliberate mental process undertaken in order to store information in one's memory for later recall. This information can be experiences, names, appointments, addresses, telephone numbers, lists, stories, poems, pictures, maps, diagrams, facts, music or other visual, auditory, or tactical information. Memorization may also refer to the process of storing particular data into the memory of a device. One of the most basic approaches to learning any information is simply to repeat it by rote. Typically this will include reading over notes or a textbook and re-writing notes.
The weakness of rote learning is that it implies a passive reading and listening style. Educators such as John Dewey have argued that students need to learn critical thinking – questioning and weighing up evidence as they learn. This can be done during lectures or when reading books.
Reading and listening
A method that is useful during the first interaction with the subject of study is REAP method. This method helps students to improve their understanding of the text and bridge the idea with that of the author's. REAP is an acronym for Read, Encode, Annotate and Ponder.
Read: Reading a section to discern the idea. Encode: Paraphrasing the idea from the author's perspective to the student's own words. Annotate: Annotating the section with critical understanding and other relevant notes. Ponder: To ponder about what they read through thinking, discussing with others and reading related materials. Thus it allows the possibility of elaboration and fulfillment of zone of proximal development.
Annotating and Encoding helps reprocess content into concise and coherent knowledge which adds to a meaningful symbolic fund of knowledge. Precise annotation, Organizing question annotation, Intentional annotation, and Probe annotation are some of the annotation methods used.