assignment 3. test yourself

Taking Learning Seriously

The Science of Learning for Teachers & Students

Self-Testing

This self-guided tutorial is for students and teachers who want to learn more about how to use self-testing as a learning strategy. it includes:.

• An overview of how self-testing affects learning, understanding and memory
• Video examples of self-testing strategies
• How to improve at self-testing

Self-Testing Explained

Self-testing is the process of trying to recall what you have learned or studied without looking back at the material. Self-testing is similar to practice testing and practice quizzes. All of these activities involve “retrieval practice,” trying to recall or retrieve information from memory. Abundant research has found that self-testing is a potent learning strategy (Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham, 2013). To illustrate, in one study researchers divided students into four groups. Each group used a different method to study an article from Scientific American.  The four methods were:

• Study: Students read/studied the material one time.
• Repeated study: Students read/studied the material four consecutive times.
• Concept mapping: Students read/studied the material one time and made a concept map of it.
• Retrieval practice: Students read/studied the material and then wrote down everything they could remember without looking back at the information. They repeated this study-recall procedure one more time. Note that this is self-testing .

One week after studying the article students took a test on the material. As shown in the figure below, the Retrieval Practice group outperformed the other groups on questions of verbatim factual information as well as questions that involved drawing inferences and conclusions (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011).

Source: Karpicke, J. D., & Blunt, J. R. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science , 331, 772–775.  http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1199327

Surprised that trying to recall the material leads to better learning than rereading and restudying the material multiple times? You are not alone. In fact, students who participated in this study predicted that retrieval practice would be the least effective among the four study methods. We can explain the differences in student learning by examining the mental processes involved in retrieval and rereading.

Retrieval practice is effective for two reasons :

• Whenever you try to recall information you have been learning you make new connections and associations that will help you recall it in the future. Bringing information to mind strengthens the memory and increases the chances you can recall it at a later time. Retrieval practice

 . . . produces direct effects on learning, because engaging in the process of retrieval itself produces learning. Every time we retrieve knowledge, that knowledge is altered, and the ability to reconstruct  that knowledge again in the future is enhanced . Karpicke & Grimaldi, 2012

In retrieving information from memory, you form new associations and connections to the material which expands your understanding of the material, and also provide new retrieval cues that help you recall the material. With additional retrieval attempts, it becomes easier to recall the information.

2. Retrieval practice is also effective because it provides feedback about what you know and don’t know. When we can’t recall information, it is a clear signal that we don’t know it (or don’t know it very well). We can use that feedback to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. After a disappointing test grade, students often tell their instructor, “I thought I knew this.” However, the most accurate way to judge whether you know something is to test yourself on it. If you can’t produce the answer, you don’t know it. Retrieval practice enables you to better judge what you know and don’t know. Then you can go back and fill in the missing pieces.

Compared to retrieval practice, rereading is a weak learning strategy. Rereading material one time does improve learning. But additional rereading produces little improvement (Callender & McDaniel, 2009). Why is this the case? Shouldn’t students learn at least a little more with each rereading? The answer to the question lies in examining how students think when they read.

Reading can be a very productive learning experience when an individual ponders a text, works out new meanings, connects new information to prior knowledge, monitors comprehension, backtracks to gain better understanding, and so forth. But this kind of close, probing reading is probably not the typical way students study. Instead, as students reread the material it becomes more and more familiar. Familiarity with the material can produce an “illusion of knowing,” a belief that you know it (Bjork, Dunlosky, & Kornell, 2013). In other words, when you read about a topic the material is in front of you and fresh in your mind. But that sense of being familiar with the material at the time of reading is not equivalent to having learned it. You may be able to answer questions about the topic today, but not when you take a test.

Although self-testing is an effective learning strategy, students tend to dislike it because it seems:

• harder than rereading and highlighting the material. Testing yourself requires extra mental effort and even a bit of struggle to recall what you learned. This  is  more difficult than simply rereading the information.
• less effective. If you read something one time and write down what you remember, you may be disappointed in how little you recall. That experience leads students to conclude that self-testing is ineffective, and they stop using it. However, the research is quite convincing, repeated self-testing over the material is much more effective than rereading it.

Examples of Self-Testing Strategies

This section identifies self-testing strategies and describes briefly how to use them effectively. You may already self-test when you study. If so, this section may introduce you to new strategies, and also give you some tips on how to optimize your learning from self-testing.

While reading an assignment.  Read a segment of assigned material, a paragraph or an entire page. Then stop, put the material aside and try to write down everything you remember from what you just read. This will seem difficult and you probably won’t remember everything or even understand everything. But that’s OK; the point is to try to remember it. You will be strengthening your memory for everything you are able to recall, and that information will be easier to remember again later. Go through the entire assignment, reading and then trying to remember the information from each part. Research has shown that this type of practice testing is superior to simply rereading the material, and even better than reading and taking notes on the material.

This short video describes and explains how to self-test while reading.

Before and after rereading an assignment . As discussed earlier, rereading is not a very effective learning strategy. However, you can make it more effective by combining it with self-testing. If you decide to reread an assignment, do it 1-2 days after the first reading. Then try this procedure:

• Before you reread, take a few minutes to test yourself by trying to remember the information from the assignment. Jot down everything you remember.
• Reread the assignment, pausing periodically to test yourself on sections of the assignment.
• When you are done reading, use your answers to identify gaps in your knowledge and understanding of the material. You can then go back and review the chapter and work on material you don’t yet know.

At the end of class . As soon as you can after class, take a few minutes to write down the major points from the class period, and then try to recall as much as you can under each major point. This is an excellent way to consolidate what you were trying to learn in class. Then later when you review your class notes, handouts, etc., you can refer back to your answers to see where you need to review and add to your understanding.

Answer practice questions . If you use a textbook that has questions at the end of each chapter, get in the habit of trying to answer them. Read the chapter and then answer the questions as best you can. Don’t look back at the answers in the book. You may not be able to answer all of them well, but that’s OK. Trying to answer the questions will improve your memory for the material. You can then go back and review the chapter to work on the gaps in your answers.

This short video describes and explains how to self-test effectively with practice questions.

Answer Study Guide Questions . A study guide from the instructor is a gift; use it! If the study guide includes practice test questions – use them!! An effective approach is to:

• Review the study guide questions for the assigned reading first.
• Read the assignment.
• Answer the questions without looking back at the material. Don’t answer the questions as you encounter them in the text. Don’t look up the answers or look back at the book! Try to answer the questions as best you can first.
• Check and revise your answers. Go back and compare your answers to the material and extend and refine your answers.
• The next time you read the assignment, review your answers and then study the material strategically – focusing on gaps in your understanding and weak spots in your answers.

Make your own practice questions/quizzes.  Initially, read and test yourself over new material (this type of test is called “free recall”). Then while the material is still fresh, go back and write a few questions to use as practice quiz questions. Testing yourself with specific questions is known as “cued recall,” because the question itself reminds you of the topics to be remembered. Use your practice questions to self-test each time you study. Cued recall questions make self-testing a bit easier than trying to remember and write down everything you remember as in free recall.

This short video explains how to make and use your own practice questions.

Concept Cards . Most classes involve learning many new concepts. You can use “Concept Cards” to learn this type of material. For a discussion of how to use “Concept Cards” for self-testing, view this short video.

Research shows that many college students use flashcards to learn specific ideas, concepts, formulas, and terminology. Flashcards can be a potent form of self-testing, students often misuse flashcards in several ways that undermines their effectiveness. If you use or plan to use flashcards, check out  Research-based Guidelines for Using Flashcards to Improve Learning .

How to Improve at Self-Testing

Dozens of research studies have documented significant gains in student learning by using retrieval practice. Self-testing can help you achieve more robust and durable knowledge and skills — but only if you use it appropriately. This section examines how to use self-testing most effectively. To appreciate some subtle, but important differences in self-testing techniques read the three brief scenarios below. For each scenario, decide whether one of the approaches would result in better learning than the other, and explain your choice.

Scenario 1 : An instructor tells students that the next exam will involve analyzing and applying course concepts to important real-life problems and identifies several types of problems that might be on the test. Students decide to use flashcards for self-testing.

• Student A  makes a set of flashcards that involve learning the definitions of the major concepts in the unit. Each card has the concept name on one side and the definition on the other.
• Student B  makes a set of flashcards that involve application of the course content to the types of problems the instructors identified. Each flashcard describes a problem on one side and on the other side are ideas about how to address the problem based on the course content.

Q:  Which set of flashcards is likely to be better for studying? Explain your choice.

Scenario 2 : Students make a set of practice questions of the major concepts and topics to be covered on the next exam. For each question they also make a correct “model answer.” They schedule three study sessions to self-test with the practice questions.

• At all three practice sessions,  Student A  answers all of the practice questions. After answering the questions, she compares her answers to the model answers.
• At the first session,  Student B  answers all the practice questions, and compares his answers to the model answers. He removes the questions he answered correctly and puts them aside. At the second practice quiz session,  B  answers only the questions he did not answer correctly in the first session. At the third practice session he works only on questions he did not answer correctly in previous sessions.

Q:  Which flashcard approach is likely to be more effective? Explain your answer.

Scenario 3 : Students prepare a set of practice quizzes that include the major concepts for the test and schedule a few study sessions to take the practice quizzes.

• In working on the practice quizzes,  Student A  encounters some questions she thinks she does not know and skips over them. She reviews the answers to the skipped questions at the end of the quiz.
• In working on the practice quizzes,  Student B  tries to answer all of the questions as best he can even when he thinks he doesn’t know the answer.

Q : Which practice quiz approach is likely to be more effective? Explain your answer.

Compare your answers to the research-based predictions .

Keys to optimizing your learning from self-testing :

• Try to make sure you have practice questions that encompass the important material for the test. Use guidance from your instructor to determine what concepts are important and also your own judgment based on the material that has been emphasized most.
• Use practice questions that target the kind of thinking needed for the test. If the test requires you to be able to recognize or create examples of concepts, then include some practice questions that involve thinking of examples. If you need to analyze concepts on the test, use practice questions that involve analysis of concepts. Research has shown that students tend to make practice questions that involve definitions of concepts. These are OK if all you need to do on the test is define concepts. But these will not help much if he questions involve more complex thinking. For examples of how to write practice questions see pp. 2-5 of Research-Based Guidelines for Using Flashcards to Improve Your Learning .
• Continue to practice after you answer questions correctly. Answer questions correctly multiple times at several study sessions. Some researchers advocate answering a question correctly 9 times, 3 times at 3 different study sessions. Think of it this way — for most skills we keep practicing even if we do something correctly once or a few times. We keep practicing until we can do it correctly every time, on demand.
• Answer practice questions even when you think you know the answer . Sometimes when students think they know an answer they skip over the question without really trying to answer it. But, recall improves your learning and memory every time — even when you already know the answer. Don’t skip over it.
• Answer practice questions even when you think you don’t know the answer . Again, trying to recall information from memory strengthens your memory as you make more associations and connections with the material. Research has shown that the best time to practice retrieval is after you have started to forget the material. This means the concepts may be harder to remember but the effort will have a positive effect on long-term learning.

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Understanding Assignments

What this handout is about.

The first step in any successful college writing venture is reading the assignment. While this sounds like a simple task, it can be a tough one. This handout will help you unravel your assignment and begin to craft an effective response. Much of the following advice will involve translating typical assignment terms and practices into meaningful clues to the type of writing your instructor expects. See our short video for more tips.

Basic beginnings

Regardless of the assignment, department, or instructor, adopting these two habits will serve you well :

• Read the assignment carefully as soon as you receive it. Do not put this task off—reading the assignment at the beginning will save you time, stress, and problems later. An assignment can look pretty straightforward at first, particularly if the instructor has provided lots of information. That does not mean it will not take time and effort to complete; you may even have to learn a new skill to complete the assignment.
• Ask the instructor about anything you do not understand. Do not hesitate to approach your instructor. Instructors would prefer to set you straight before you hand the paper in. That’s also when you will find their feedback most useful.

Assignment formats

Many assignments follow a basic format. Assignments often begin with an overview of the topic, include a central verb or verbs that describe the task, and offer some additional suggestions, questions, or prompts to get you started.

