When reading you notes just isn’t enough…

The Study Method

1. Read the assigned material before it is covered in lecture. Why? You will have a basic understanding of the material in advance of lecture and you will be able to take notes more accurately and intelligently.
2. Read the assigned material with a highlighter in your hand and mark terms and other important items. Why? Because you will be more actively engaged in reading the material by doing this. Each word that you read you will be evaluating as to whether, or not, it should be highlighted and when you decide that a word or sentence should be highlighted you will read it a second time as you run the highlighter across it. You will then have read it, thought about it, made a decision about it, and reread it when you highlighted it. This will help you remember it on the test.
3. As soon as possible after a lecture sit down with your notes and rewrite or word process them using your textbook to fill in some of the gaps in the notes you took in class. Why? To create a set of very accurate and more organized study notes that will represent what is in the textbook and what the professor lectured on in class. If you do a good job on the study notes you will be able to rely on them for study purposes and you won’t have to reread the textbook. In addition, as you put this set of study notes together you will be studying the material and you will be more likely to remember the information for the test.
4. Create flash cards for terms and concepts you must memorize. Use 3 X 5 cards and on one side write the term or concept and on the other side write the definition. You will use these to test yourself and can easily go through a stack of twenty or thirty cards in a few minutes. You can test yourself on the term/concept or the on definition by simply turning the card over. Why? Pulling the information out of your textbook and notes to create the cards will help you memorize the material and because repetition is the key to remembering, you can quickly and frequently cover this information. Each time you go through the cards you will test yourself over the terms and concepts.
5. If you are going to be required to identify parts of cells, label anatomical features, etc., either sketch the items and draw arrows to the important parts you must learn and make a number of photocopies to practice labeling or check to see if your lab book has the illustrations you need that can be photocopied. If the items are already labeled make one copy and use whiteout to remove the labels before making the necessary number of photocopies to use for test practice. Why? You can create a testing situation similar to class and test yourself by taking one of the copies and labeling the parts. Afterwards you can check your work to see how you did. Repeat this exercise until you can label everything correctly.

Now your test preparation kit for one chapter is complete and you have the following:

1. study notes,
2. flashcards, and
3. illustrations for labeling. Repeat this for each chapter that will be on the test or exam.

Finally, read ad reread your notes, quiz yourself with your flashcards, and label the illustrations you created until you are confident that you both know and understand the material.