High School > Language Arts > Study Skills Videos
High school life certainly involves a lot of studying. Students have this uncanny ability to juggle so many different subjects all at once: finishing projects, typing up papers, and taking exams here and there.
While all students are capable of studying, not every one of them has great study skills. Most students study very hard, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Thing is, they don’t study smart, so it takes away so much time they could spend doing other things, like their hobbies.
Smart study skills involve not just memorizing facts and plainly reading notes over and over and over again. Instead, it involves techniques catering to the specific learning style of each student, leveraging their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses. These skills should also be part and parcel of any high school curriculum.
One useful study tip is the use of mnemonics. These are mental shortcuts designed for rote memorization easier and faster. Take the common “Dear King Phillip Came Over For Good Soup“ for remembering the order of taxonomic classifications from top to bottom. The first letters of each word are the same letters of the scientific words: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. Many other mnemonics exist for different things to be memorized, usually for science class.
Another not-so-used tip is testing oneself. Research has shown that those who quiz themselves after every study session tend to outperform those who don’t. This might take more effort to design a quiz for every study session, but it is proven to be very effective. It will be well worth the extra effort.
These and other study tips will help students not just to score higher in tests, but to better remember the information they study. Studying smarter will end the cycle of memorizing facts just to pass the test and forgetting it right after.