An Overview of Some Kind

The instructor might set the stage with some general discussion of the subject of the assignment, introduce the topic, or remind you of something pertinent that you have discussed in class. For example:

“Throughout history, gerbils have played a key role in politics,” or “In the last few weeks of class, we have focused on the evening wear of the housefly …”

The Task of the Assignment

Pay attention; this part tells you what to do when you write the paper. Look for the key verb or verbs in the sentence. Words like analyze, summarize, or compare direct you to think about your topic in a certain way. Also pay attention to words such as how, what, when, where, and why; these words guide your attention toward specific information. (See the section in this handout titled “Key Terms” for more information.)

“Analyze the effect that gerbils had on the Russian Revolution”, or “Suggest an interpretation of housefly undergarments that differs from Darwin’s.”

Additional Material to Think about

Here you will find some questions to use as springboards as you begin to think about the topic. Instructors usually include these questions as suggestions rather than requirements. Do not feel compelled to answer every question unless the instructor asks you to do so. Pay attention to the order of the questions. Sometimes they suggest the thinking process your instructor imagines you will need to follow to begin thinking about the topic.

“You may wish to consider the differing views held by Communist gerbils vs. Monarchist gerbils, or Can there be such a thing as ‘the housefly garment industry’ or is it just a home-based craft?”

These are the instructor’s comments about writing expectations:

“Be concise”, “Write effectively”, or “Argue furiously.”

Technical Details

These instructions usually indicate format rules or guidelines.

“Your paper must be typed in Palatino font on gray paper and must not exceed 600 pages. It is due on the anniversary of Mao Tse-tung’s death.”

The assignment’s parts may not appear in exactly this order, and each part may be very long or really short. Nonetheless, being aware of this standard pattern can help you understand what your instructor wants you to do.

Interpreting the assignment

Ask yourself a few basic questions as you read and jot down the answers on the assignment sheet:

Why did your instructor ask you to do this particular task?

Who is your audience.

• What kind of evidence do you need to support your ideas?

What kind of writing style is acceptable?

• What are the absolute rules of the paper?

Try to look at the question from the point of view of the instructor. Recognize that your instructor has a reason for giving you this assignment and for giving it to you at a particular point in the semester. In every assignment, the instructor has a challenge for you. This challenge could be anything from demonstrating an ability to think clearly to demonstrating an ability to use the library. See the assignment not as a vague suggestion of what to do but as an opportunity to show that you can handle the course material as directed. Paper assignments give you more than a topic to discuss—they ask you to do something with the topic. Keep reminding yourself of that. Be careful to avoid the other extreme as well: do not read more into the assignment than what is there.

Of course, your instructor has given you an assignment so that they will be able to assess your understanding of the course material and give you an appropriate grade. But there is more to it than that. Your instructor has tried to design a learning experience of some kind. Your instructor wants you to think about something in a particular way for a particular reason. If you read the course description at the beginning of your syllabus, review the assigned readings, and consider the assignment itself, you may begin to see the plan, purpose, or approach to the subject matter that your instructor has created for you. If you still aren’t sure of the assignment’s goals, try asking the instructor. For help with this, see our handout on getting feedback .

Given your instructor’s efforts, it helps to answer the question: What is my purpose in completing this assignment? Is it to gather research from a variety of outside sources and present a coherent picture? Is it to take material I have been learning in class and apply it to a new situation? Is it to prove a point one way or another? Key words from the assignment can help you figure this out. Look for key terms in the form of active verbs that tell you what to do.

Key Terms: Finding Those Active Verbs

Here are some common key words and definitions to help you think about assignment terms:

Information words Ask you to demonstrate what you know about the subject, such as who, what, when, where, how, and why.

• define —give the subject’s meaning (according to someone or something). Sometimes you have to give more than one view on the subject’s meaning
• describe —provide details about the subject by answering question words (such as who, what, when, where, how, and why); you might also give details related to the five senses (what you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell)
• explain —give reasons why or examples of how something happened
• illustrate —give descriptive examples of the subject and show how each is connected with the subject
• summarize —briefly list the important ideas you learned about the subject
• trace —outline how something has changed or developed from an earlier time to its current form
• research —gather material from outside sources about the subject, often with the implication or requirement that you will analyze what you have found

Relation words Ask you to demonstrate how things are connected.

• compare —show how two or more things are similar (and, sometimes, different)
• contrast —show how two or more things are dissimilar
• apply —use details that you’ve been given to demonstrate how an idea, theory, or concept works in a particular situation
• cause —show how one event or series of events made something else happen
• relate —show or describe the connections between things

Interpretation words Ask you to defend ideas of your own about the subject. Do not see these words as requesting opinion alone (unless the assignment specifically says so), but as requiring opinion that is supported by concrete evidence. Remember examples, principles, definitions, or concepts from class or research and use them in your interpretation.

• assess —summarize your opinion of the subject and measure it against something
• prove, justify —give reasons or examples to demonstrate how or why something is the truth
• evaluate, respond —state your opinion of the subject as good, bad, or some combination of the two, with examples and reasons
• support —give reasons or evidence for something you believe (be sure to state clearly what it is that you believe)
• synthesize —put two or more things together that have not been put together in class or in your readings before; do not just summarize one and then the other and say that they are similar or different—you must provide a reason for putting them together that runs all the way through the paper
• analyze —determine how individual parts create or relate to the whole, figure out how something works, what it might mean, or why it is important
• argue —take a side and defend it with evidence against the other side

More Clues to Your Purpose As you read the assignment, think about what the teacher does in class:

• What kinds of textbooks or coursepack did your instructor choose for the course—ones that provide background information, explain theories or perspectives, or argue a point of view?
• In lecture, does your instructor ask your opinion, try to prove their point of view, or use keywords that show up again in the assignment?
• What kinds of assignments are typical in this discipline? Social science classes often expect more research. Humanities classes thrive on interpretation and analysis.
• How do the assignments, readings, and lectures work together in the course? Instructors spend time designing courses, sometimes even arguing with their peers about the most effective course materials. Figuring out the overall design to the course will help you understand what each assignment is meant to achieve.

Now, what about your reader? Most undergraduates think of their audience as the instructor. True, your instructor is a good person to keep in mind as you write. But for the purposes of a good paper, think of your audience as someone like your roommate: smart enough to understand a clear, logical argument, but not someone who already knows exactly what is going on in your particular paper. Remember, even if the instructor knows everything there is to know about your paper topic, they still have to read your paper and assess your understanding. In other words, teach the material to your reader.

Aiming a paper at your audience happens in two ways: you make decisions about the tone and the level of information you want to convey.

• Tone means the “voice” of your paper. Should you be chatty, formal, or objective? Usually you will find some happy medium—you do not want to alienate your reader by sounding condescending or superior, but you do not want to, um, like, totally wig on the man, you know? Eschew ostentatious erudition: some students think the way to sound academic is to use big words. Be careful—you can sound ridiculous, especially if you use the wrong big words.
• The level of information you use depends on who you think your audience is. If you imagine your audience as your instructor and they already know everything you have to say, you may find yourself leaving out key information that can cause your argument to be unconvincing and illogical. But you do not have to explain every single word or issue. If you are telling your roommate what happened on your favorite science fiction TV show last night, you do not say, “First a dark-haired white man of average height, wearing a suit and carrying a flashlight, walked into the room. Then a purple alien with fifteen arms and at least three eyes turned around. Then the man smiled slightly. In the background, you could hear a clock ticking. The room was fairly dark and had at least two windows that I saw.” You also do not say, “This guy found some aliens. The end.” Find some balance of useful details that support your main point.

You’ll find a much more detailed discussion of these concepts in our handout on audience .

The Grim Truth

With a few exceptions (including some lab and ethnography reports), you are probably being asked to make an argument. You must convince your audience. It is easy to forget this aim when you are researching and writing; as you become involved in your subject matter, you may become enmeshed in the details and focus on learning or simply telling the information you have found. You need to do more than just repeat what you have read. Your writing should have a point, and you should be able to say it in a sentence. Sometimes instructors call this sentence a “thesis” or a “claim.”

So, if your instructor tells you to write about some aspect of oral hygiene, you do not want to just list: “First, you brush your teeth with a soft brush and some peanut butter. Then, you floss with unwaxed, bologna-flavored string. Finally, gargle with bourbon.” Instead, you could say, “Of all the oral cleaning methods, sandblasting removes the most plaque. Therefore it should be recommended by the American Dental Association.” Or, “From an aesthetic perspective, moldy teeth can be quite charming. However, their joys are short-lived.”

Convincing the reader of your argument is the goal of academic writing. It doesn’t have to say “argument” anywhere in the assignment for you to need one. Look at the assignment and think about what kind of argument you could make about it instead of just seeing it as a checklist of information you have to present. For help with understanding the role of argument in academic writing, see our handout on argument .

What kind of evidence do you need?

There are many kinds of evidence, and what type of evidence will work for your assignment can depend on several factors–the discipline, the parameters of the assignment, and your instructor’s preference. Should you use statistics? Historical examples? Do you need to conduct your own experiment? Can you rely on personal experience? See our handout on evidence for suggestions on how to use evidence appropriately.

Make sure you are clear about this part of the assignment, because your use of evidence will be crucial in writing a successful paper. You are not just learning how to argue; you are learning how to argue with specific types of materials and ideas. Ask your instructor what counts as acceptable evidence. You can also ask a librarian for help. No matter what kind of evidence you use, be sure to cite it correctly—see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial .

You cannot always tell from the assignment just what sort of writing style your instructor expects. The instructor may be really laid back in class but still expect you to sound formal in writing. Or the instructor may be fairly formal in class and ask you to write a reflection paper where you need to use “I” and speak from your own experience.

Try to avoid false associations of a particular field with a style (“art historians like wacky creativity,” or “political scientists are boring and just give facts”) and look instead to the types of readings you have been given in class. No one expects you to write like Plato—just use the readings as a guide for what is standard or preferable to your instructor. When in doubt, ask your instructor about the level of formality they expect.

No matter what field you are writing for or what facts you are including, if you do not write so that your reader can understand your main idea, you have wasted your time. So make clarity your main goal. For specific help with style, see our handout on style .

Technical details about the assignment

The technical information you are given in an assignment always seems like the easy part. This section can actually give you lots of little hints about approaching the task. Find out if elements such as page length and citation format (see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial ) are negotiable. Some professors do not have strong preferences as long as you are consistent and fully answer the assignment. Some professors are very specific and will deduct big points for deviations.

Usually, the page length tells you something important: The instructor thinks the size of the paper is appropriate to the assignment’s parameters. In plain English, your instructor is telling you how many pages it should take for you to answer the question as fully as you are expected to. So if an assignment is two pages long, you cannot pad your paper with examples or reword your main idea several times. Hit your one point early, defend it with the clearest example, and finish quickly. If an assignment is ten pages long, you can be more complex in your main points and examples—and if you can only produce five pages for that assignment, you need to see someone for help—as soon as possible.

Tricks that don’t work

Your instructors are not fooled when you:

• spend more time on the cover page than the essay —graphics, cool binders, and cute titles are no replacement for a well-written paper.
• use huge fonts, wide margins, or extra spacing to pad the page length —these tricks are immediately obvious to the eye. Most instructors use the same word processor you do. They know what’s possible. Such tactics are especially damning when the instructor has a stack of 60 papers to grade and yours is the only one that low-flying airplane pilots could read.
• use a paper from another class that covered “sort of similar” material . Again, the instructor has a particular task for you to fulfill in the assignment that usually relates to course material and lectures. Your other paper may not cover this material, and turning in the same paper for more than one course may constitute an Honor Code violation . Ask the instructor—it can’t hurt.
• get all wacky and “creative” before you answer the question . Showing that you are able to think beyond the boundaries of a simple assignment can be good, but you must do what the assignment calls for first. Again, check with your instructor. A humorous tone can be refreshing for someone grading a stack of papers, but it will not get you a good grade if you have not fulfilled the task.

Critical reading of assignments leads to skills in other types of reading and writing. If you get good at figuring out what the real goals of assignments are, you are going to be better at understanding the goals of all of your classes and fields of study.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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3.8 Memory, Studying, and Test Taking

Student Survey

How confident are you in preparing for and taking tests? Take this quick survey to figure it out, ranking questions on a scale of 1–4, 1 meaning “least like me” and 4 meaning “most like me.” These questions will help you determine how the section concepts relate to you right now. As you are introduced to new concepts and practices, it can be informative to reflect on how your understanding changes over time. We’ll revisit these questions at the end of the section to see whether your feelings have changed.

