The importance of studying and practicing

Do you know how much practice improves your memorization? Have you put into practice what you study over time? No? Now, I’ll show you how studying and practicing can improve your learning, and I’ll also give you a really cool tip to practice after each study session.

Before passing on the tips, let’s understand why you should avoid just studying the theory.

It’s not enough to just stick to theory

Unfortunately, many students spend hours and hours learning the theory, just reading and highlighting a text without putting the learning into practice, it is a practically automatic habit, without reflection and without significant learning.

Ok, that happens, but studying without practicing is not very effective, after all you are just reading and not using the information to form more memories.

I’m always saying in the videos that your brain always wants to save energy, and if information is difficult to store, your brain will do everything it can to make it easier in your memory. According to Benedic Carey, author of the book How We Learn:

“The more effort your brain needs to make to bring up a memory, the greater the increase in learning (retrieval and storage powers)”

So, when you force your brain to try to retrieve information you studied to answer a question, you are making it easier to remember.

How to practice the right way to memorize your studies

Simple, always when you finish a study session, answer some questions about what you are learning, make this a constant habit. There are several methods to achieve this, I will indicate here one that I really receive a lot of positive feedback from students who show good results:

• Create questions to answer later
• Answer previous tests that you find on the internet
• Use question apps

Answer questions you have in your books or handouts
The more questions you answer, the easier it will be to remember the content you want to learn. But it is obvious that just answering questions is not enough, you also need to correct them.

The power of correcting activities

One of the things that helps a lot in learning is correcting the activities you answer. This happens because when you correct it you start to notice the points that need to improve and even which parts of the theory deserve to be seen again.

A really cool strategy that I always recommend to those who do my learning programs is the following, whenever you are correcting the exercises, ask yourself:

• What did I get wrong in this question?
• Was it a mistake due to lack of attention or lack of knowledge?
• How can I solve a question similar to this next time?

Answering these questions makes the most of the power of the questions and prepares you even more for better results in your tests. The important thing is that you have enough time to respond and then correct your questions.

Conclusion

The most important thing now is that you start using the questions to your advantage today, because as a well-known phrase goes “practice makes perfect” 🙂

Furthermore, remember that it is not enough to answer questions just once, you need to have a constant system to review the questions daily, use many questions when reviewing content too.

One last tip, take advantage of the moments after lunch at work or while you are somewhere waiting to answer questions. Some apps can help you do this. This way, you will gradually increase your productivity, learning twice as much and increasing your memorization of the content.