Many students practice “teaching to the test.” This is the method of preparing for exams. It allows you to check and consolidate your knowledge. This approach is quite effective and very often students are able to get high scores. However, this technique has some drawbacks. Most students remember only a certain template of the test. They pay attention only to the basic facts, missing many important details. The main thing in education is not high grades, but good and profound knowledge. Here is a list of tips on how to check the quality of your knowledge and learn how to memorize educational material.
How to Understand and Remember the Learning Material
Become a Teacher
One of the best ways to check how well you have remembered and understood this or that topic is to be in the role of a teacher and try to explain the studying materials to someone. For example, you can train with your group mates. It will be useful for you to review and understand information, and at the same time, your friends can learn many new facts.
You can practice at home, teaching your parents, brothers and sisters. In return, you can ask them to be your teachers. This is a very good method of studying. A person who does not have an idea of the structure and format of the exam will make more emphasis on important details. Your family will like this practice. In addition, they will help you improve your grades and acquire new knowledge and also learn a lot of interesting things and raise their level of erudition.
Study Different Versions of Test Formats
As mentioned before, the mistake of many students is that they are accustomed to one format of exams and can guess what type of questions they can get. In order to check your true understanding of the material, you can try to do tasks from the examples of tests that differ from the format you are familiar with. Such examples can be easily found on the Internet. You can even find ready-made answers to them and work on your mistakes. For the best effect, you can even try to answer test assignments from universities or colleges of other countries.
Ask Unusual Questions
In addition to ready-made manuals and computer programs that help prepare for the tests, you can create your own version of the exam. Think about the questions and answer them yourself. The main feature of this method is that you need to come up with unusual questions. If you are preparing for an exam in mathematics or chemistry, of course, it will be much more difficult, but if you study humanitarian subjects, such as literature or history, you have much more opportunities to apply your creative fantasy. Imagine that you are a little child and ask a question on behalf of a kid. Ask about some insignificant, minor at first glance, the facts, which the teacher is never asked about. This will help you develop your imaginative thinking, improve memory and pay attention to every small detail.
Compare Your Knowledge with the Materials of a More Advanced Level
If you are well versed in the topic that you are currently studying in a college or university, do not relax. It is necessary to constantly improve and strive to get new knowledge. The best way to learn new material quickly is to study topics of a more difficult level. This will allow you to not only review information that you learned earlier, but also get acquainted with the new facts. Even if you do not understand everything, you will already have some knowledge basics, and it will be much easier to understand this topic later, when it will be explained to you by the teacher.
Here is an example of using this method in a practice. Imagine that you are studying a foreign language and understand that you always learn only a few new words during the lesson and your level is growing very slowly. Take a textbook one level higher, work on it at home and you will be able to learn many new words and grammatical features.