Posts Tagged ‘study’

What Storytellers Can Teach You About How to Learn Faster

Storytelling is a demanding craft. Not only do you have to be able to write or perform the story accurately, you need to create vivid descriptions. Boring, complex or difficult to understand metaphors can turn an imaginative journey into a lifeless plot.

You may not think of it deliberately, but learning is very similar to storytelling. You need to give yourself vivid, memorable and emotionally descriptions… » Continue

January 3 2008 | By Scott H | Tagged: brain, grades, holistic, improvement, learning, mental, metaphor, Productivity, study, thinking | 21 comments»

Why Your Classes are Boring

Does your textbook make your eyes glaze over? Is the desire for a degree or diploma the only thing keeping you focused on your classes? I’ll admit the lecture format most schools use to teach material isn’t the best way to hold your attention. But I think there is a more important factor when deciding if classes keep you interested:

Are you actually using the information you’re… » Continue

December 4 2007 | By Scott H | Tagged: boring, class, college, learning, Lifehack, Productivity, school, study, university | 20 comments»

Study Tip: How to Find the Hidden Bias in a Test

Life isn’t fair. Why should tests be?

Virtually all tests have have hidden biases. These biases aren’t usually large and most instructors will do their best to minimize it. However, knowing the bias of a test can be an added tool for allocating study time.

What is a Testing Bias?

Testing bias is when a test favors students who understand particular concepts or have particular types of knowledge… » Continue

November 22 2007 | By Scott H | Tagged: bias, exam, hack, learning, school, study, test | 16 comments»

Study Tip: Why Aiming for A is Better Than A+

Is it better to get an A or an A+? Most people instinctively react with an A+. As I’d like to show in this article, that isn’t always the case. Being perfect can cost far more than good enough. Also, as I’d like to demonstrate, the habits that might get you an A+ might also leave you with a B or C if you fail… » Continue

November 20 2007 | By Scott H | Tagged: 80/20, learning, Lifehack, pareto, Productivity, students, study, university | 14 comments»

How to Study Less by Learning Things Once

You read over your notes. Then you read them over again. Then you read them over a third time. Then you take the test and are surprised at just how much you missed. Despite reading everything three times!

A lot of study time is wasted because of one problem: you fail to learn things the first time around.

Repeatedly going over the same information like putting a… » Continue

November 15 2007 | By Scott H | Tagged: holistic, ideas, learning, school, study | 21 comments»

How to Improve Your Spelling Skills

Fair or not, your spelling skills are used throughout your life to evaluate you as a person. Several months ago, the results of a study of Fortune 500 human resource employees were published, saying that of the people they had interviewed, some 85% threw away a resume or cover letter that had as little as one or two spelling errors. The logic was, if you didn’t care… » Continue

November 7 2007 | By Dustin | Tagged: learning, mnemonic, spelling, student, study, writing | 20 comments»

7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make

The brain isn’t a flawless piece of machinery. Although it is powerful and comes in an easy to carry container, it has it’s weaknesses. A field in psychology which studies these errors, known as biases. Although you can’t upgrade your mental hardware, noticing these biases can clue you into possible mistakes.

How Bias Hurts You

If you were in a canoe, you’d probably want to know about any… » Continue

September 11 2007 | By Scott H | Tagged: bias, brain, decide, heuristic, learn, Lifehack, logic, mental, study, think, thinking | 88 comments»

Advice for Students: Use a Wiki for Better Note-Taking

It’s back to school time, and it’s time to make good on the promises you made yourself last year to be more organized this time around! One of the stumbling blocks I see most often in my students is taking — and keeping — good notes for their classes. Ideally, you’d like to have notes on all your reading, as well as notes from lectures, and you’d like… » Continue

August 22 2007 | By Dustin | Tagged: notes, notetaking, students, study, studying, tool, web, web2.0, webtools, wiki | 40 comments»

How to Choose a Private High School

7 Key Questions to Answer
My brother’s son is in fifth grade and is starting to think about which high school is “right” for their family. In today’s private school market, the process of choosing the school that fits your family’s needs and style is nothing short of an art-form. Fortunately, this medium can be learned by just about anyone.

What’s your motivation for a private school education?… » Continue

August 14 2007 | By Mike | Tagged: children, education, life, school, study | 7 comments»

15 Steps to Cultivate Lifelong Learning

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” - Marcel Proust“I don’t think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.” - Abraham Lincoln

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” - Mark Twain
Assuming the public school system hasn’t crushed your soul, learning is a great activity… » Continue

July 31 2007 | By Scott H | Tagged: book, intuition, learning, study, thinking | 30 comments»

10 Tips to Study Smart and Save Time

I recently got my marks back from University. My grade point average was a 4.2 out of a possible 4.5, resting between an A and a perfect A+. In itself, this isn’t an incredible achievement. But I managed to do this while spending only a fraction of the time studying than many of the people I knew.

Is it just natural talent? Perhaps. I’ve always… » Continue

July 5 2007 | By Scott H | Tagged: learning, study | 34 comments»

Advice for students: New year’s resolutions

People in academic life, teachers and students alike, get a curious bonus — while everyone else trudges from January to December, we have a chance to begin anew with each semester, term, or quarter. In a wonderful passage from his autobiographyThe Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Thomas Merton evokes the feeling of possibility on a college campus when everything is about to begin again:October is a fine and dangerous season in… » Continue

August 18 2006 | By Leon | Tagged: resolution, study | no comments»

Conditions for Learning

If you want learning to work for you, you must create the conditions in which exploration can take place and discoveries can be made. It’s very clear what these are. Without them, all your efforts to learn and grown will be in vain. » Continue

May 21 2006 | By Adrian | Tagged: achievement, breakthrough, competence, creativity, education, learn, learning, motivation, student, study, studying, thinking, train, training | 4 comments»

How to take lecture notes

For students: Taking good notes in lecture is your initial step to learn and prepare for your exam and assignments in school. wikiHow has an extensive how-to on preparing yourself to take notes, and also how to revise them. It has some quick tips as well:

# Collect notes for each course in one place, in a separate notebook or section of a notebook.
# Write notes on one side of… » Continue

May 16 2006 | By Leon | Tagged: notes, study | no comments»

Free Online Version of How People Learn

It is a great found that the book How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School has a free online version! The book has some great research and concepts of learning, such as memory and its structure, analysis and reasoning, self-regulatory capabilities, community participation and so on.

Learning is a basic, adaptive function of humans. More than any other species, people are designed to be flexible learners… » Continue

February 16 2006 | By Leon | Tagged: brain, learning, study | 2 comments»