How To Study For Exams
Taking midterms and final exams is a relatively new challenge for high school students, especially ninth graders. Often teachers will hand out study guides to follow when reviewing. It is important to follow all of your teachers’ instructions! However, sometimes you will not have a study guide to work from. In this situation, it is helpful to have some idea of how to actually begin to study large amounts of material. The following suggestions have been put together to help you with this challenging task! Use, change, or add to them as necessary. If you begin studying about 10 days before exams start, and spread out your study time, you will find you are learning small chunks of material earlier on and will remember them much better on the exams. Creating study schedules can also be helpful so that you can plan out your time before you begin to work. Research has shown that short, frequent breaks (maybe 15-20 minutes) in between study sessions can make a big difference in your concentration and efficiency, so be sure to schedule break time as well as work time. Some students have found that studying in pairs or groups can be very helpful as well, as long as the groups can keep focused!!! And lastly, get lots of sleep and eat healthy foods during the exam period. These two things are almost more important than how much you study!
I. MATERIALS YOU CAN USE TO STUDY
a. Pencils, pens, highlighters
b. LOTS of blank index cards of varying sizes and colors, and a box or boxes of some kind to hold them or separate them into categories
c. Loose-leaf lined or blank paper or an empty spiral notebook for English, history or foreign language
d. Graph paper for math and science
e. A ruler, protractor and/or compass for math if you are taking geometry
f. A calculator
g. Your plan book
h. A timer or alarm clock (to remind you when to take breaks!)
II. ORGANIZE YOUR MATERIALS FOR EACH SUBJECT FIRST!
For each subject, be sure you have all of the following to study from and organize so that you can find each easily:
a. Assignments
b. relevant homework
c. notes
d. handouts
e. quizzes and tests, and papers
f. Lab reports (for science)
g. Review sheets
Specific Subject Suggestions
FOREIGN LANGUAGE (NO MIDTERMS)
*How can you be sure you really know all the material you are supposed to know?
BE SYSTEMATIC: Check the Assignments page by page to make sure you haven’t missed anything! Study your note cards in both directions, not just in one. It is great to be able to recognize all the foreign words and know what they mean. It is much harder to be able to recall the foreign words when given the English ones first. Lastly, can you write a list of ALL the vocabulary (from a given category) from memory? Test yourself and see. If you forget a few, study a little more and try again.