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Innovative Research
To Study - Studies - Studying Continued...
Happy Pyramids:
Some students find the topics that they are revising overwhelming and seemingly endless. Although the PQRST method can help maintain your focus on the whole point of learning the large topic in the first place there are other methods that help facilitate your learning.
If you break a large topic in a series of smaller topics that can be defined as a size of material that takes less than 10 minutes each to complete. Even the largest project or topic can be broken down into these bitesize sections. The important part comes in regarding the series of smaller 10 minutes as adding up to the whole topic and that it is finished.
This system can be drawn as a pyramid with topics requiring incrementally more time on each level. So if you decided that you needed to break it into 20 minute segments then you could place 10 minute and 5 minute topics on lower levels of the pyramid that mount up to the whole topic at the apex of the pyramid. Starting from the bottom when all the smaller blocks are in the place then the pyramid is built and the topic finished.
Topic ABCDEFGHIJK Collectively 1.5 hours
Part 1 ABC 20 Minutes
Part 2 DEF 10 Minutes
Part 3 GHI 5 Minutes
Part 4 JK 5 minutes
Something that may have been put or slowed down by the size or important of the topic may be greatly shortened. Of course you can apply any other study skill such as the PQRST method to each of the individual parts to help their progression..
Traffic Lights:
It is a common pitfall in studying to set out to learn everything that you have been taught in an orderly and precise fashion. If time, boredom, and fatigue were not variables that can impact on your studying and even health then this may always be possible. More normally you will have a set amount of time (that doesn't encroach on leisure time for any reason) to learn a set amount of topics. An easy way to separate what is really important to know (likely to constitute the majority of exam marks) from what you would like to know if you had infinite time and energy is the traffic light system.
Green: Take a green pen and label or place a star next to everything that is essential to know for your exam. These topics should be studied first and allow you to progress to the less number of amber and red topics. These should generally be the first few on a syllabus and be the easiest concepts to learn but also the easiest to underestimate.
Amber: Take an orange or gold pen and label everything that is neither essential to know or is not too time consuming to learn. This should form the mainstay of your learning and range from topics leading from the green range of topics to ones leading to the red range of topics.
Red: Take a red pen and label everything you would want to know if you had all the time and energy neccessary but not at the expense of the essential green topics and desired amber topics. This would include overly complicated ideas and subjects that may add one or two marks but may cost you if you focus all your attention just on knowing the more difficult bits and underestimating the importance of accumulating the green and amber topics first and to a greater extend. A greater focus on green and amber topics may also lead to topics that seemed red to become more amber as time goes on.
The color system should remind you that it is easier to get moving on green topics and to be needlessly stopped and held up by red topics. It is also important to stop amber topics It is also a healthy reminder to keeping your learning as a progressive experience and never allow it to stagnate where all topics become more red in nature as you become more tired and bored. An alternative form of this can be used in which you determine which subjects you need to spend more time on.
Learning:
Learning is one of the most important mental function of humans, animals and artificial cognitive systems. It relies on the acquisition of different types of knowledge supported by perceived information. It leads to the development of new capacities, skills, values, understanding, and preferences. Its goal is the increasing of individual and group experience. Learning functions can be performed by different brain learning processes, which depend on the mental capacities of learning subject, the type of knowledge which has to be acquitted, as well as on socio-cognitive and environmental circumstances.
Learning ranges from simple forms of learning such as habituation and classical conditioning seen in many animal species, to more complex activities such as play, seen only in relatively intelligent animals and humans. Therefore, in general, a learning can be conscious and not conscious.
For example, for small children, not conscious learning processes are as natural as breathing. In fact, there is evidence for behavioral learning prenatally, in which habituation has been observed as early as 32 weeks into gestation, indicating that the central nervous system is sufficiently developed and primed for learning and memory to occur very early on in development.
From the social perspective, learning is the goal of teaching and education.
Conscious learning is a capacity requested by students, therefore is usually goal-oriented and requires a motivation.
Learning has also been mathematically modeled using a differential equation related to an arbitrarily defined knowledge indicator with respect to time, and dependent on a number of interacting factors (constants and variables) such as initial knowledge, motivation, intelligence, knowledge anchorage or resistance, etc. Thus, learning does not occur if there is no change in the amount of knowledge even for a long time, and learning is negative if the amount of knowledge is decreasing in time. Inspection of the solution to the differential equation also shows the sigmoid and logarithmic decay learning curves, as well as the knowledge carrying capacity for a given learner.
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