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Complete Guide to Understanding Your School Work Without Cramming

A certain teacher started out teaching like most teachers — he lectured – until he discovered a problem. His students had learned Newton’s third law of motion — or at least they could recite it (as all physics students can), but he decided to test their understanding of it with a problem involving a collision between a heavy truck and a light car. To his surprise, his students couldn’t answer the problem, and not only did they struggle with this one, they found other conceptual problems he gave them difficult.

It seems the students were memorizing the material but not understanding it, and these were his advice to them.

1. Try to learn by questioning. Structure your study around short conceptual questions. Start your study with questions, try to find answers to them, explain and defend why you arrived at that conclusion.

2. Focus on the way you ask and answer questions. If you do not understand a concept, break it down into smaller steps or stages. Look for an example, parallel or analogy. Translate it into language that you understand. Try to understand the nature of the problem by using “your own words.” Could you ask another student to explain it?

3. Build questions into handouts. These will encourage you to engage with the material actively rather than just absorbing it passively. For example: Organic Chemistry: Why is organic chemistry relevant to mankind? What are examples of its relevancy around me? What makes it organic? Is there inorganic chemistry? What chemical elements and compounds make up organic chemistry? How were they arrived at? and so forth.

4. Begin a study session with a few key questions as illustrated above. Then use the rest of the time to answer or explore them. Return to them at the end.

5. Look carefully at the kinds of comments you make on written work. Do they really help you to understand? You should know that the way you comment on your work affects how you approach learning.

6. Are you a weak student? Find simpler or more basic textbooks that you can use as a backup to the standard ones in your areas of difficulty. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, the bottom-line is for you to get the knowledge, and understand it.

7. If your timetable allows, set aside some individual tutorial sessions with other students who seem to understand the concept. If you can invest some time in this early on, it may save you time later.

8. Carry out a simple survey of your accomplishments by asking which parts of the course you find most difficult and why. Gather the results and see if there are any patterns.  

9. Ask yourself what you think the course is really about, what it requires of you. Do you see it in terms of deep learning (because you really want to understand it) or surface learning (because you simply just want to pass your tests and exams)? How do you approach it? What strategies do you use to cope with it?

10. Do not try to cover so much in a single session. Allow more time for question and answer and checking understanding.

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