• I set aside enough time to prepare for tests.
• If I don’t set aside enough time, or if life gets in the way, I can usually cram and get positive results.
• I prefer to pull all-nighters. The adrenaline and urgency help me remember what I need come test time.
• I study my notes, highlight book passages, and use flash cards, but I still don’t feel like I’m as successful as I should be on tests.

You can also take the Memory, Studying, & Test Taking Survey anonymously below.

About this Section

By the time you finish this section, you should be able to do the following:

• Outline the importance of memory when studying, and note some opportunities to strengthen memory.
• Discuss specific ways to increase the effectiveness of studying.
• Articulate test-taking strategies that minimize anxiety and maximize results.

Kerri didn’t need to study in high school. She made good grades, and her friends considered her lucky because she never seemed to sweat exams or cram. In reality, Kerri did her studying during school hours, took excellent notes in class, asked great questions, and read the material before class meetings—all of these are excellent strategies. Kerri just seemed to do them without much fuss.

Then when she got to college, those same skills weren’t always working as well. Sound familiar? She discovered that, for many classes, she needed to read paragraphs and textbook passages more than once for comprehension. Her notes from class sessions were longer and more involved—the subject material was more complicated and the problems more complex than she had ever encountered. College isn’t high school, as most students realize shortly after enrolling in a higher ed program. Some old study habits and test-taking strategies may serve as a good foundation, but others may need major modification.

It makes sense that, the better you are at studying and test taking, the better results you’ll see in the form of high grades and long-term learning and knowledge acquisition. And the more experience you have using your study and memorization skills and employing success strategies during exams, the better you’ll get at it. But you have to keep it up—maintaining these skills and learning better strategies as the content you study becomes increasingly complex is crucial to your success. Once you transition into a work environment, you will be able to use these same skills that helped you be successful in college as you face the problem-solving demands and expectations of your job. Earning high grades is one goal, and certainly a good one when you’re in college, but true learning means committing content to long-term memory.

Questions to consider:

• How does working memory work, exactly?
• What’s the difference between working and short-term memory?
• How does long-term memory function?
• What obstacles exist to remembering?
• When and how should you memorize things?

In what situations is it best to memorize, and what do you memorize?

What can you do consistently to improve both your short- and long-term memory?

Memory  is one of those cherished but mysterious elements in life. Everyone has memories, and some people are very good at rapid recall, which is an enviable skill for test takers. We know that we seem to lose the capacity to remember things as we age, and scientists continue to study how we remember some things but not others and what memory means, but we don’t know that much about memory, really.

Nelson Cowan is one researcher who is working to explain what we do know about memory. His article “What Are the Differences between Long-Term, Short-Term, and Working Memory?” breaks down the different types of memory and what happens when we recall thoughts and ideas. When we remember something, we actually do quite a lot of thinking. 1

We go through three basic steps when we remember ideas or images: we encode, store, and retrieve that information. Encoding is how we first perceive information through our senses, such as when we smell a lovely flower or a putrid trash bin. Both make an impression on our minds through our sense of smell and probably our vision. Our brains encode, or label, this content in short-term memory in case we want to think about it again.

If the information is important and we have frequent exposure to it, the brain will store it for us in case we need to use it in the future in our aptly named long-term memory. Later, the brain will allow us to recall or retrieve that image, feeling, or information so we can do something with it. This is what we call remembering.

Take a few minutes to list ways you create memories on a daily basis. Do you think about how you make memories? Do you do anything that helps you keep track of your memories?

Foundations of Memory

William Sumrall et al. in the  International Journal of Humanities and Social Science  explain the foundation of memory by noting: “Memory is a term applied to numerous biological devices by which living organisms acquire, retain, and make use of skills and knowledge. It is present in all forms of higher order animals. The most evolutionary forms of memory have taken place in human beings. Despite much research and exploration, a complete understanding of human memory does not exist.” 2

Working Memory

Working memory  is a type of short-term memory, but we use it when we are actively performing a task. For example, nursing student Marilyn needs to use her knowledge of chemical reactions to suggest appropriate prescriptions in various medical case studies. She does not have to recall every single fact she learned in years of chemistry classes, but she does need to have a working memory of certain chemicals and how they work with others. To ensure she can make these connections, Marilyn will have to review and study the relevant chemical details for the types of drug interactions she will recommend in the case studies.

In working memory, you have access to whatever information you have stored in your memory that helps you complete the task you are performing. For instance, when you begin to study an assignment, you certainly need to read the directions, but you must also remember that in class your professor reduced the number of problem sets the written instructions indicated you needed to finish. This was an oral addition to the written assignment. The change to the instructions is what you bring up in working memory when you complete the assignment.

Short-Term Memory

Short-term memory  is a very handy thing. It helps us remember where we set our keys or where we left off on a project the day before. Think about all the aids we employ to help us with short-term memory: you may hang your keys in a particular place each evening so you know exactly where they are supposed to be. When you go grocery shopping, do you ever choose a product because you recall an advertising jingle? You see the box of cereal and you remember the song on the TV commercial. If that memory causes you to buy that product, the advertising worked. We help our memory along all the time, which is perfectly fine. In fact, we can modify these everyday examples of memory assistance for purposes of studying and test taking. The key is deliberate use of strategies that are not so elaborate that they are too difficult to remember in our short-term memory.

Consider this list of items. Look at the list for no more than 30 seconds. Then, cover up the list and use the spaces below to complete an activity.

Without looking at the list, write down as many items as you can remember.

Now, look back at your list and make sure that you give yourself credit for any that you got right. Any items that you misremembered, meaning they were not in the original list, you won’t count in your total. TOTAL ITEMS REMEMBERED _______________________.

There were 20 total items. Did you remember between 5 and 9 items? If you did, then you have a typical short-term memory and you just participated in an experiment, of sorts, to prove it.

Harvard psychology professor George A. Miller in 1956 claimed humans can recall about five to nine bits of information in our short-term memory at any given time. Other research has come after this claim, but this concept is a popular one. Miller’s article is entitled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” and is easily accessible online if you’re interested in learning more about this seminar report. 3

Considering the vast amount of knowledge available to us, five to nine bits isn’t very much to work with. To combat this limitation, we clump information together, making connections to help us stretch our capacity to remember. Many factors play into how much we can remember and how we do it, including the subject matter, how familiar we are with the ideas, and how interested we are in the topic, but we certainly cannot remember absolutely everything, for a test or any other task we face. As such, we have to use effective strategies, like those we cover later in this chapter, to get the most out of our memories.

Now, let’s revisit the items above. Go back to them and see if you can organize them in a way that you would have about five groups of items. See below for an example of how to group them.

Row 1: Items found in a kitchen

Row 2: Items that a child would play with

Row 3: Items of nature

Row 4: Items in a desk drawer/school supplies

Row 5: Items found in a bedroom

Now that you have grouped items into categories, also known as chunking, you can work on remembering the categories and the items that fit into those categories, which will result in remembering more items. Check it out below by covering up the list of items again and writing down what you can remember.

Now, look back at your list and make sure that you give yourself credit for any that you got right. Any items that you misremembered, meaning they were not in the original list, you won’t count in your total. TOTAL ITEMS REMEMBERED _______________________. Did you increase how many items you could remember?

Long-Term Memory

Long-term memory  is exactly what it sounds like. These are things you recall from the past, such as the smell of your elementary school cafeteria or how to pop a wheelie on a bicycle. Our brain keeps a vast array of information, images, and sensory experiences in long-term memory. Whatever it is we are trying to keep in our memories, whether a beautiful song or a list of chemistry vocabulary terms, must first come into our brains in short-term memory. If we want these fleeting ideas to transfer into long-term memory, we have to do some work, such as causing frequent exposure to the information over time (such as studying the terms every day for a period of time or the repetition you performed to memorize multiplication tables or spelling rules) and some relevant manipulation for the information.

According to Alison Preston of the University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Learning and Memory, “A short-term memory’s conversion to a long-term memory requires changes within the brain . . . and result[s] in changes to neurons (nerve cells) or sets of neurons. . . . For example, new synapses—the connections between neurons through which they exchange information—can form to allow for communication between new networks of neurons. Alternatively, existing synapses can be strengthened to allow for increased sensitivity in the communication between two neurons.” 4

When you work to convert your thoughts into memories, you are literally  changing your mind.  Much of this brain work begins in the part of the brain called the  hippocampus . Preston continues, “Initially, the hippocampus works in concert with sensory-processing regions distributed in the neocortex (the outermost layer of the brain) to form the new memories. Within the neocortex, representations of the elements that constitute an event in our life are distributed across multiple brain regions according to their content. . . . When a memory is first formed, the hippocampus rapidly combines this distributed information into a single memory, thus acting as an index of representations in the sensory-processing regions. As time passes, cellular and molecular changes allow for the strengthening of direct connections among the neocortical regions, enabling access to the memory independent of the hippocampus.”

We learn the lyrics of a favorite song by singing and/or playing the song over and over. That alone may not be enough to get that song into the coveted long-term memory area of our brain, but if we have an emotional connection to the song, such as a painful breakup or a life-changing proposal that occurred while we were listening to the song, this may help. Think of ways to make your study session memorable and create connections with the information you need to study. That way, you have a better chance of keeping your study material in your memory so you can access it whenever you need it.

What are some ways you convert short-term memories into long-term memories?

Do your memorization strategies differ for specific courses (e.g., how you remember for math or history)?

Obstacles to Remembering

If remembering things we need to know for exams or for learning new disciplines were easy, no one would have problems with it, but students face several significant obstacles to remembering, including a persistent lack of sleep and an unrealistic reliance on cramming. Life is busy and stressful for all students, so you have to keep practicing strategies to help you study and remember successfully, but you also must be mindful of obstacles to remembering.

Lack of Sleep

Let’s face it, sleep and college don’t always go well together. You have so much to do! All that reading, all those papers, all those extra hours in the science lab or tutoring center or library! And then we have the social and emotional aspects of going to school, which may not be the most critical aspect of your life as you pursue more education but are a significant part of who you are. When you consider everything you need to attend to in college, you probably won’t be surprised that sleep is often the first thing we give up as we search for more time to accomplish everything we’re trying to do. That seems reasonable—just wake up an hour earlier or stay up a little later. But you may want to reconsider picking away at your precious sleep time.

Sleep benefits all of your bodily functions, and your brain needs sleep time to dream and rest through the night. You probably can recall times when you had to do something without adequate sleep. We say things like “I just can’t wake up” and “I’m walking around half asleep.”

In fact, you may actually be doing just that. Lack of sleep impairs judgment, focus, and our overall mood. Do you know anyone who is always grumpy in the morning? A fascinating medical study from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) claims that sleep deprivation is as dangerous as being drunk, both in what it does to our bodies and in the harm we may cause to ourselves and others in driving and performing various daily tasks. 5 6

If you can’t focus well because you didn’t get enough sleep, then you likely won’t be able to remember whatever it is you need to recall for any sort of studying or test-taking situation. Most exams in a college setting go beyond simple memorization, but you still have a lot to remember for exams. For example, when Saanvi sits down to take an exam on introductory biology, she needs to recall all the subject-specific vocabulary she read in the textbook’s opening chapters, the general connections she made between biological studies and other scientific fields, and any biology details introduced in the unit for which she is taking the exam.

Trying to make these mental connections on too little sleep will take a large mental toll because Saanvi has to concentrate even harder than she would with adequate sleep. She isn’t merely tired; her brain is not refreshed and primed to conduct difficult tasks. Although not an exact comparison, think about when you overtax a computer by opening too many programs simultaneously. Sometimes the programs are sluggish or slow to respond, making it difficult to work efficiently; sometimes the computer shuts down completely and you have to reboot the entire system. Your body is a bit like that on too little sleep.

On the flip side, though, your brain on adequate sleep is amazing, and sleep can actually assist you in making connections, remembering difficult concepts, and studying for exams. The exact reasons for this is still a serious research project for scientists, but the results all point to a solid connection between sleep and cognitive performance.

