Buckle up, because this article will logically break down the fundamental strategies and methods you must know as a Pace student.
BE CAREFUL and don’t spend all of your free time in the Commons or Inman. It’s good to be social, but a useful and common method is to spend one free socializing and the other getting work done. Similarly, if you only have one free, then spend the first half studying and the second half socializing.
Can’t focus? Many students find themselves attempting to study and by the time the period ends, they’ve gotten nothing done. “I want to study but I just can’t focus,” said sophomore Jack Lynch. The issue is your environment. When studying, you must eliminate distractions around you. This may include your phone, noise, movement, or even your friends.
Haven’t memorized your schedule? Before each school day search up Pace Portal Veracross, sign in with your school email using google, and click daily schedule.
Do you need to memorize a mountain of vocabulary for a quiz tomorrow? Turns out you’ve been approaching it all wrong. In order to memorize anything you must engage in active recall, the process of regurgitating the information back out. You don’t actually memorize information by reading or highlighting, but instead by reading it and forcing yourself to pull the information back out of your brain at a later time. For example, if you read your history textbook and then write down a summary of the important pieces of information, you will remember it a lot better.
Do you want to remember what you learned at the beginning of the year for the spring semester cumulative exam? Then you must use spaced repetition, the process that moves information from your short-term memory to your long-term memory. To do this, you have to space out your repetition of the information you want to know. For example, you could study your vocabulary words 3 days after you learn them, then 1 week after, then a month after, and finally once again before the exam. That way, you would have the material perfectly stored in your long-term memory.
If you find that your inability to sit down and focus on your studying prevents you from even being able to try these methods, the solution to your issue is the powder technique. To try it, you use 25 minute study sessions with five-minute intervals in between, and after three of these cycles, you get a 20 minute break.
On the other hand, the deep work technique is for students who have already built strong study habits. The human brain can effectively pay attention for 90 minutes at a time, but the best time to study is an hour after you wake up in the morning or the evening from 5-7:30. For this technique, use one or two 90 minute study sessions per day at these specified times.