As both the junior school and our seniors approach their exams in less than three weeks, here are some handy tips for you as you head into study mode!

Get a good night’s sleep: There is a relationship between your grades and how much sleep you’re getting. However, this doesn’t only mean getting a full 8 hours of sleep before a big test. What matters even more is getting enough sleep for several nights before you do the bulk of your studying.

Switch up your study environment: This might not seem like a promising study strategy, but studies show that switching up your study environment can increase your recall! Instead of studying at home every day, try heading to the town library or a café in town for a healthy snack. A change in scenery can improve both your memory and concentration levels.

Stick with an environment that works: If you have a good study space at home or somewhere that is reliably a productive place for you, it makes sense to stick with this when you are under pressure.

Eliminate distractions: Eliminate distractions by silencing your phone and annoying background noises such as the TV or radio. Make a pact with yourself to avoid checking social media until your study session is over. Give your phone to a parent to hide for a bit!

Snack on smart food: Coffee and lollies will give you a temporary boost, but then you’ll have a blood sugar crash. For energy that is more focused and sustainable, try healthy snacks such as edamame, apples, or nuts.

Utilise practice assessments: Use practice tests or questions to quiz yourself, without looking at your book or notes.

Make your own questions: Be your own teacher and create questions you think would be in an exam. If you’re in a study group, encourage others to do the same, and trade questions.

Use flashcards: Create flashcards, but make sure to practice your retrieval technique. Instead of flipping a card over prematurely, write the answer down and then check.

Colour Coded Notes

- Messy notes can make it hard to recall the important points of a lecture. Writing in color is a dynamic way to organize the information you’re learning. It also helps you review and prioritize the most important ideas.

- A recent study found that color can improve a person’s memory performance. That same study found that warm colors (red and yellow) “can create a learning environment that is positive and motivating that can help learners not only to have a positive perception toward the content but also to engage and interact more with the learning materials.” It also reported that warmer colors “increase attention and elicit excitement and information.”

Writing in colour may seem like a no-brainer, but keep these tips in mind:

- Write down key points in red.

- Highlight important information in yellow.

- Organize topics by colour.

- Don’t colour everything—just the most important information.

Mind Mapping

If you’re a visual learner, try mind mapping, a technique that allows you to visually organize information in a diagram. First, you write a word in the center of a blank page. From there, you write major ideas and keywords and connect them directly to the central concept. Other related ideas will continue to branch out.

The structure of a mind map is related to how our brains store and retrieve information. Mind mapping your notes instead of just writing them down can improve your reading comprehension. It also enables you to see the big picture by communicating the hierarchy and relationships between concepts and ideas.

So, how do you do it?

- Grab a blank sheet of paper (or use a tool online) and write your study topic in the center, such as “Unfamiliar Text”

- Connect one of your main ideas (poetry) to the main topic, such as “poetic or figurative techniques”

- Connect sub-branches of supporting ideas to your main branch. This is the association of ideas. For example, “sound devices,” “imagery,” “word choice,” and “sentence types”

- TIP: Use different colours for each branch and draw pictures if it helps.