If you’re interested in learning more about this research, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) is a good place to start. One article is entitled “College Students: Getting Enough Sleep Is Vital to Academic Success.”

How long do you sleep every night on average? Do you see a change in your ability to function when you haven’t had enough sleep? What could you do to limit the number of nights with too little sleep?

Downside of Cramming

At least once in their college careers, most students will experience the well-known pastime called  cramming . See if any of this is familiar: Shelley has lots of classes, works part-time at a popular restaurant, and is just amazingly busy, so she puts off serious study sessions day after day. She isn’t worried because she has set aside time she would have spent sleeping to cram just before the exam. That’s the idea anyway. Originally, she planned to stay up a little late and study for four hours from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. and still get several hours of refreshing sleep. But it’s Dolphin Week or Beat State Day or whatever else comes up, and her study session doesn’t start until midnight—she’ll pull an  all-nighter  (to be more precise, this is actually an  all-really-early-morning-er,  but it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it). So, two hours after her original start time, she tries to  cram  all the lessons, problems, and information from the last two weeks of lessons into this one session. Shelley falls asleep around 3 a.m. with her notes and books still on her bed. After her late night, she doesn’t sleep well and goes into the morning exam tired.

Shelley does OK but not great on the exam, and she is not pleased with her results. More and more research is showing that the stress Shelley has put on her body doing this, combined with the way our brains work, makes cramming a seriously poor choice for learning.

One sleep researcher, Dr. Susan Redline from Boston, says, “Sleep deficiency can affect mood and the ability to make memories and learn, but it also affects metabolism, appetite, blood pressure, levels of inflammation in the body and perhaps even the immune response.” 7

Your brain simply refuses to cooperate with cramming—it sounds like a good idea, but it doesn’t work. Cramming causes stress, which can lead to paralyzing test anxiety; it erroneously supposes you can remember and understand something fully after only minimal exposure; and it overloads your brain, which, however amazing it is, can only focus on one concept at a time and a limited number of concepts all together for learning and retention.

Leading neuroscientist John Medina claims that the brain begins to wander at about 10 minutes, at which point you need a new stimulus to spark interest. 8  That doesn’t mean you can’t focus for longer than 10 minutes; you just have to switch gears a lot to keep your brain engaged. Have you ever heard a speaker drone on about one concept for, say, 30 minutes without somehow changing pace to engage the listeners? It doesn’t take much to re-engage—pausing to ask the listeners questions or moving to a different location in the room will do it—but without these subtle attention markers, listeners start thinking of something else. The same thing happens to you if you try to cram all reading, problem-solving, and note reviewing into one long session; your brain will wander.

• Reading or rereading the text or my class notes.
• Watching videos of my instructor’s lecture or other people discussing the topics.
• Taking practice quizzes/tests.
• Creating/using study tools (flashcards, mnemonic devices, etc.)
• Working with a study group, tutor, or academic support.
• Vocabulary and facts (such as Biology vocab, Historical facts.)
• Problem-solving methods (such as in Math)
• Details from text and literature
• Skills and processes (such as a lab technique or a building process)
• Computer functions/locations/processes
• Which formulas, processes, or categories to apply in situations (such as in Physics or Accounting)
• A great deal
• A moderate amount
• None at all

You can also take the What Students Say survey anonymously below.

Students offered their views on these questions, and the results are displayed in the graphs below.

Which of the following is your most common method of studying?

Which of the following do you have the most difficulty remembering?

How much anxiety do you feel when an exam or other major course evaluation is approaching?

Determining When/What to Memorize

In the realm of learning and studying, some conditions warrant memorization as the most effective way to work with information. For instance, if you are expected to have a working knowledge of conversational French or Spanish, you will have to memorize some words. Simply knowing a long list of terms isn’t going to help you order food in a café or ask for directions in a foreign country because you also need to understand the other language’s grammar and have some sort of context for what needs to be said from your vocabulary list. But you cannot say the words in a different language if you cannot remember your vocabulary. From this scenario, you can assume that memorization is a good fit for some parts of language acquisition.

A worthwhile book on memory, thinking, and learning is a short study called  Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning  by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel. The authors conclude, after extensive research, that our attempts to speed up learning and make studying easier are not good ideas. Studying is hard work, and it should be. For learning to  stick , we need to work hard to pull the information out of our memory and use it by continually pushing ourselves to accomplish increasingly difficult tasks. 9

• How do you prepare yourself and your environment for successful studying?
• What study strategies will be most beneficial to you?
• What are learning preferences and strategies, and how can you leverage those to your advantage?

Preparing to Study

Studying is hard work, but you can still learn some techniques to help you be a more effective learner. Two major and interrelated techniques involve avoiding distractions to the best of your ability and creating a study environment that works to help you concentrate.

Avoiding Distractions

We have always had distractions—video games, television shows, movies, music, friends—even housecleaning can distract us from doing something else we need to do, like study for an exam. That may seem extreme, but sometimes vacuuming is the preferred activity to buckling down and working through calculus problems! Cell phones, tablets, and portable computers that literally bring a world of possibilities to us anywhere have brought  distraction  to an entirely new level. When was the last time you were with a large group of people when you didn’t see at least a few people on devices?

When you study, your biggest challenge may be to block out all the competing noise. And letting go of that connection to our friends and the larger world, even for a short amount of time, can be difficult. Perhaps the least stressful way to allow yourself a distraction-free environment is to make the study session a definite amount of time: long enough to get a significant amount of studying accomplished but short enough to hold your attention.

You can increase that attention time with practice and focus. Pretend it is a professional appointment or meeting during which you cannot check e-mail or texts or otherwise engage with your portable devices. We have all become very attached to the ability to check in—anonymously on social media or with family and friends via text, chat, and calls. If you set a specific amount of time to study without interruptions, you can convince your wandering mind that you will soon be able to return to your link to the outside world. Start small and set an alarm—a 30-minute period to review notes, then a brief break, then another 45-minute study session to quiz yourself on the material, and so on.

When you prepare for your optimal study session, remember to do these things:

• Put your phone out of sight—in another room or at least some place where you will not see or hear it vibrate or ring. Just flipping it over is not enough.
• Turn off the television or music (more on that in the next section).
• Unless you are deliberately working with a study group, study somewhere alone if possible or at least away from others enough to not hear them talking.

If you live with lots of other people or don’t have access to much privacy, see if you can negotiate some space alone to study. Ask others to leave one part of the house or an area in one room as a quiet zone during certain hours. Ask politely for a specific block of time; most people will respect your educational goals and be willing to accommodate you. If you’re trying to work out quiet zones with small children in the house, the bathtub with a pillow can make a fine study oasis.

Study Environment

You may not always be in the mood or inspired to study. And if you have a long deadline, maybe you can blow off a study session on occasion, but you shouldn’t get into the habit of ignoring a strong study routine. Jane Austen once wrote in a letter, “I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.” Sometimes just starting is the hard part; go ahead and begin. Don’t wait around for your study muse; start working, and she’ll show up.

Sometimes you just need to plop down and study whenever and wherever you can manage—in the car waiting for someone, on the bus, at the Little League field as you cheer on your shortstop. And that’s OK if this is the exception. For long-term success in studying, though, you need a better study setting that will help you get the most out of your limited study time. Whatever your space limitations, carve out a place that you can dedicate to reading, writing, note taking, and reviewing. This doesn’t need to be elaborate and expensive—all you truly need is a flat surface large enough to hold either your computer or writing paper, book or notes, pens/pencils/markers, and subject-specific materials you may need (e.g., stand-alone calculators, drawing tools, and notepads). Your space should be cool or warm enough for you to be comfortable as you study. What do you have now that you consider your study space? Is it set up for your optimal success?

If it is at all possible, try to make this area exclusive to your study sessions and something you can leave set up all the time and a place out of the way of family or roommate traffic. For example, Martina thought setting up her study station on the dining room table was a good idea at first. The view was calming, and the table was big enough to spread out and could even hold all her materials to study architectural drawings, her favorite subject. But then she needed the table for a small family dinner party, so she had to find a cubbyhole to hide away her supplies with some needing to go into a closet in the next room. Now she was spread out over multiple study spaces. And the family TV was in an adjacent room, not visible from the table but certainly an auditory distraction. Martina ultimately decided to forgo her view and create a smaller station in an unused bedroom so she could leave her supplies out and have a quieter area. You may have to try out numerous places to determine what works best for you.

Wherever you study, try to make it a welcoming place you want to be in—not an uncomfortable environment that makes you want to just do the minimum you must complete and leave. You should include the basics: a good chair, a work surface, and whatever materials, books, notes, and other supplies you need for the subject you are studying. If you want to make it even more of a productive place, you can look in magazines for ideas or search the web to see how others have set up simple areas or more elaborate arrangements. Don’t let decorating your workspace be an excuse to get out of studying!

You don’t need an elaborate setting, but you may want to consider including a few effective additions if you have the space:

• small bulletin board for often-used formulas
• encouraging quotes or pictures of your goal
• whiteboard for brainstorming
• sticky notes for reminders in texts and notes
• file holder for most-used documents
• bookshelf for reference books

Describe every element in your ideal study environment and explain why it’s there as well as how it will make more efficient use of your time, limit distractions, or in some other way strengthen your ability to study.

After you have described your ideal study environment, think about how you can adapt that environment if you cannot be in your favorite place to study. How do you  make your own space  in the library, a student lounge, or a dedicated space on campus for student studying?

Debunking Study Myths

MYTH #1: You can multitask while studying.

How many times do you eat in the car? Watch TV while you write out a grocery list? Listen to music while you cook dinner? What about type an e-mail while you’re on the phone with someone else and jot down notes about the call? The common term for this attempt to do more than one thing at a time is multitasking, and almost everyone does it at some point. On some days, you simply cannot accomplish all that you want to get done, so you double up. The problem is, multitasking doesn’t really work. Of course, it exists, and we do it. For instance, we walk and chew gum or drive and talk, but we are not really thinking about two or more distinct things or doing multiple processes simultaneously.

MYTH #2: Highlighting main points of a text is useful.

Another myth of studying that seems to have a firm hold is that the idea of highlighting text—in and of itself—is the best way to review study material. It is one way, and you can get some benefit from it, but don’t trick yourself into spending too much time on this surface activity and consider your study session complete. Annotating texts or notes is a first-step type of study practice. If you allow it to take up all your time, you may want to think you are fully prepared for an exam because you put in the time. Actually, you need much more time reviewing and retrieving your lessons and ideas from the text or class lecture as well as quizzing yourself to accomplish your goal of learning so you can perform well on the exam. Highlighting is a task you can do rather easily, and it makes you feel good because you are actively engaging with your text, but true learning needs more steps.

MYTH #3: Studying effectively is effortless.

There is nothing effortless, or even pleasant at times, about studying. This is why so many students don’t put in the time necessary to learn complex material: it takes time, effort, and, in some cases, a little drudgery. This is not to say that the outcome, learning—and maybe making an A—is not pleasant and rewarding. It is just that when done right, learning takes focus, deliberate strategies, and time. Think about a superstar athlete who puts in countless hours of drills and conditioning so that she makes her work on the field look easy. If you can also  enjoy  the studying, the skill development, and the knowledge building, then you will most likely be more motivated to do the work.

When are you most liable to multitask? How could you be more aware of this practice and try to eliminate it, especially when it comes to studying? How can you make your initial text highlighting more time efficient so you can include other study practices?

Study Strategies

Everyone wishes they had a better memory or a stronger way to use memorization. You can make the most of the memory you have by making some conscious decisions about how you study and prepare for exams. Incorporate these ideas into your study sessions:

Practicing effective memorization is when you use a trick, technique, or strategy to recall something—for another class, an exam, or even to bring up an acquaintance’s name in a social situation. Really whatever works for you to recall information is a good tool to have. You can create your own quizzes and tests to go over material from class. You can use mnemonics to jog your memory. You can work in groups to develop unique ways to remember complex information. Whatever methods you choose to enhance your memory, keep in mind that repetition is one of the most effective tools in any memory strategy. Do whatever you do over and over for the best results.

