Tips To Help You Study Better at Home
Online learning can often feel very challenging. You have to be a very driven individual in order to manage your time effectively and complete your course. However, you aren’t on your own! Although online learning may seem hard at first, our tutors are always on the end of the phone to help. We have also put together some top tips to help you study better at home.
Get yourself a wall planner
Optimising your work-from-home workspace is really important if you are going to stay motivated. You should have a dedicated area for your studying, to reduce the chance of being distracted by other things happening in your home. We would recommend getting a wall planner and popping it up on the wall you face. By having this staring at you all the time you will see all the deadlines you have set yourself for certain projects. This will help you to see that the end is in sight, and by popping your holidays on there that should give you the boost you need!
Don’t re-read subjects over and over
If you get stuck on a particular subject area it can be tempting to go over and over it until the penny drops and your brain figures it out. How many times has that ever actually happened though? Our guess is never! When you re-read a piece of information you are trying to process it just simply won’t go into your brain. Try having a break, or doing some other studying and come back later to that part. A great way to interrupt your thought process is to ask yourself a question. Go on, give it a try right now. Your brain will automatically focus on the question due to an inbuilt reflex in our brains.
Switch off your phone and other distractions
Whilst it can be tempting to have your phone sat on your desk while you are studying, the temptation to just look at something, or browse social media is too much. You’ll soon find yourself in a black hole and no studying will have been achieved! The average time each adult in the UK checks their phone is every 12 minutes. So if you have set aside an hour to study, you are likely to lose 5 minutes from the simple act of picking up your phone in that hour. Add on the 10 minutes you spent scrolling through your news feed each time, and it soon mounts up.
Mix up your learning
Having flexibility in your studying schedule is really important. One day you might have the ‘Assessment Methods’ knowledge-based tasks for the Level 3 Certificate in Assessing Vocational Achievement on your wall planner. This doesn’t mean it has to be completed on a particular day, that is the beauty of distance learning – it is flexible. If your brain is not going to focus on that particular task, choose something different like ‘The Training Cycle’ task instead.
Use colour and diagrams
Colour and drawings make everything better (or so we think!). It has been proven that the brain retains much more information if things are separated out into different colours, so grab those highlighters and make a start. Mind-maps are also a great way to learn, rather than just having endless A4 documents of notes. By drawing out your ideas you are more likely to absorb the information.
If you would like any support or guidance from the team at Brooks and Kirk we are contactable via phone on 01205 805 155, or email training@brooksandkirk.co.uk
