Definitely worth a go…
It’s exam season whether it’s your college exams or you’re waiting impatiently for the Leaving Cert to start so you can get on with the rest of your life.
We are looking forward to the start of the Leaving Cert as well because of the inevitable fine weather which will accompany its arrival.
We’ve had articles over the past couple of days regarding exams from an exam coach that are well worth checking out, such as the one line he hates seeing in an exam, and the biggest mistakes people make and how to avoid them.
But now, Patricia Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford with a PhD, believes that she has the key to raising your results by at least one grade.
“All too often, students just jump mindlessly into studying before they have even strategized what to use, without understanding why they are using each resource, and without planning out how they would use the resource to learn effectively,” she said to Quartz.
“I find this very unfortunate because it undermines their own potential to learn well and perform well.”
She is the lead author of a study on the subject and she believes that people can be thought to think strategically about thinking and studying, which will really help them improve their grades.
In the study, students were asked about which grade they wanted to receive, as well as their chances of achieving it and what it would mean to them, in 15 minutes.
The students were then asked to think about the kinds of questions that would come up in the exam, and 15 class resources they could use to prepare themselves for these questions such as textbooks, lecture notes etc. They wrote down why they included each resource and how they would use it to prepare for the exam.
The other group of students were simply given a reminder that the exam was coming up in a week’s time.
As well as improving their grades, the students who completed the online survey before studying reported less stress and anxiety in the lead up to the exam as well as greater confidence in their performance during the exam.
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