10 Ways To Make Learning Easier And Effective!
Blogs Home
- 22 Nov 2021
As a student, your mind is constantly practicing to analyse, memorise and apply concepts to real life that you come across while studying. Especially, when there are exams around the corner it becomes important to train your mind to grasp everything crucial and important for the exam. UPSC is one of the most well-known competitive exams in India, where lakhs of students strive hard to get the most prominent position in Indian bureaucracy. But when the exam is based on skills and not rote learning, just repetitive reading will not help.
So What Helps?
Here are some tips to help you get through the exams, efficiently hone your skills and enhance your calibre as an IAS aspirant.
1. Make Your Learning Style Versatile
Adding flexibility to your learning style will ensure the holistic growth of your mind. Instead of sticking to an old school method of just reading from books, you can try to go for visual explanations to be able to comprehend the concepts. Listen to podcasts to enhance your attentiveness and sharpen your auditory skills. Take notes, try to cultivate a problem-solving attitude. Adapting to multiple styles of learning helps solidify knowledge and when concepts are understood using different techniques, they are retained by our brain for a longer period.
For instance, your teachers in kindergarten used creative methods to teach you about numbers and shapes and you remember many of those concepts and names, even today like nursery rhymes. Learning with a creative approach increases the retaining capacity of the mind.
2. Learn. Revise. Repeat.
Regular practice and learning new things help revise the concept. This is why when we stop working on something for a long time it just vanishes from our memory. To avoid starting from square one, it is important to keep revising concepts and keep practicing them to boost retention.
3. Share Your Knowledge
Helping your peers learn the concept that you are thorough with will reinvigorate your own knowledge. Sharing what you have learned with others, cements the concept in your mind. Either through notes, verbal explanation, presentation, or any other medium will help bolster what you have learned so far. This is the reason why teachers remember so many things and are always thorough with the concepts.
4. Train Your Memory
The most important factor that helps us in our exams is our retention power. A strong memory that registers everything seen, done or learned can help us succeed in our exams. Therefore, improving your memory is crucial. As a student, you need to train your memory to enhance your retention and cognition. Here are a few tips:
- Pay attention
- Stay proactive
- Don't get over burdened
- Connect with your surroundings with newly learnt concepts
- Avoid rote learning and focus on understanding concepts first
- Use visual reference and aids
5. Get Practical
The traditional way of learning involves reading from a book, understanding it, and noting it down. But once you put the concepts into practice, you are better equipped to gain knowledge and enhance your learning skills further. For instance, try conducting a social survey for first-hand experience in research. Such methods help you understand an issue directly from the source rather than a book. This brings a great level of authenticity to your work.
6. Find Your Niche
One of the best ways to improve your learning is adapting to the methods that suit you best. Understanding your comfort zone and using elaborative and creative methods to enhance your learning helps in a most beneficial way. It is not necessary that the techniques that suit your friends, will also suit you. Understand what’s best for you and try to move in that direction.
7. Test Your Skills
Once you are thorough with a topic, test yourself. Testing how much you have learned so far gives you an analytical perspective of your knowledge and information retention power. Take mock tests and attempt previous year’s questions to test yourself. Compare your answers with toppers’ answer sheets and with your peer group to get a more holistic idea of your capabilities. Spot your own errors and formulate a better plan of action to learn and understand concepts in an efficient manner.
8. Stick To One Activity At A Time
Multitasking is beneficial, but not always. Especially, when you are preparing for an exam. Since your mind needs to focus on what you are doing and retain it for long, thus it is important to stick to only one activity at a time. Cramming only creates unnecessary pressure and produces short-lived data that vanishes from memory after a short time.
9. Follow A Time-Table
Staying organised and scheduled is in every way beneficial for learners of all kinds. Planning and implementing things as per schedule will definitely help in boosting your memory. Also, scheduling your day and setting daily goals will strengthen your learning ability and increase its effectiveness.
10. Don't Forget To Take A Break
Pushing yourself to unrealistic limits and studying for long hours will not help. Instead, it will create stress and pressure which can negatively affect your cognitive abilities. Taking power naps, or taking a stroll away from your place of study, snacking, etc., and 8 hours of daily sleep will help boost your memory and sharpen your cognitive skills.
Improvement doesn’t happen overnight. It demands practice and consistency. When preparation becomes difficult, it is necessary to try other techniques to make it easier. As students, it is crucial to understand that nothing is out of your reach and not everything comes the easy way. It requires struggle, consistent efforts, and an unwavering focus to achieve something in life.
Failure is something that everyone experiences at least once in their lifetime, but losing hope should not be an option. Not giving up and moving forward with improved methods will help produce better results.
Students aspiring to clear the UPSC exam dream of becoming the harbinger of change in the country and to work with dedication to make this nation a better place for its citizens. This is the determination that pushes UPSC aspirants to work for success.
If you too are going in the same direction, it is crucial for you to sharpen your learning, reasoning, social, interactive, and implementation skills to attain your goals faster. Do follow the tips given above and experience your learning skills improve with time.
Start today to become better tomorrow!
Shrishti Gupta
