As the Spring Break approaches, I am pretty sure that most of the students are pulling all - nighters to study for the upcoming midterms and writing essays before the relaxing vacation. Just like many students, I also am cramming my brain to study for upcoming exams. From my own experience of last semester, all I did for studying exam was to receive a review sheet from the professors of each course and studied with that study guide. However, unlike last semester in which I received review sheets from all professors, this semester's professors did not give out any review sheets. I was being too used to studying by professors' review guides that I did not know what to do at first when I did not get any review sheets. Thus, I decided to create my own study guide this time: a study guide that fit my style of studying. 
As shown in the above image, this is what we received every lecture. The good thing about this slides was that I could print them out and cut each sections. After I cut it, I can fold the middle margin to make it into a flashcard form to study the images and its information. Along with the information provided, I used the blank spaces to write down other contexts of each artworks from textbooks. I carry these flash cards everywhere I go and whenever I have a free time I just look at them over and over in order to memorize them. And because I started doing this at the beginning of last week, which was Monday, I memorized almost all of them.
The second strategy I used was to create my own study guide, a review sheet. The good thing about this was that I was able to study the information as I made the study guide. I was able to organize the chunk of inforamtion by making this. In this review sheet, I put down all names of the artists that we learned in the course. Next to each of their names, I put down their period, their artistic style, and a brief context of each.Because HOA 106 was about the Arts History, we had to learn a tremendous amount of art pieces, the medium, the periods, and most importantly the artists. The problem was that because there were way too many areas to know, I could not fully memorize the entirely artists. So, I decided to highlight the artists who I think was mentioned a lot in class lectures and in the textbook. Since they were mentioned a lot, I guessed that the highlighted ones would mostly be on the exam. This way I could first focus on memorizing the important ones first and then memorize, or just familiarize the less important ones.
I combined the two strategies to help me memorizing the information more effectively. I first memorized the names of the artists, their period, and style from the review sheet. And with those memorized it was easier to memorize the images in the flashcards because if I knew which artist belonged to which artwork, I automatically knew the period and the style of it. I just needed to look at the images and connect them with the artists. This way, I was able to save more time in trying to memorize all the information.
If you have an exam coming up but did not get any review sheets or study guide from your professor, I suggest you not to panic because you can create review sheets on your own. Although creating the review sheet might seem like time consuming and you might that you can just start studying instead of wasting your time making a study guide. However, it really is not a waste of time because you will realize how you actually remember the information as you organize and put them down in your review sheet.
Nice Nice. I like the idea of how you took advantage of your lecture notes and straightly created an study aid/index card off of it. I have never thought of doing that and i'll take a look at my course lecture notes and see if i can do the same. So thanks for that. And your second strategy, creating your own study guide can sometimes have negative effect too. The time taken into creating such thing can be a long process and very time consuming. However, the process for creating the study guide forces you to review the materials and let you have the chance to write the materials down as well. In your case, it had positive effect though, so I suggest you to keep on doing that. Overall, good job Agent Park
ReplyDeleteI am also an all-nighter to study for my exam the day before, which was not that a great of an idea. Most of my professors also did not gave out review sheets for the exams, so I basically have to do everything by myself without any 'help' from my professors. I personally did not like using flash cards; I used them when I was in high school to memorize vocabularies for my Spanish class. It did not really helped me a lot (don't know the reason). But, as long as the strategy works for you, good! A review sheet is a strategy that I used the most when I had a exam. I would make a review sheet by writing the notes more organizally and writing some important informations from the textbook. This really helped me. Hope this strategy will also benefit you. Good luck in your exams, Agent Aiden!
ReplyDeleteCatchy title & image is enough for me to get hooked to your strategies. All we need is a cup of Starbucks coffee. Utilizing flash card is very common as I also used it as a vocabulary study guide for my SAT exam back in high school. But using index card as study guide for exam in college is different concept for me. I might as well use that strategy for my classes too because I'm so used to making em and its effective as well. The review sheet strategy is also a great way to prepare for an exam in addition to the index card.
ReplyDeleteFlashcards are a helpful way for studying sometimes, but most of my classes require memorizing of the rather big concepts rather than vocabularies or people, so using flashcards do not really help in most occasions. However, it is a very useful way for me as well to study for vocabularies and information on people. I like how you said you were able to organize information into different chunks when you were making your study guide. This is an effective way to make study guides because you can see your information as a whole. When I used to make outlines, I only took notes straight out of the textbooks, and I did not know how to make them connect with each other. This was not helpful for me at all because I did not see how the concepts connected with each other. Nice job, you were able to pull it off by using these two strategies.
ReplyDeleteI love your flash cards Adrien. It looks very friendly and neat. This is perfect for a visual learner and you told me once that you were a visual learner. For a course like this, I would definitely have chose the same strategies as you have. I remember last semester when two of us studied history exams together, but we didn't use flash cards. We focused on just exam questions that we made. I think flash cards are a great addition to your study materials.
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