4 Golden Rules of Effective Studying

Very often our students need to match their participation in bootcamp with other responsibilities like a job, university, family. Thanks to flexible hours of the online course they are able to cope with this hard task.

However, every single person who decides to take part in our bootcamp wants to learn fast and effective.

What does it mean? It means that learning new things will take as little time as possible and will allow you to remember the whole material for long. That’s why we introduce four rules of effective studying.

Why are you an inefficient student?

When studying something new, like a new module, most probably you read the material a couple of times in a row. It’s a plain text after all, right? Unfortunately, reading the same thing again and again is monotonous. These are the habits we got at school but they’re not always effective. The reason is that our education system doesn’t teach us how to study the right way. If your teacher showed you how to do this - you’ve been lucky!

The research shows that no matter if you read the text twice or five times, the memorization level will be the same. Conclusions? We waste time, have no pleasure in studying and we have bad results.

Why is it so? Having read a text ten times you should know it by heart! You do indeed, but only for a short time. You’re not able to remember the whole text for long. And this is what studying is all about, unless you go for the “cram-pass-forget” rule. But this is something we do not recommend - neither in programming, nor in anything else.

How to change it?

This article will show you 4 principles of effective studying which you’ll find useful throughout your career. So let’s get down to business - effective learning means zero time waste, after all!

1. Study in intervals

Studying in intervals is called Dispersed Practice Theory and it says that time matters. The research shows that you’ll learn more if you break down your study into smaller steps. During the bootcamp, then, don’t study for 7 hours on Saturday and Sunday. You’ll learn more by studying for 2-3 hours from Monday-Friday.

This theory is scientifically proven - a research was held in 1978 in a British post office. Four groups of people were asked to learn parcels coding within 60 hours.

Group 1 - studied twice a day for 2 hours.

Group 2 - studied once a day for 2 hours.

Group 3 - studied 2 times a day for 1 hour.

Group 4 - studied for 1 hour each day (dispersed study)

As you might have already guessed, each subsequent group was more effective than the previous one. So Group 1 was the weakest one and Group 4 was the best. Group 1 needed 80 hours to learn the material, while Group 4 needed only 55 hours.

2. Quiz yourself

Instead of reading the same text over and over again, quiz yourself! Once again, the research shows that reading the same material fifth or tenth time is ineffective.

Proof? In 2006 there was a research which was supposed to answer the question: is it better to read a text twice or read it once and test oneself? It all depends. After 5 minutes the difference in memorizing is infinitesimal. But after 2 days or after a week, the group who used mock quizzes remembered everything better. Unfortunately, reading the text twice was proven ineffective.

So what should a quiz look like? It can be just anything: after a couple of days you can list down everything you remember from the material, you can ask yourself questions and answer them... The most important thing is to realize which topics you struggle with and therefore, what you should focus on when studying.

Conclusion: During the bootcamp read the module and complete the assignment. It will show you how much you remember from the module and let you use your knowledge in practice.

3. Teach someone

Study as if you were supposed to pass this knowledge to someone else. Think about how you understand the issue and try to explain it with your own words. According to the research from 1994, this method can increase your learning effectiveness by about 32%.

Hint:

Look for relations, real life examples, try to understand the issue and not to memorize it. During our bootcamp join the chat and talk to other students and Mentors. Ask questions, help others solve their problems - you’ll remember this for a long time.

4. Surprise your brain

There’s no one universal way which will make your studying effective. The best way is to mix different methods and surprise your brain during the study sessions. If you run out of ideas, just change the environment. As research shows, you can memorize 50% more material in a new place.

Make your learning process engaging and you’ll remember more for longer.