Using Mnemonics

Mnemonics  (pronounced new-monics) are a way to remember things using reminders. Did you learn the points of the compass by remembering NEWS (north, east, west, and south)? Or the notes on the music staff as FACE or EGBDF (every good boy does fine)? These are mnemonics. When you’re first learning something and you aren’t familiar with the foundational concepts, these help you bring up the information quickly, especially for multistep processes or lists. After you’ve worked in that discipline for a while, you likely don’t need the mnemonics, but you probably won’t forget them either.

Here are some familiar mnemonics you may find useful:

You can certainly make up your own mnemonics, but be careful that your reminder isn’t so complex and convoluted that it is more difficult to remember than the information you were relating it to!

Do you have other mnemonics that help you remember difficult material? What are they? How have they helped you with remembering important things?

Practicing Concept Association

When you study, you’re going to make connections to other things—that’s a good thing. It shows a highly intelligent ability to make sense of the world when you can associate like and even somewhat unlike components. If, for instance, you were reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and you read the line that he had been in Birmingham, you may remember a trip you took with your family last summer through Alabama and that you passed by and visited the civil rights museum in Birmingham. This may remind you of the different displays you saw and the discussions you had with your family about what had happened concerning civil rights in the 1950s,’60s, and ’70s in the United States.

This is a good connection to make, but if your assignment is to critique the literary aspects of King’s long epistle, you need to be able to come back to the actual words of the letter and see what trends you can see in his writing and why he may have used his actual words to convey the powerful message. The connection is fine, but you can’t get lost in going down rabbit holes that may or may not be what you’re supposed to be doing at the time. Make a folder for this assignment where you can put things such as a short summary of your trip to Alabama. You may eventually include notes from this summary in your analysis. You may include something from a website that shows you information about that time period. Additionally, you could include items about Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and death and his work for civil rights. All of these elements may help you understand the significance of this one letter, but you need to be cognizant of what you’re doing at the time and remember it is not usually a good idea to just try to keep it all in your head. The best idea is to have a way to access this information easily, either electronically or in hard copy, so that if you are able to use it, you can find it easily and quickly.

Generating Idea Clusters

Like mnemonics, idea clusters are nothing more than ways to help your brain come up with ways to recall specific information by connecting it to other knowledge you already have. For example, Andrea is an avid knitter and remembers how to create complicated stitches by associating them with nursery rhymes she read as a child. A delicate stitch that requires concentration because it makes the yarn look like part of it is hiding brings to mind Red Riding Hood, and connecting it to that character helps Andrea recall the exact order of steps necessary to execute the design. You can do the same thing with song lyrics, lines from movies, or favorite stories where you draw a connection to the well-known phrase or song and the task you need to complete.

Application

Choose one of the following, and create an idea cluster to group and organize:

• Example A: aviation jobs in North America
• Example B: the use of analytics in sports to determine team rosters
• Example C: how social media affects political campaigns

Start the idea cluster with the topic circled in the middle of the page. For Example A, you might make one cluster off the main circle for specific positions; you could add another cluster for salary ranges and another for geographic regions.

Three Effective Study Strategies

There are more than three study strategies, but focusing on the most effective strategies will make an enormous difference in how well you will be able to demonstrate learning (also known as “acing your tests”). Here is a brief overview of each of the three strategies:

• Spacing—This has to do with  when  you study. Hint: Don’t cram; study over a period of days, preferably with “breaks” in between.
• Interleaving—This has to do with  what  you study. Hint: Don’t study just one type of content, topic, chapter, or unit at a time; instead, mix up the content when you study.
• Practice testing—This has to do with  how  you study. Hint: Don’t just reread content. You must quiz or test your ability to retrieve the information from your brain.

We all know that cramming is not an effective study strategy, but do we know why? Research on memory suggests that giving yourself time in between study sessions actually helps you forget the information. And forgetting, which sounds like it would be something you  don’t  want to do, is actually good for your ability to remember information long-term. That’s because every time you forget something, you need to relearn it, leading to gains in your overall understanding and “storage” of the material. The table below demonstrates how  spacing  works. Assume you are going to spend about four hours studying for a Sociology exam. Cramming would have you spending most of those four hours the night before the exam. With spacing, on the other hand, you would study a little bit each day.

Interleaving

One particular studying technique is called  interleaving , which calls for students to mix up the content that is being studied. This means not just spending the entire study session on one sort of problem and then moving on to a different sort of problem at a later time.

If you take the schedule we used for the spacing example above, we can add the interleaving concepts to it. Notice that interleaving includes revisiting material from a previous chapter or unit or revisiting different types of problems or question sets. The benefit is that your brain is “mixing up” the information, which can sometimes lead to short-term forgetting but can lead to long-term memory and learning.

Practice Testing

You can do a practice “test” in two ways. One is to test yourself as you are reading or taking in information. This is a great way to add a little variety to your studying. You can ask yourself what a paragraph or text section means as you read. To do this, read a passage in a text, cover up the material, and ask yourself, “What was the main idea of this section?” Recite aloud or write down your answer, and then check it against the original information.

Another, more involved, way to  practice test  is to create flashcards or an actual test by writing a test. This takes more time, but there are online programs such as Quizlet that make it a little easier. Practice testing is an effective study strategy because it helps you practice  retrieving  information, which is what you want to be able to do when you are taking the real test.

One of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to someone else, so ask a friend or family member if you can explain something to them, and  teach  them the lesson. You may find you know more about the subject than you thought . . . or you may realize quickly that you need to do more studying. Why does teaching someone else rank as one of the most effective ways to learn something? It is a form of practice testing that requires you to demonstrate you know something in front of someone else! No one wants to look like they don’t know what they are talking about, even if it your audience is another classmate.

Recognizing Strengths/Weaknesses of Preferred Study Approaches

Most children don’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading a manual; they learn by watching other kids, listening to instructions, and getting up on the seat and learning to balance—sometimes with training wheels or a proud parent holding on, but ultimately without any other support. They may fall over and feel insecure, but usually, they learn to make the machine go. Most of us employ multiple methods of study all the time. You usually only run into trouble if you stubbornly rely on just one way to learn or study and the material you’re studying or the task you want to accomplish doesn’t lend itself to that preference. You can practice specific strategies to help you learn in your preferred learning approach. Can you think of a time when the way you usually study a situation didn’t work?

When deciding on a study approach, consider what you know about the material and the type of knowledge it involves. Is it a group of concepts related to problem-solving methods, such as those you’d find in a physics class? Or is it a literary analysis of a novel? Consider as many elements as possible about the material — and the way the material will be assessed — to help choose a study approach.

You should also consider your instructor’s preferred method of teaching and learning. Watching the way they teach lessons or convey necessary course information to the class. Do they almost always augment lessons with video clips to provide examples or create a memorable narrative? Do they like to show you how something works by demonstrating and working with their hands—for instance, assembling a piece of equipment by taking it apart and putting it back together again? Echoing their teaching approach may help your study. That doesn’t mean you have to change your entire learning approach to match your instructors’ methods. Many instructors understand that their students will have different ways of learning and try to present information in multiple ways.

Practicing Active Continuous Improvement for All Preferences

You can certainly learn through specific approaches or according to specific preferences, but you will also need to adapt to different situations, skills, and subject areas. Don’t limit yourself to thinking you can  only  learn one way or another. That mindset induces anxiety when you encounter a learning situation that doesn’t match your preference. What if your instructor  only  uses a spoken lecture to teach concepts in your chemistry class, and you consider yourself a visual learner? Or what if the only method presented to you for learning mathematical computations is to see videos of others working problems, and you’re more hands-on? You may have to concentrate in a different way or devise other strategies to learn, but you can do it. In fact, you should sometimes work on the styles/preferences that you feel are your least favorite; it will actually strengthen your overall ability to learn and retain information. 10

Dr. Stephen Covey, famous leadership coach and businessman, called this attention to knowing and honing all your skill sets, not just your favorites,  sharpening the saw.  He advised that people should be aware of their strengths but should always hone their weaknesses by saying, “We must never become too busy sawing to take time to sharpen the saw.” 11  For instance, in the chemistry lecture example, you may need to take good notes from the spoken lecture and then review those notes as you sketch out any complex ideas or formulas. If the math videos are not enough for you to grasp difficult problems, you may ask for or find your own problems for additional practice covering that particular mathematical concept to solve on your own.

• What are the differences between test prep and taking the actual test?
• How can you take a  whole person  approach to test taking?
• What can you do on test day to increase your confidence and success?
• What should you know about test anxiety?

Once you are practicing good study habits, you’ll be better prepared for actual test taking. Since studying and test taking are both part of learning, honing your skills in one will help you in the other.

Probably the most obvious differences between your preparation for an exam and the actual test itself is your level of urgency and the time constraints. A slight elevation in your stress level can actually be OK for testing—it keeps you focused and  on your game  when you need to bring up all the information, thinking, and studying to show what you’ve learned. Properly executed, test preparation mixed in with a bit of stress can significantly improve your actual test-taking experience.

Preparation vs. Actual Test

You can replicate the effective sense of urgency an actual test produces by including timed writing into your study sessions. You don’t need all of your study time to exactly replicate the test, but you would be well served to find out the format of the exam in advance and practice the skills you’ll need to use for the various test components. On one early exam in history, Stuart learned the prof was going to include several short-answer essay questions—one for each year of the time period covered. Stuart set up practice times to write for about 15 to 20 minutes on significant events from his notes because he estimated that would be about how much time he could devote out of the hour-long testing session to write one or two required short-answer questions. He would write a prompt from his notes, set a timer, and start writing. If you’re ready and you have practiced and know the material, 20 minutes is adequate to prepare, draft, and revise a short response, but you don’t have a lot of extra time.

Likewise, in a math exam, you will need to know what kinds of problems you will have to solve and to what extent you’ll need to show your computational work on the exam. If you are able to incorporate this sort of timed problem-solving into your study time, you’ll be more prepared and confident when you actually come to the exam. Making yourself adhere to a timed session during your study can only help. It puts a sense of urgency on you, and it will help you to find out what types of problems you need to practice more than ones that perhaps you’re more comfortable solving.

Leveraging Study Habits for Test Prep

In your mind, you probably know what you need to do to be prepared for tests. Occasionally, something may surprise you—emphasis on a concept you considered unimportant or a different presentation of a familiar problem. But those should be exceptions. You can take all your well-honed study habits to get ready for exams. Here’s a checklist for study and test success for your consideration:

Read this list with each separate class in mind, and check off the items you already do. Give yourself one point for every item you checked. If you always take the success steps—congratulations! They are not a guarantee, but doing the steps mindfully will give you a nice head start. If you do fewer than five of the steps—you have some work to do. But recognition is a good place to start, and you can incorporate these steps starting now.

As strange as this may sound, you can find some interesting research articles online about using the taste or smell of peppermint to increase memory, recall, and focus. Read more at: http://naturalsociety.com/mint-scent-improve-brain-cognition-memory. While sucking on a peppermint disk won’t replace studying, why not experiment with this relatively easy idea that seems to be gaining some scientific traction?

Whole Person Approach to Testing

Just because you are facing a major exam in your engineering class (or math or science or English class) doesn’t mean everything else in your life comes to a stop. Perhaps that’s somewhat annoying, but that’s reality. Allergies still flare up, children still need to eat, and you still need to sleep. You must see your academic life as one segment of who you are—it’s an important segment, but just one aspect of who you are as a whole person. Neela tries to turn off everything else when she has exams coming up in her nursing program, which is pretty often. She ignores her health, puts off her family, tries to reschedule competing work tasks, and focuses all her energy on the pending exam. On the surface, that sounds like a reasonable approach, but if she becomes really sick by ignoring a minor head cold, or if she misses an important school deadline for one of her children, Neela risks making matters worse by attempting to compartmentalize so strictly. Taking care of her own health by eating and sleeping properly; asking for help in other aspects of her busy life, such as attending to the needs of her children; and seeing the big picture of how it all fits together would be a better approach. Pretending otherwise may work sporadically, but it is not sustainable for the long run.

A whole person approach to testing takes a lot of organization, scheduling, and attention to detail, but the life-long benefits make the effort worthwhile.

