Study Obstacles: What to Do When Nothing Seems to Stick

Maybe you've dealt with all the issues I mentioned in my article on obstacles to studying effectively, namely fatigue, hastily prepared reviewers, lacking energy, or lousy revision space, but you're still struggling with remembering everything you study?

One of the worst feelings in the world is suspecting that you're wasting your time. This feeling might creep up to you one early morning study binge, and you might just thing "what am I doing?." It has happened to me, and it is scary.

If you have spent hours re-reading material, but nothing seems to stick, you may be revising for revision's sake. GOAL. Remember, the goal to reviewing is to re-learn something. At the very least, it's to find something you missed the first time.

Here is one thing you can do to overcome obstacles to studying effectively: add value to the things you memorize. Here are two strategies to do just that.

1. Never underestimate the idea of ENRICHMENT.

Enrichment means adding value to something. The idea is to take what you already know and enrich it. You don't need to keep repeating something over and over a.k.a. rote learning, though there is nothing wrong with that if it has worked for you thus far, but the problem is that memorization alone doesn't add value. Those are words related to your subject matter, but their meanings are vague.

Enriching what you already learned means finding examples that are relevant to the current times. If you're taking a refresher course and retaking an exam that you took a long, long time ago, the examples and nature of related cases may have changed in the last couple of years.

Read about them. Search examples on youtube. Interview people who you know have experienced this. Write to your professors and ask for anecdotes about the time they put theoretical knowledge into practice. Whatever examples you collect will only help you understand, ans most of all, REMEMBER the things you are reviewing.

This also applies to hard concepts that you don't udnerstand, which was probably why you simply resorted to memorization in the first place (again, no judgement here... i do that a lot).

2. Let the new ideas SIMMER

After you've collected your examples and related them to the theories you've been ruminating for a long time, you have to allot time to let everything blend together. You cannot skip this part, which is why applying time management concepts are crucial to revision and why putting off studying until the last minute could hurt your chances of ranking high.

Pacing up and down your hallway while you let your thoughts brew, taking a walk, lying in bed or the sofa just reflecting... these errands aren't lazy. They're for settling your mind, so that you can wrap your mental arms around the new ideas you just inputted.

The best thing to do would be to make notes regarding your realizations, which is why you must have a revision notebook. If you're like me, you probably have several notebooks that you're reserving for a special thing. THIS is that special thing. It's like creating a study diary.

Hope these work for you!

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Ruby Galvez, RL

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