Learning Strategies

Self Testing

Recall what you have studied or answer questions without looking back at your study material. Review questions may be provided by your professor, found in a textbook, in an online textbook supplement, or from your Cornell Notes.

Teach Others

Teach the course content back to yourself, or get together with classmates and take turns teaching each other. Use examples, create analogies, and connect different concepts to make the learning more relevant and "sticky". Teaching someone else is a good gauge of how much you know.

Predict Test Questions

Thinking back to the last test you wrote, what kinds of questions were on there? How were the questions worded? Use this knowledge to create similar questions to help you study. This strategy is ideal to use with classmates or a Peer Tutor.

Interleaving

Once you have a good grasp of individual but related topics, start practicing in a way that switches between the topics. Interleaving helps you learn how to differentiate between similar concepts, which is a skill you need for test-taking. This technique is especially beneficial for math and many science courses.

Hypercorrection

Learning from your mistakes can improve your memory of content and force your brain to work harder to make that information stick for next time. You want to make mistakes during your test preparation and learn from them rather than making these mistakes during your actual test.