Establishing Realistic Expectations for Test Situations

Would you expect to make a perfect pastry if you’ve never learned how to bake? Or paint a masterpiece if you’ve never tried to work with paints and brushes? Probably not. But often we expect ourselves to perform at much higher levels of achievement than that for which we’ve actually prepared. If you become very upset and stressed if you make any score lower than the highest, you probably need to reevaluate your own expectations for test situations. Striving to always do your best is an admirable goal. Realistically knowing that your current  best  may not achieve the highest academic ratings can help you plot your progress.

Realistic continuous improvement is a better plan, because people who repeatedly attempt challenges for which they have not adequately prepared and understandably fail (or at least do not achieve the desired highest ranking) often start moving toward the goal in frustration. They simply quit. This doesn’t mean you settle for mediocre grades or refrain from your challenges. It means you become increasingly aware of yourself and your current state and potential future. Know yourself, know your strengths and weaknesses, and be honest with yourself about your expectations.

Understanding Accommodations and Responsibilities

As with so many parts of life, some people take exams in stride and do just fine. Others may need more time or change of location or format to succeed in test-taking situations. With adequate notice, most faculty will provide students with reasonable accommodations to assist students in succeeding in test situations. If you feel that you would benefit from receiving these sorts of accommodations, first speak with your instructor. You may also need to talk to a student services advisor for specific requirements for accommodations at your institution.

If you need  accommodations , you are responsible for understanding what your specific needs are and communicating your needs with your instructors. Before exams in class, you may be allowed to have someone else take notes for you, receive your books in audio form, engage an interpreter, or have adaptive devices in the classroom to help you participate. Testing accommodations may allow for additional time on the test, the use of a scribe to record exam answers, the use of a computer instead of handwriting answers, as well as other means to make the test situation successful. Talk to your instructors if you have questions about testing accommodations.

Prioritizing Time Surrounding Test Situations

Keep in mind that you don’t have any more or less time than anyone else, so you can’t  make time  for an activity. You can only use the time everyone gets wisely and realistically. Exams in college classes are important, but they are not the only significant events you have in your classes. In fact, everything leading up to the exam, the exam itself, and the post-exam activities are all one large continuum. Think of the exam as an event with multiple phases, more like a long-distance run instead of a 50-yard dash. Step back and look at the big picture of this timeline. Draw it out on paper. What needs to happen between now and the exam so you feel comfortable, confident, and ready?

If your instructor conducts some sort of pre-exam summary or prep session, make sure to attend. These can be invaluable. If this instructor does not provide that sort of formal exam prep, create your own with a group of classmates or on your own. Consider everything you know about the exam, from written instructions to notes you took in class, including any experiential notes you may have from previous exams, such as the possibility of bonus points for answering an extra question that requires some time management on your part. You can read more about time management in Chapter 3.

Which apps can help you study for a test, increase your memory, and even help you overcome test anxiety?

Personal  Zen is a free online gaming app clinically proven to reduce stress and anxiety. The games retrain your brain to think more positively, reducing stress to help you focus on the experiences around you.

Games like solitaire, hangman, and Simon Says all build on your memory, keeping it sharp and active. There are loads of fun, free online memory games you can use to make time wasting a little less wasteful. For more than 250 options, visit the  Memory Improvement Tips  website.

iTunes University  might be able to help you dig into a research topic or find additional content to help you if you’re struggling with a course. Their library of free lectures and content comes from some of the most highly respected universities around the world.

Chegg Prep  is a flashcard-based self-quizzing resource. It provides millions of pre-made flashcards and decks organized by course and topic, which you can search, sort, bookmark, and use in a variety of ways. The service is free and does not require a login unless you’d like to save or create your own cards.

Once you get to the exam session, try your best to focus on nothing but the exam. This can be very difficult with all the distractions in our lives. But if you have done all the groundwork to attend the classes, completed the assignments, and scheduled your exam prep time, you are ready to focus intently for the comparatively short time most exams last.

Arriving to class:

Don’t let yourself be sidetracked right at the end. Beyond the preparation we’ve discussed, give yourself some more advantages on the actual test day:

• Get to the testing location a few minutes early so you can settle into your place and take a few relaxing breaths.
• Don’t let other classmates interrupt your calmness at this point.
• Just get to your designated place, take out whatever supplies and materials you are allowed to have, and calm your mind.

Taking the test:

Once the instructor begins the test:

• Listen carefully for any last-minute oral directions that may have changed some detail on the exam, such as the timing or the content of the questions.
• As soon as you receive the exam sheet or packet, make a quick scan over the entire test.
• Don’t spend a lot of time on this initial glance, but make sure you are familiar with the layout and what you need to do.
• Using this first review, decide how you will allocate your available time for each section.
• You can even jot down how many minutes you can allow for the different sections or questions.

Then for each section, if the exam is divided this way, be sure you  read the section directions  very carefully so you don’t miss an important detail. For example, instructors often offer options—so you may have four short-answer questions from which to choose, but you only need to answer two of them. If you had not read the directions for that section, you may have thought you needed to provide answers to all four prompts. Working on extra questions for which you likely will receive no credit would be a waste of your limited exam time. The extra time you spend at the beginning is like an investment in your overall results.

Answer every required question on the exam.  Even if you don’t complete each one, you may receive some credit for partial answers. Whether or not you can receive partial credit would be an excellent question to ask before the exam during the preparation time. If you are taking an exam that contains multiple-choice questions, go through and answer the questions about which you are the most confident first.

Read the entire question carefully even if you think you know what the stem (the introduction of the choices) says, and read all the choices.  Skip really difficult questions or ones where your brain goes blank. Then you can go back and concentrate on those skipped ones later after you have answered the majority of the questions confidently. Sometimes a later question will trigger an idea in your mind that will help you answer the skipped questions.

And, in a similar fashion to spending a few minutes right at the beginning of the test time to read the directions carefully and identify the test elements,  allow yourself a few minutes at the end of the exam session to review your answers.  Depending on what sort of exam it is, you can use this time to check your math computations, review an essay for grammatical and content errors, or answer the difficult multiple-choice questions you skipped earlier. Finally,  make sure you have completed the entire test:  check the backs of pages, and verify that you have a corresponding answer section for every question section on the exam. It can be easy to skip a section with the idea you will come back to it but then forget to return there, which can have a significant impact on your test results.

After the Test

As you leave the exam room, the last thing you may want to think about is that particular test. You probably have numerous other assignments, projects, and life obligations to attend to, especially if you pushed some of those off to study for this completed exam. Give yourself some space from this exam, but only for the duration of the time when your instructor is grading your exam. Once you have your results, study them—whether you did really well (Go, you!) or not as well as you had hoped (Keep your spirits up!). Both scenarios hold valuable information if you will use it.

Thandie had a habit of going all-out for exams before she took them, and she did pretty well usually, but once the instructor passed back the graded tests, she would look at the letter grade, glance half-heartedly at the instructor’s comments, and toss the exam away, ready to move on to the next chapter, section, or concept. A better plan would be to learn from her exam results and analyze both what she did well and where she struggled. After a particularly unimpressive exam outing in her statistics class, Thandie took her crumpled-up exam to the campus tutoring center, where the tutor reviewed the test with her section by section. Together they discovered that Thandie did particularly well on the computational sections, which she admitted were her favorites, and not well at all on the short-answer essay questions that she did not expect to find in a stats class, which in her experience had been more geared toward the mathematical side of solving statistical problems.

Going forward in this class, Thandie should practice writing out her explanations of how to compute the problems and talk to her instructor about ways to hone this skill. This tutoring session also proved to Thandie the benefit of holding on to important class papers—either electronically or in hard copy, depending on the class setup—for future reference. For some classes, you probably don’t need to keep every scrap of paper (or file) associated with your notes, exams, assignments, and projects, but for others, especially for those in your major, those early class materials may come in very handy in your more difficult later undergraduate courses or even in grad school when you need a quick refresher on the basic concepts.

Test Anxiety

Test anxiety  is very real. You may know this firsthand. Almost everyone gets a little nervous before a major exam, in the same way most people get slightly anxious meeting a new potential date or undertaking an unfamiliar activity. We second-guess whether we’re ready for this leap, if we prepared adequately, or if we should postpone this potentially awkward situation. And in most situations, testing included, that reasonable level of nervous anticipation can be a good thing—enhancing your focus and providing you with a bit of bravado to get you through a difficult time.

Test anxiety, however, can cause us to doubt ourselves so severely that we underperform or overcompensate to the point that we do not do well on the exam. Don’t despair; you can still succeed if you suffer from test anxiety. The first step is to understand what it is and what it is not, and then to practice some simple strategies to cope with your anxious feelings relative to test taking. Whatever you do, don’t use the label  test anxiety  to keep you from your dreams of completing your education and pursuing whatever career you have your eyes on. You are bigger than any anxiety.

Understanding Test Anxiety

If someone tries to tell you that test anxiety is  all in your head , they’re sort of right. Our thinking is a key element of anxiety of any sort. On the other hand, test anxiety can manifest itself in other parts of our bodies as well. You may feel queasy or light-headed if you are experiencing test anxiety. Your palms may sweat, or you may become suddenly very hot or very cold for no apparent reason. At its worst, test anxiety can cause its sufferers to experience several unpleasant conditions including nausea, diarrhea, and shortness of breath. Some people may feel as though they may throw up, faint, or have a heart attack, none of which would make going into a testing situation a pleasant idea. You can learn more about symptoms of test anxiety from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America that conducts research on this topic. 12

Back to our minds for a minute. We think constantly, and if we have important events coming up, such as exams, but other significant events as well, we tend to think about them seemingly all the time. Almost as if we have a movie reel looping in our heads, we can anticipate everything that may happen during these events—both sensational results and catastrophic endings. What if you oversleep on the test day? What if you’re hit by a bus on the way to campus? What if you get stung by a mysterious insect and have to save the world on the very day of your exam?

How about the other way? You win the lottery! Your screenplay is accepted by a major publisher! You get a multimillion-dollar record deal! It could happen. Typically, though, life falls somewhere in between those two extremes, unless you live in an action movie. Our minds, however, (perhaps influenced by some of those action movies or spy novels we’ve seen and read) often gravitate to those black-and-white, all-or-nothing results. Hence, we can become very nervous when we think about taking an exam because if we do really poorly, we think, we may have to face consequences as dire as dropping out of school or never graduating. Usually, this isn’t going to happen, but we can literally make ourselves sick with anxiety if we dwell on those slight possibilities. You actually may encounter a few tests in your academic careers that are so important that you have to alter your other life plans temporarily, but truly, this is the exception, not the rule. Don’t let the most extreme and severe result take over your thoughts. Prepare well and do your best, see where you land, and then go from there.

Using Strategies to Manage Test Anxiety

You have to work hard to control test anxiety so it does not take an unhealthy hold on you every time you face a test situation, which for many of you will last well into your careers. One of the best ways to control test anxiety is to be prepared for the exam. You can control that part. You can also learn effective relaxation techniques including controlled breathing, visualization, and meditation. Some of these practices work well even in the moment: at your test site, take a deep breath, close your eyes, and smile—just bringing positive thoughts into your mind can help you meet the challenges of taking an exam without anxiety taking over.

The tests in the corporate world or in other career fields may not look exactly like the ones you encounter in college, but professionals of all sorts take tests routinely. Again, being prepared helps reduce or eliminate this anxiety in all these situations. Think of a presentation or an explanation you have provided well numerous times—you likely are not going to feel anxious about this same presentation if asked to provide it again. That’s because you are prepared and know what to expect. Try to replicate this feeling of preparation and confidence in your test-taking situations.

Many professions require participants to take frequent licensing exams to prove they are staying current in their rapidly changing work environments, including nursing, engineering, education, and architecture, as well as many other occupations. You have tools to take control of your thinking about tests. Better to face it head-on and let test anxiety know who’s in charge!

