"EXAMS": Study tips for students

As the end of the semester approaches, teachers around the globe are giving their students the same piece of advice: “Study for your exams.”  The unfortunate thing is that many students have no idea what this means. Providing learners with a clear picture of what studying looks like will help them develop practices that will yield results on final exams and other assessments. Here’s an acronym you could use with your students as you help them learn to organize their study efforts:

How to Study for Your Exams

Explain:  

Studying is not a passive activity. Many students think reading over their notes or review packets is an effective study technique, when in reality, it does little to reinforce long-term understanding. Study actively! Try explaining the material in your own words. Work collaboratively with a study partner, or tell your dog, your favorite plant, or your little sister all about what you’re learning. If you can explain it, there’s a good chance that you understand it.    

X (focus on the Xs):

Teachers traditionally put an X on a student’s paper to indicate questions or objectives the student answered incorrectly. But when students study for a test over the same material later, they often treat everything equally. Don’t waste your time re-studying all the things you already know. Pinpoint your points of confusion and work on ways to make sure you understand those difficult parts.      

Ask Questions:

Use Costa’s Levels of Thinking to write (and answer) questions about the content you are studying. Predict the questions you think might be asked on the exam. Higher-level questions can help you make connections between the things you’ve learned throughout the semester.  

Manage time and materials:

Schedule blocks of time to study, and turn off your cell phone so you can concentrate on the task at hand. Make sure you have all the materials you need: textbooks, review packet, old tests and quizzes, class notes, and whatever resources your teacher has recommended. Make a plan for how and when to study, and stick to it!  

Sleep and study breaks:   

Pulling an “all-nighter” sounds like a good idea when you’re under pressure to do well on an exam, but a tired brain isn’t a fully-functioning brain. To prepare your brain to do its best, make sure that you get some rest. Also, reward yourself for your hard work by taking short breaks while you study. After mental exertion, your brain needs some time to relax.  

Good luck during exam week!

WICOR and Exam Reviews

It's everyone's favorite time of the year: the time when we soon get to put aside new learning and focus our efforts on helping the students get prepared for the joy that is better known as final exam week.  In our haste to finish the semester, we should, of course, never forget the importance of WICOR (writing, inquiry, collaboration, organization, and reading), so I am compiling a little list to help you plan your review activities:

11 Ways to Infuse Your Final Exam Reviews with WICOR

1.  Teach your students how to read multiple choice questions and essay prompts effectively.  Spending some time talking about the language used in testing in your subject area will help them become more effective test takers.

2.  Write your own exam questions.  One good study technique is to ask students to predict questions they might encounter on their exams by writing questions--multiple choice or short answer--of their own.  Writing multiple choice questions might also give students some insight into how questions are written, which could translate to greater insight on exam day.

3.  Have students form in-class study groups.  Give each person in each group a job (scribe, task-manager, researcher, questioner, etc.), and spend some time beforehand talking about how effective study groups work.  You could give each group a topic to review and present their findings with the class.  The students will find this collaborative review a welcome break from the sit-and-get they'll have in most of their classes during review week.

4.  Levels of Questions:  Using Costa's or Bloom's, discuss the various levels of questions on the exam.  Have a class discussion to brainstorm the various ways to prepare for different types of questions they may see on the exam.

5.  Ask your kids to write explanations about what they have learned in your class.  If it's a history class, they can write a monologue from a famous person they've studied.  In biology, they can write a dialogue between an onion cell and a cheek cell.  In math, they can write an explanation of how to simplify a polynomial.   Share the students' writings with the class.  You might even be able to turn this into a "who am I?" game where the class has to guess the topic after the student reads his or her paper.

6.  Help students think about the material on their exam in a variety of ways by creating graphic organizers or analogies.  This is a great group assignment.   Give each group a broad topic (ie. figurative language, mercantilism, symbiosis, reactions) and a large piece of paper (or a computer with PowerPoint) and ask them to come up with a visual organizer or metaphor to explain the topic to the class.

7.  Matching Card Sets:  I've used this before with material that required Level I knowledge (lists of terms, vocabulary, people, events, etc.).  One day in class, I put the students into groups and gave each group a pile of small squares of paper or cardstock (about half the size of an index card).  On one half of the cards, the students wrote the term, person, event, etc.  Then, they created a second set of cards by writing clues or definitions leading to each word on the other set.  On the back of each pair, they put a number or letter to signify that the two should go together.  After the entire set was complete, the students could lay the cards out on the floor, face up, and match the pairs.  They could check their answers by looking at the backs of the cards.  I had the students leave their sets in the classroom so that all students could use them for independent review before or after school during exam week.

8.  Skimming the text can be a great way to remind oneself of the content of a book prior to an exam.  Teach this skill to your students so they can learn how to reread quickly, searching for key ideas and reviewing major concepts while not getting bogged down in picky details.

9.  Create a quiz show.  Split the class into several teams.  Distribute note cards to the students, and ask them to write review questions (and provide answers) for students on other teams to answer during a review game.  Tell them the questions should not be too easy or the other team will get all the points.  Also, you might want to make a rule that if the question is too hard, you--as the head judge of all that is reasonable for students to answer--could penalize the team that created the question.  Use the questions to conduct a game in any manner you prefer.

10.  Another collaborative review game my students enjoy is the tag-team review.  Split the class into two teams.  Then, split each team into pairs of students who will work together to answer a question in front of the class.   [Before class begins, make a set of cards containing broad topics to discuss or essay-type questions, ones that require a longer explanation rather than one precise answer.  Ex.  "What was the Columbian Exchange, and how did it affect Europe?" "Characteristics of Romanticism," or "How to Plot a Point on a Graph."]    Begin with a pair from team A.  Ask them to draw one topic from your set of cards. Give them one minute to huddle and then one minute to stand in front of the class and answer that question or explain that topic together.  (I usually let a pair from the other team draw their topic and have their huddle time while the first group is explaining to keep things moving).  After the minute is up, award the team anywhere from 0-5 points based on the quality of the explanation or response.  Sometimes, I add unpredictable bonuses based on speaking ability (ex. the first group not to begin speaking by saying "Okay" gets a 5-point bonus). The tag-team review is a fun (albeit a bit pressure-filled) way to review big-picture ideas and concepts before the exam.

11.  Talk with your students about time management, prioritizing study tasks, creating a tutorial schedule, and all the other organizational things that will help them succeed as they prepare for exams.

I hope some of these WICOR tips help make your upcoming review week interesting and productive for you and your students.  Hang in there.