It is believed that education is crucial not only to the progress of the individual but also to the development of society. In order to do better in one area than others, people need to find ways to improve their learning efficiency.
In the process of learning, we often face a lot of confusions: Why other students can study hard, but I am always sleepy and have no motivation to learn? Why do I remember these points clearly when reviewing but can’t remember them when taking the exam? Why do I study hard and do exercises every day, but my grades never go up? Why can’t I concentrate on my study? As a student, when there is a problem with the learning system and it is impossible for them to obtain happiness and satisfaction of their own sense of value through grades, a variety of psychological problems will occur. So today I’m going to give you a scientific answer to these questions so that I can fundamentally improve your learning efficiency and allow you to study strategically.
First of all, learning is a long process, in such a process, many people will feel tired, want to give up. So, one of the things that’s really important is motivation. Motivation is a force that pushes you forward. It will not reduce the difficulties you are going to deal with, but it will make you more confident in facing them. There are two kinds of motivation, intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation is the type of motivation comes from inside of yourself. For example, if you are asked to finish a task which you are not interested with, you may feel bored and tired during the process. However, if you are curious about something, it will be much easier for you to learn. And you will feel encouraging all the time. Extrinsic motivation is the type of motivation comes from external factors. For example, although you do not care about the middle east economy at all, you will still be willing to do researches about it if your professor promises you an A grade after you finish your work. The source of these two types of motivation are different, but they lead to the same result- To make you finish your job successfully.
So, how can we increase our motivation? I will show you the easiest way. As a college student, we all know that our parents need to spend a lot of money to pay for our tuition fee. According to data from US news, during 2019 to 2020, the average tuition fees of in-state public college is $10,116. For out-state public college is $22,577. And for international students, they need to pay more than that.
We can calculate that each class you take is worth thousands of dollars. You will lose hundreds dollar if you skip school for a day. Is this data strong enough to motivate you to attend every class?
If money cannot motivate you, you can try to set up a goal. Goal is really helpful when you feel meaningful to do something. It is an intrinsic motivation. According to Locke and Latham, who do research on goal setting, there are four main reasons to explain the process.
- Goals direct your attention to the task at hand. Goals help you concentrate on your current task and directly pull you back to it if you get distracted.
- Goals mobilize effort. Goals can encourage you to work hard so that you can finish the assignments.
- Goals increase persistence. Goals keep you from getting frustrated when the task becomes harder and harder.
- Goals promote the development of new strategies when old strategies fall short. Goals can help you assess your learning methods and study status. Once you feel that you are not using the right strategy, goals will help you improve the strategy to increase your learning efficiency.
If you can set a goal for yourself, you will not be afraid of difficulties and succeed in completing the task which could easily lead you to a good grade.
Now you are motivated, you are willing to learn, and you are not afraid of difficulties. However, these things cannot guarantee you an A grade. You need to learn how to memory things. If you do not know what information processing model is, I am willing to explain it to you. Memory is very complex and can be divided into several levels. “The first level is sensory memory. The second level is short-term memory (STM). The last level is long-term memory (LTM)” (L. E. Bourne, 1986). And in order to turn your sensory memory and short-term memory to long-term memory, you need to do it step by step.
The first step is encoding. In this process, you need to make information meaningful to you. For example, when you first see a tiger, how do you remember what it looks like? You may first find something you are familiar with and connect it to the tiger. Everyone knows cats. So, you can remember a tiger as a big cat. That is the way to encoding your memory and turn them into your short-term memory.
Then you need to store your memory. This is a very important step since it directly determines whether you can turn short-term memory into long-term memory or not. You may ask how can I do the storing? Actually, it’s your choice. You can remember it by using all kinds of learning strategies you are used to. The strategies may be different. However, they all have one thing in common. As long as you work on it really hard, you can remember it. The more work you did on it, the bigger possibility for you to remember it.
The last thing you need to do is retrieving information. When you have a lot of long-term memory, you have to make them come alive. You need to try to use your long-term memory to remember more things. Like what I said before, although you can remember a tiger as a big cat, what if you don’t know what a cat is? See? Cat is in your long-term memory so that you can use it to remember other things. After you learn the skill of retrieving information, you will become more and more knowledgeable. It’s a complete circle. As long as you can understand the principle of memory, it is easy for you to remember knowledge firmly.
To have a great academic performance, the last step is improving concentration. Almost everyone would have an experience that it is the easiest to get distracted at first a few minutes when we are trying to concentrate on something. But we will be more and more focused over time. Do you know why? Anne Bradley has divided concentration into three levels: light, moderate, and deep.
When we just sit down and pick up a book, we are at the first level, light concentration level. It will last 5 minutes. At this level, we could be easily distracted. Something like bird outside the window, footsteps in the corridor and so on are our biggest problem. Because Anderson found that you can only pay attention to one cognitively demanding task (one that requires thinking) at a time.
However, as long as we enter the next 5 minutes, we have much more chance to concentrate. At the level of moderate concentration, we may feel that we are not that easily distracted. We begin to focus on the tasks. The birds outside and footsteps in the corridor will disappear. At last, we will enter the final level, deep concentration. We will be super-efficient and focused in this period. We will care about nothing but the tasks we need to do. So, when you decide to give up something, you can try to ask yourself to do it for a few more minutes. Once you could enter the deep concentration level, nothing could stop you.
Education is an important factor both for individuals and for society. Only if students master the efficient learning strategies, they can make more contributions after they enter the society. But not only students need to study, everybody needs to study, too. When you are trying to do a job which you are not willing to do, give yourself some motivations, set a goal, use your experience and be concentrate. You will receive success!