• 1 NCBI. “What are the differences between long-term, short-term, and working memory?” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657600/
• 2 Sumrall, William, et. al. “A Review of Memory Theory.” International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2016. Vol. 6. No. 5.
• 3 Miller, George A. “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our capacity for Processing Information.” Psychological Review, 1956.
• 4 Preston, Alison. “Ask the Experts: How do short-term memories become long-term memories?” Scientific American, Dec. 2017. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-do-short-term-memories-become-l/
• 5 Nir, Yuval, et. al. “Selective neuronal lapses precede human cognitive lapses following sleep deprivation,” Nature Medicine volume23, pages 1474–1480 (2017).
• 6 UCLA Health. “Drowsy Driving.” https://www.uclahealth.org/sleepcenter/drowsy-driving
• 7 Redline, Susan https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Sleep/health-hazards-linked-lack-sleep/story?id=16524313
• 8 Medina, John. Brain Rules. 2018, Pear Press.
• 9 Brown, Peter, et. al. Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Brown, Roediger, Daniel, 2014.
• 10 Newton, Phillip M., & Miah, Mahallad. “Evidence-Based Higher Education—Is the Learning Style ‘Myth’ Important?”  Frontiers in Psychology  8:444 (2017) DOI: 10. 3389/FPSYG. 2017.00444.
• 11 Covey, Stephen. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People ® https://www.franklincovey.com/the-7-habits.html
• 12 Reteguiz, Jo-Ann. “Relationship between anxiety and standardized patient test performance in the medicine clerkship.” Journal of general internal medicine vol. 21,5 (2006): 415-8. doi:10.1111/j.1525-1497.2006.00419.

Source:  OpenStax College Success  is licensed under  Creative Commons Attribution License v4.0

Strategies for First Year College Success Copyright © by OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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👩‍🎓How to set a 'Test yourself' assignment

A step by step guide to setting a 'test yourself' assignment..

Why do we need to do this?

Setting an 'Test yourself' assignment allows a teacher to set a specific test or tests to students.

What comes before?

You must be a Teacher, HoD or Admin on the site and be set up as a teacher in the groups you want to set an assignment to.

Your groups must be set up ready (see here for how to set up groups).

Setting the assignment

1. Login to your account and click on the 'Assignments/Exam' button at the top of your page.

2. Click on the 'Create new assignment' button.

3. Select 'Test yourself'.

4. From the drop-down menus, select the group or groups you wish to assign this task to and the course that the written task is linked to.

5. Input the start date and time, as well as the end date and time.

6. You have the option of setting a minimum pass score. This is set as a percentage.

7. You have the option of editing the number of questions in the test. This is very important if you are setting a a test assignment that covers more than once lesson as the assignment will automatically choose all questions available from those lessons. We suggest a maximum of 30 questions per test .

8. In the grey text box, write your assignment title (this should clearly link to the content of the task) and an explanation of the task.

9. Choose whether to allow retakes or not and whether the task is mandatory.

10. Now select to assign to either the whole group(s) or to individual students. Setting to individual students is a great way to provide targeted support and personalised learning opportunities.

11. Click 'Create assignment'.

Rubric Best Practices, Examples, and Templates

A rubric is a scoring tool that identifies the different criteria relevant to an assignment, assessment, or learning outcome and states the possible levels of achievement in a specific, clear, and objective way. Use rubrics to assess project-based student work including essays, group projects, creative endeavors, and oral presentations.

Rubrics can help instructors communicate expectations to students and assess student work fairly, consistently and efficiently. Rubrics can provide students with informative feedback on their strengths and weaknesses so that they can reflect on their performance and work on areas that need improvement.

How to Get Started

Best practices, moodle how-to guides.

• Workshop Recording (Spring 2024)
• Workshop Registration

Step 1: Analyze the assignment

The first step in the rubric creation process is to analyze the assignment or assessment for which you are creating a rubric. To do this, consider the following questions:

• What is the purpose of the assignment and your feedback? What do you want students to demonstrate through the completion of this assignment (i.e. what are the learning objectives measured by it)? Is it a summative assessment, or will students use the feedback to create an improved product?
• Does the assignment break down into different or smaller tasks? Are these tasks equally important as the main assignment?
• What would an “excellent” assignment look like? An “acceptable” assignment? One that still needs major work?
• How detailed do you want the feedback you give students to be? Do you want/need to give them a grade?

Step 2: Decide what kind of rubric you will use

Types of rubrics: holistic, analytic/descriptive, single-point

Holistic Rubric. A holistic rubric includes all the criteria (such as clarity, organization, mechanics, etc.) to be considered together and included in a single evaluation. With a holistic rubric, the rater or grader assigns a single score based on an overall judgment of the student’s work, using descriptions of each performance level to assign the score.

Advantages of holistic rubrics:

• Can p lace an emphasis on what learners can demonstrate rather than what they cannot
• Save grader time by minimizing the number of evaluations to be made for each student
• Can be used consistently across raters, provided they have all been trained

Disadvantages of holistic rubrics:

• Provide less specific feedback than analytic/descriptive rubrics
• Can be difficult to choose a score when a student’s work is at varying levels across the criteria
• Any weighting of c riteria cannot be indicated in the rubric

Analytic/Descriptive Rubric . An analytic or descriptive rubric often takes the form of a table with the criteria listed in the left column and with levels of performance listed across the top row. Each cell contains a description of what the specified criterion looks like at a given level of performance. Each of the criteria is scored individually.

Advantages of analytic rubrics:

• Provide detailed feedback on areas of strength or weakness
• Each criterion can be weighted to reflect its relative importance

Disadvantages of analytic rubrics:

• More time-consuming to create and use than a holistic rubric
• May not be used consistently across raters unless the cells are well defined
• May result in giving less personalized feedback

Single-Point Rubric . A single-point rubric is breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria, but instead of describing different levels of performance, only the “proficient” level is described. Feedback space is provided for instructors to give individualized comments to help students improve and/or show where they excelled beyond the proficiency descriptors.

Advantages of single-point rubrics:

• Easier to create than an analytic/descriptive rubric
• Perhaps more likely that students will read the descriptors
• Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended
• May removes a focus on the grade/points
• May increase student creativity in project-based assignments

Disadvantage of analytic rubrics: Requires more work for instructors writing feedback

Step 3 (Optional): Look for templates and examples.

You might Google, “Rubric for persuasive essay at the college level” and see if there are any publicly available examples to start from. Ask your colleagues if they have used a rubric for a similar assignment. Some examples are also available at the end of this article. These rubrics can be a great starting point for you, but consider steps 3, 4, and 5 below to ensure that the rubric matches your assignment description, learning objectives and expectations.

Step 4: Define the assignment criteria

Make a list of the knowledge and skills are you measuring with the assignment/assessment Refer to your stated learning objectives, the assignment instructions, past examples of student work, etc. for help.

  Helpful strategies for defining grading criteria:

• Collaborate with co-instructors, teaching assistants, and other colleagues
• Brainstorm and discuss with students
• Can they be observed and measured?
• Are they important and essential?
• Are they distinct from other criteria?
• Are they phrased in precise, unambiguous language?
• Revise the criteria as needed
• Consider whether some are more important than others, and how you will weight them.

Step 5: Design the rating scale

Most ratings scales include between 3 and 5 levels. Consider the following questions when designing your rating scale:

• Given what students are able to demonstrate in this assignment/assessment, what are the possible levels of achievement?
• How many levels would you like to include (more levels means more detailed descriptions)
• Will you use numbers and/or descriptive labels for each level of performance? (for example 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and/or Exceeds expectations, Accomplished, Proficient, Developing, Beginning, etc.)
• Don’t use too many columns, and recognize that some criteria can have more columns that others . The rubric needs to be comprehensible and organized. Pick the right amount of columns so that the criteria flow logically and naturally across levels.

Step 6: Write descriptions for each level of the rating scale

Artificial Intelligence tools like Chat GPT have proven to be useful tools for creating a rubric. You will want to engineer your prompt that you provide the AI assistant to ensure you get what you want. For example, you might provide the assignment description, the criteria you feel are important, and the number of levels of performance you want in your prompt. Use the results as a starting point, and adjust the descriptions as needed.

Building a rubric from scratch

For a single-point rubric , describe what would be considered “proficient,” i.e. B-level work, and provide that description. You might also include suggestions for students outside of the actual rubric about how they might surpass proficient-level work.

For analytic and holistic rubrics , c reate statements of expected performance at each level of the rubric.

• Consider what descriptor is appropriate for each criteria, e.g., presence vs absence, complete vs incomplete, many vs none, major vs minor, consistent vs inconsistent, always vs never. If you have an indicator described in one level, it will need to be described in each level.
• You might start with the top/exemplary level. What does it look like when a student has achieved excellence for each/every criterion? Then, look at the “bottom” level. What does it look like when a student has not achieved the learning goals in any way? Then, complete the in-between levels.
• For an analytic rubric , do this for each particular criterion of the rubric so that every cell in the table is filled. These descriptions help students understand your expectations and their performance in regard to those expectations.

Well-written descriptions:

• Describe observable and measurable behavior
• Use parallel language across the scale
• Indicate the degree to which the standards are met

Step 7: Create your rubric

Create your rubric in a table or spreadsheet in Word, Google Docs, Sheets, etc., and then transfer it by typing it into Moodle. You can also use online tools to create the rubric, but you will still have to type the criteria, indicators, levels, etc., into Moodle. Rubric creators: Rubistar , iRubric

Step 8: Pilot-test your rubric

Prior to implementing your rubric on a live course, obtain feedback from:

• Teacher assistants

Try out your new rubric on a sample of student work. After you pilot-test your rubric, analyze the results to consider its effectiveness and revise accordingly.

• Limit the rubric to a single page for reading and grading ease
• Use parallel language . Use similar language and syntax/wording from column to column. Make sure that the rubric can be easily read from left to right or vice versa.
• Use student-friendly language . Make sure the language is learning-level appropriate. If you use academic language or concepts, you will need to teach those concepts.
• Share and discuss the rubric with your students . Students should understand that the rubric is there to help them learn, reflect, and self-assess. If students use a rubric, they will understand the expectations and their relevance to learning.
• Consider scalability and reusability of rubrics. Create rubric templates that you can alter as needed for multiple assignments.
• Maximize the descriptiveness of your language. Avoid words like “good” and “excellent.” For example, instead of saying, “uses excellent sources,” you might describe what makes a resource excellent so that students will know. You might also consider reducing the reliance on quantity, such as a number of allowable misspelled words. Focus instead, for example, on how distracting any spelling errors are.

Example of an analytic rubric for a final paper

Example of a holistic rubric for a final paper

Single-Point Rubric

More examples:

• Single Point Rubric Template ( variation )
• Analytic Rubric Template make a copy to edit
• A Rubric for Rubrics
• Bank of Online Discussion Rubrics in different formats
• Mathematical Presentations Descriptive Rubric
• Math Proof Assessment Rubric
• Kansas State Sample Rubrics
• Design Single Point Rubric

Technology Tools: Rubrics in Moodle

• Moodle Docs: Rubrics
• Moodle Docs: Grading Guide (use for single-point rubrics)

Tools with rubrics (other than Moodle)

• Google Assignments
• Turnitin Assignments: Rubric or Grading Form

Other resources

• DePaul University (n.d.). Rubrics .
• Gonzalez, J. (2014). Know your terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics . Cult of Pedagogy.
• Goodrich, H. (1996). Understanding rubrics . Teaching for Authentic Student Performance, 54 (4), 14-17. Retrieved from   
• Miller, A. (2012). Tame the beast: tips for designing and using rubrics.
• Ragupathi, K., Lee, A. (2020). Beyond Fairness and Consistency in Grading: The Role of Rubrics in Higher Education. In: Sanger, C., Gleason, N. (eds) Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore.

87 Self-Reflection Questions for Introspection [+Exercises]

Do you sometimes take time to clarify your values in a moment of doubt or uncertainty?

If you answered “yes,” you are no stranger to self-reflection and introspection (terms that will be used more or less interchangeably in this article), an important psychological exercise that can help you grow, develop your mind, and extract value from your mistakes.

Read on if you’d like to learn the meaning of self-reflection and introspection, reasons why it’s important, and tools and techniques for practicing it yourself.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Self-Compassion Exercises for free . These detailed, science-based exercises will not only help you increase the compassion and kindness you show yourself but will also give you the tools to help your clients, students, or employees show more compassion to themselves.

This Article Contains:

What is introspection a definition, what is the importance of introspection, 70 self-reflective questions to ask yourself, 10 self-reflection exercises, activities, and techniques for adults and students, 4 self-reflection worksheets and tools, the 3 best books on self-reflection and introspection, a take-home message.

