CultusEveryone has a couple of bad habits. Sometimes these habits affect your life a little and sometimes they cost you dearly.
Whether you are studying for a lecture or for your online courses with safetydegree.eku.edu your future job success and income directly relate to the quality of your education and your grades. As a result, it is extremely important to make certain that you are studying efficiently and with a focused mind.
Before you sit down to study for your next quiz or exam, ask yourself if you have these three bad habits that ruin the study regimen of most students:
Highlighting everything
One of the biggest bad habits that students have is highlighting their texts while they read. Although highlighting can result in better reading comprehension and information retention, students who highlight as they read typically find themselves highlighting every sentence until every book page has been colored in bright marker. Once this happens, a student then wastes precious study or pretest time trying to separate important and extraneous information.
Tips: Read a section and then go back and highlight important areas. Use more than one color of highlighter to help you remember different concepts and definitions.
Multi-tasking while studying
Another horrendous bad habit is multi-tasking while studying. With technological advancements, students have grown used to doing multiple tasks while they study, such as carry on conversations, answer phones, reply to text messages and watch TV. With multi-tasking, many students suffer reduced information retention.
Tips: Study alone in an area where there are few distractions. Turn off your cell phone or forward calls to voicemail during study time. If background noise helps you to study, use music and set the volume before you begin.
Accepting interruptions
Lastly, many students allow other people in their lives, such as family members, roommates and classmates, to interrupt their study sessions. An interruption while in the middle of reading a passage, or while memorizing definitions or facts, can also adversely affect your mind’s ability to retain information. An interruption can create just enough distraction to make information you learned become fuzzy or muddled in your mind.
Tips: Explain to family, friends and others the importance of quiet, uninterrupted study. Before you begin, put a sign on the door of your room that makes it clear to others that you can’t have any interruptions and then lock the door.
By Annette Hazard
