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College Students With Learning Disabilities – Adopt Two New Study Habits
It is common among high school students to cross the college threshold with poor study habits. For students with learning disabilities, however, this deficit, along with college’s unique challenges, can quickly set them on a downward spiral. Freshmen soon learn that given the greater quantity of reading in college, high school habits no longer suffice. A change in habits is required if students wish to succeed on the college level. Below, find two useful strategies that are easy to implement yet yield significant results. Once these habits become second-nature, students can gradually add new strategies to their repertoire, until they are satisfied with their exam results.
Strategy 1: Review lecture notes within 24 hours
There are several reasons reviewing notes after a lecture is an effective habit:
A. While the lecture is fresh in your mind, it is likely you will be able to fill in facts and examples you didn’t have time to write down during the lecture. Moreover, you can mark parts of the lecture that were unclear, so you can consult the instructor before you are neurological disorders hopelessly confused.
B. Immediate review starts to get material into your long-term memory. This does not occur when a longer period of time has elapsed. If a student has not reviewed notes within 24 hours, and it’s time to study for an exam, the material appears unfamiliar and will take much longer to learn. A good way to review is typing your notes Cornell style (two-column note taking) later that day. This allows you to organize your notes, make them neater, and review all in one sitting.
C. When it comes time for an exam, you will spend less time studying. Just from reviewing within 24 hours, you will have retained much what you learned.
Strategy 2: Use mnemonics
Have you ever had to memorize a process consisting of a long list neurological disorders of steps? Or, for example, maybe you have to learn the factors that put teens at risk for entering the criminal justice system. Whenever you have a list to remember, mnemonics make the process much easier.
First, decide whether you can change the order of the listed items. If the items are not part of a process or ordered in any particular way, you can re-arrange them. Assuming you can change the order, arrange them so the first letters of the important items in the list spell a word or represent the first letters of words in a sentence.
Here is an example. Anyone who takes music lessons learns that “FACE” represents the notes in the spaces of the treble clef, and “EGBDF” stands for “every good boy does fine”, or the notes on the lines of the clef. Without these mnemonics, or word tricks, it would take much longer to remember the position of the notes. Once we can chunk unrelated pieces of information into something easy to remember, memorization is no longer a tedious chore.
Given the quantity of information college students need to remember, it makes sense to use mnemonics. If you are new to this technique, expect that it may take some time to think of a word or sentence. Like anything else, the more you do it, the better you’ll get. It also helps to think of words or sentences that are personal and “off-color”. Those are the ones students find most memorable!
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