Studying Strategy

After completing the time management exercise and reading the studying guide, I reflected on my studying behavior that used for preparing the exams. I recognized that I have wasted a great amount of time because of poor time management, which requires me to spend extra time on reviewing.

The time wasters exercise analyzes the reason and solution of those of my biggest time waster. I realized that I spent too much time on technical devices to distract myself from studying. Smartphone is the biggest reason that led me to low productivity on studying. While I was doing an assignment or preparing for exam, I usually kept my phone in front of me, thus a single message could distract my attention. Game, Facebook, Instagram and such applications in the smartphone distracted me from studying as well. Sometimes, I will even watch the drama when I was tired of studying. Even though they are great entertainments for relaxation, spending too much time on it during studying usually result in a waste of time for one to two hours. In order to improve the problem of distraction, it is important to manage my time wisely and learn to control myself. I also find that I need to turn off my phone when I am working on my school work so that I will not be distracted by messages and games.

As a freshman, the studying guide allows me to adjust my studying strategy from high school to university. Before, I only adopted the rote memorization as my studying strategy because all I had to do was to memorize and understand. However, as mentioned in the guide, it took me a lot of time to absorb all the knowledge. Besides, I could easily miss the points when I was distracted by others. The studying guide provides a lot of information for me to recognize my studying weakness and adopt to different learning strategies under different circumstances. Personally, I found that “explain what you are studying” and “integrate information presented in text with information presented in figures and diagrams” are two of the most useful strategies for me. In some subjects such as Economics, it is more straightforward for me to clarify the concept through a model or graph because the Economics graph or model enables to explain the theory and apply to the similar cases in the real world. “Explain what you are studying” requires more understanding than memorizing all the concepts. More importantly, it helps me to reflect on my studying after a period time of studying. Since there is a break for me to reflect and adjust, I am able to make sure that I fully understand the concept before moving on to the next topic.

Studying in the university is totally different from studying in high school. There are more workload in the university, which requires more than one studying strategies in order to study well. In short, throughout this activity, I have learned to adopt to more suitable studying strategies, those strategies allows me to plan towards my goal — to achieve at least 3.5 of GPA by the end of the semester.

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