Releasing your inner reading potential and Quick Tip #2 (Effective Studying)

If you’re a student and you’ve at least made it through your high school education, you probably think you know how to read and study by now. But are you doing it in the most time-effective and purposeful manner?

One issue many people have is lack of preparation for a reading. To retain the most knowledge while reading, you need to put yourself in the right mindset before beginning. First, remove all distractions from your environment. Next, realize how the reading your doing actually fits into the material your currently learning; this will help to create connections to past materials while you read, which in result will boost your retention rate. Finally, identify the type of reading you’re doing and realize it’s strengths and weaknesses. For instance, traditional reading (as opposed to online) poses the benefit of almost always being reliable by virtue of being published, but limits how you can learn the material to a very linear path. On the other hand, online reading allows you to learn on your own non-sequential path in order to make immediate connections between the reading and other sources that can further supplement the material.

During and after the reading, focus on identifying and jotting down main ideas, and your comments/reactions to these ideas. This will help you later to recall main ideas and chapters without having to dive into the reading entirely again.

Quick Tip (#2) Effective Studying

Being an active learner meanings getting creative with how you process and organize ideas. One way to be an active learner is to create your own study tools: the act of making something helps you to learn it more effectively by allowing you to demonstrate your own relations among learned concepts. Here are some cool tools you can utilize in aiding your studies:

1) Infographics

2) Timelines

3) Mind Maps

4) Presentations

5) Animations