Hey Mustangs! We posted a poll about y’alls new years resolutions 3 weeks ago with the options- Better fitness, better academics, mental health, and work ethic. 56% of y’all voted that you wanted to better your academics on instagram, and 50% of you voted for the same thing on The Stampede. So in this article I will be giving some tips on how you can do so!
Believe me, as a student, I know all about academic burnout and not feeling like your work is important. But your grades are super important. No matter what path you choose to take in your future.
Whether you want to go to college, or if you want to just graduate high school and figure it out from there, the grades you get now will affect what you’re able to do after high school! So here are some things I do when I’m feeling unmotivated to do my work (that are backed by research!)
For one, I set myself a timer. This is a technique called the Pomodoro Technique, which was created by Francesco Cirillo in 1999. It doesn’t matter how long the timer is, but until that timer goes off I remove all distractions and do my work. Usually, my timer is about an hour, and in that hour I do nothing but school assignments. This helps me a lot, because it gives me a timeframe of how long I am going to have to do work before I can do whatever else I want.
It works for me and many others, because people learn best when they are fully engaged in a task, however it can be tiring. This is why “intensity breaks” are important. Doing work in shifts for specific amounts of time can be (and for many is) very advantageous.
Another thing I do is call my friends so that we can study together. This makes homework less of a chore and more of an excuse to hang out with my friends while ALSO being an academic weapon. We socialize and goof around a bit, but we also get so much work done and are able to help each other out on things we may not understand.
Torrens University Australia has an entire article on how studying with friends can be beneficial. The 5 benefits they listed in their article were: studying with friends can be good for mental health, friends on campus keep you motivated and reduce procrastination, studying with your friends improves your grades, learning with friends encourages soft skills development, and studying with friends can no also save you money.
Of course, this article was referring to mainly college students, but it can be applied to any grade. Benefits of studying amongst friends can be seen in students of all ages. I know that my friends and I have noticed that we make better grades on quizzes and tests when we study together. I think that this happens because we are very comfortable around each other, and studying together takes the pressure off of us and makes us feel more relaxed.
Last but not least, one of the things I do the most in order to push myself, is think about my future goals. I know what I want for myself and for my future, and I know that what I do in high school shapes my future. As I stated before, even if you don’t want to go to college, graduating high school opens up so many opportunities for you. And in order to graduate, I know that I need to get decent grades. And sometimes, that is the only motivation that I need to handle my business.
Stanford News has an article on a study that they did, showing how employing a strategic approach to studying improved students’ exam scores by an average of one third. The conclusion that I came to after reading this article was: reflecting on yourself as you study can (and in many instances, has) have a good impact on your overall grades. So just think about where you want to go in life, and how what you do now can affect whether or not you get there, and that could be enough motivation for you!
That concludes this article on study methods that I use and may help you! I hope that you found this article useful and interesting, and might even take something from it and use it for yourself.
https://news.stanford.edu/2017/05/08/studying-strategically-equals-improved-exam-scores/