Introspection can be practiced both as an informal reflection process and a formal experimental approach, and the two have different definitions. Still, both processes can be undertaken by anyone with curiosity and determination (Cherry, 2016).

The informal reflection process can be defined as examining one’s own internal thoughts and feelings and reflecting on what they mean. The process can be focused on either one’s current mental experience or mental experiences from the very recent past.

The formal experimental technique is a more objective and standardized version of this, in which people train themselves to carefully analyze the contents of their own thoughts in a way that’s as unbiased as possible.

The original idea of introspection was developed by Wilhelm Wundt in the late 1800s (McLeod, 2008). Wundt focused on three areas of mental functioning: thoughts, images, and feelings. Wundt’s work eventually led to the current work on perceptual processes and the establishment of the field of cognitive psychology .

Researchers have shown that we think more than 50,000 thoughts per day, of which more than half are negative and more than 90% are just repeats from the day before (Wood, 2013).

If you don’t make the time and effort to refocus your mind on the positive through introspection, you won’t give yourself the opportunity to grow and develop.

Enhancing our ability to understand ourselves and our motivations and to learn more about our own values helps us take the power away from the distractions of our modern, fast-paced lives and instead refocus on fulfillment (Wood, 2013).

The importance of doing it right

Reflecting on ourselves and our environments is a healthy and adaptive practice, but it should be undertaken with some care—there is, in fact, a wrong way to do it.

When your focus on introspection has morphed from a dedication to an obsession, you have taken it too far. In fact, those who take self-reflection too far can end up feeling more stressed, depressed, and anxious than ever (Eurich, 2017).

In addition, it is all too easy for us to fool ourselves into thinking we have found some deep insight that may or may not be accurate. We are surprisingly good at coming up with rational explanations for the irrational behaviors we engage in (Dahl, 2017).

To help stay on the right path with your self-reflection, consider asking more “what” questions than “why” questions. “Why” questions can highlight our limitations and stir up negative emotions, while “what” questions help keep us curious and positive about the future (Eurich, 2017).

With this important point in mind, let’s move on to the questions, exercises, and worksheets that you can use to work on your own self-reflection.

Read through the following three lists to get some ideas for introspective questions. Answering them can take you from feeling like you don’t understand yourself to knowing yourself like the back of your hand.

These 10 questions are great ways to jumpstart self-reflection (Woronko, n.d.):

• Am I using my time wisely?
• Am I taking anything for granted?
• Am I employing a healthy perspective?
• Am I living true to myself?
• Am I waking up in the morning ready to take on the day?
• Am I thinking negative thoughts before I fall asleep?
• Am I putting enough effort into my relationships?
• Am I taking care of myself physically?
• Am I letting matters that are out of my control stress me out?
• Am I achieving the goals that I’ve set for myself?

The following 30 questions are questions you can ask yourself every day to get to know yourself better (William, n.d.):

• Who am I, really?
• What worries me most about the future?
• If this were the last day of my life, would I have the same plans for today?
• What am I really scared of?
• Am I holding on to something I need to let go of?
• If not now, then when?
• What matters most in my life?
• What am I doing about the things that matter most in my life?
• Why do I matter?
• Have I done anything lately that’s worth remembering?
• Have I made someone smile today?
• What have I given up on?
• When did I last push the boundaries of my comfort zone?
• If I had to instill one piece of advice in a newborn baby, what advice would I give?
• What small act of kindness was I once shown that I will never forget?
• How will I live, knowing I will die?
• What do I need to change about myself?
• Is it more important to love or be loved?
• How many of my friends would I trust with my life?
• Who has had the greatest impact on my life?
• Would I break the law to save a loved one?
• Would I steal to feed a starving child?
• What do I want most in life?
• What is life asking of me?
• Which is worse: failing or never trying?
• If I try to fail and succeed, what have I done?
• What’s the one thing I’d like others to remember about me at the end of my life?
• Does it really matter what others think about me?
• To what degree have I actually controlled the course of my life?
• When all is said and done, what will I have said more than I’ve done?

Finally, the following 30 prompts and questions are great ways to put your journal to use (Tartakovsky, 2014):

• My favorite way to spend the day is . . .
• If I could talk to my teenage self, the one thing I would say is . . .
• The two moments I’ll never forget in my life are . . . (Describe them in great detail, and what makes them so unforgettable.)
• Make a list of 30 things that make you smile.
• “Write about a moment experienced through your body. Making love, making breakfast, going to a party, having a fight, an experience you’ve had or you imagine for your character. Leave out thought and emotion, and let all information be conveyed through the body and senses.”
• The words I’d like to live by are . . .
• I couldn’t imagine living without . . .
• When I’m in pain—physical or emotional—the kindest thing I can do for myself is . . .
• Make a list of the people in your life who genuinely support you, and whom you can genuinely trust. Then, make time to hang out with them.
• What does unconditional love look like for you?
• What things would you do if you loved yourself unconditionally? How can you act on these things, even if you’re not yet able to love yourself unconditionally?
• I really wish others knew this about me . . .
• Name what is enough for you.
• If my body could talk, it would say . . .
• Name a compassionate way you’ve supported a friend recently. Then, write down how you can do the same for yourself.
• What do you love about life?
• What always brings tears to your eyes? (As Paulo Coelho has said, “Tears are words that need to be written.”)
• Write about a time when your work felt real, necessary and satisfying to you, whether the work was paid or unpaid, professional or domestic, physical or mental.
• Write about your first love—whether it’s a person, place or thing.
• Using 10 words, describe yourself.
• What’s surprised you the most about your life or life in general?
• What can you learn from your biggest mistakes?
• I feel most energized when . . .
• “Write a list of questions to which you urgently need answers.”
• Make a list of everything that inspires you—whether books, websites, quotes, people, paintings, stores, or stars in the sky.
• What’s one topic you need to learn more about to help you live a more fulfilling life? (Then, follow through and learn more about that topic.)
• I feel happiest in my skin when . . .
• Make a list of everything you’d like to say no to.
• Make a list of everything you’d like to say yes to.
• Write the words you need to hear.

For example, the five self-examination exercises listed below (Bates, 2012) are a good way to get started with self-reflection. They’re simple and easy to do, but they can familiarize you with the process for more in-depth reflection in the future.

Self-Examination Exercise 1

Consider whether or not you tend to analyze people or diagnose their problems for them without their encouragement or request.

Often when we hold information that has helped us to make sense of the world, we want to share it. This information, when unprompted and delivered to another person, sometimes doesn’t feel so good. They may feel like you are telling them that something about them is wrong, something that they might not necessarily agree with.

Remind yourself that this information needs to be asked for and not prescribed by you, no matter how valid it feels to pass it on (Bates, 2012).

Self-Examination Exercise 2

This is a good exercise if you tend to expend a lot of energy trying to understand what upsets you about another person’s actions. You may also spend a lot of energy thinking of ways to address that person about what upsets you.

Not only does this burn a lot of your energy, but it also can have an unintended effect on the person who has upset you. When you place a clear emphasis or focus on what is wrong when speaking with someone, it implies that you are dissatisfied and unhappy.

Usually, the issue you have is not something that is making you terribly unhappy, just an annoyance or irritation, so this doom and gloom is not the message you want to deliver. It’s just a single issue that needs attention, but it can seem much bigger and more pervasive to the person you are planning to discuss it with.

Try to remind yourself that this problem, no matter how valid an issue it is or how important it is to you, is not the whole of your feelings. When you deliver this information, remember that a person who loves you does not want to be the cause of your unhappiness—do not make them feel an unnecessary amount of pain as a result of the unhappiness they’ve caused you.

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Self-Examination Exercise 3

Do you frequently interrupt people or constantly think of your own stories to share while they are talking? If you’re like a lot of social people, the answer is probably yes.

In order to relate to others, we have to share a little bit of ourselves with them—your stories can help you establish common ground with others or make you closer with them. However, if you’re only focused on sharing your stories, it can distract you from the greater purpose of a conversation.

In our eagerness to relate, please, entertain, and share, we often remove ourselves from the present, reducing our ability to be sensitive and engaged listeners. Even if we spend our whole lives trying to be good listeners , sometimes we slip out of practice in empathizing or identifying with the person we’re talking to, or we lose an opportunity to comfort or entertain the other person.

Next time you have a conversation with a loved one and you find yourself thinking ahead of them, take a moment to pause and truly listen. Don’t think about how you can personally identify with what they are talking about, and don’t search your memory bank for a relevant story of your own—just listen.

It’s a rewarding experience to truly soak in what another person is saying, both for you and the other person (Bates, 2012).

Self-Examination Exercise 4

Sometimes when we work very hard to do good things, we get to a level of comfort with that fact, and we begin to talk about it to others. That can be a great thing in that it allows us to own our efforts and our actions and, with that, acknowledge our goodness to ourselves.

But for this exercise, consider how you might feel if you were to do things that are good, but only for your own knowledge. The next time you do something really wonderful, try keeping that wonderful thing to yourself and not sharing it with anyone.

Often when a person is good and loving, they don’t have to tell anyone; it’s a truth that shines from every angle of their person. As an experiment, keep some knowledge to yourself, as a gift to you (Bates, 2012).

Self-Examination Exercise 5

For this exercise, you need only to do one thing: Consider what you don’t know.

When we get to a place of comfort in our skin and in the world, we tend to lose the ability to see things from a different perspective. Things make sense to us in our own point of view, so what’s left to know?

Everything, it turns out.

By this, we mean to try and remind yourself of these facts: You cannot know or understand everything, and you are not the judge of what is right for another person.

You can neither read minds nor know what the future holds. You can only exist in one moment at a time, and you are changing every day.

Trust that sometimes others know themselves and their lives better than you ever could. Listen with the awareness that you might learn something new.

Be open to the fact that you might one day feel totally different about something that you believe to be fixed—and that includes your sticking points, the “unchangeables” you thought were forever set in stone. Let what you don’t know and can’t know be a comfort rather than something to fear, because it means that anything is possible (Bates, 2012).

Once you have found your footing with these self-examination exercises, the following introspective exercises are a great next step.

4 Self-reflection technique – OER Africa

Affirmations

Creating affirmations is a helpful way to clear your mind and put things in perspective. Affirmations can be defined as positive phrases or statements used to challenge  negative or unhelpful thoughts .

For this exercise, write a list of at least 50 affirmations. They should address what you want to embrace, improve, and achieve in your life.

Follow these instructions when composing and practicing your affirmations:

• Write the affirmations in the present tense and be sure to use the word “I” throughout the affirmations;
• Focus on the things that are occurring now that will lead to your future success. You may have negative thoughts pop up, but do your best to let go of the negative thoughts and replace them with positive thinking;
• Repeat your affirmations aloud to help reprogram your mind with more positive thoughts.

Following these steps can help you open yourself up to the positive in your life and take steps that will lead you to the future you want (Holothink, n.d.).

Subconscious Mind Exercise

In this exercise, you will dive into your subconscious. Don’t worry, it’s not as painful or scary as it sounds!

Your subconscious mind is where your self-image is stored. All of your attitudes, experiences, beliefs, and values are stored deep in your subconscious, driving your behavior and forming the core of who you are.

We don’t often take time to think about ourselves on this level. So in this exercise, take some time and put a concerted effort into thinking about your attitudes, experiences, beliefs, and values. It may take a few sessions of self-reflection to really uncover your core beliefs, but it’s worth the effort it takes to learn about yourself.

Reflecting on this core component of yourself will help you gain greater self-awareness . Much like meditation, it will help you achieve a new, higher level of consciousness, and it may just help you find valuable information and answers about yourself and your beliefs (Holothink, n.d.).

Visualization Exercise

This exercise offers you an opportunity to put your creativity to use.

Create a box, a vision board, or some other medium to store and display who you are and what your hopes and dreams are for the future. You can create or decorate your box or board however you’d like. Use whatever you feel represents yourself and what’s important to you.

Place pictures, words, drawings, poems, or small items of personal significance on your board or in your box. The more details you include, the better.

The end result is a visual representation of yourself and what you love. Come back to the box or board when you’re having a dilemma or trying to figure out the best course of action, and draw from this visual representation of yourself to help you make decisions (Holothink, n.d.).

For this exercise, feel free to put your imagination to good use—the sky’s the limit when it comes to visualization.

Questions About Yourself

This exercise is simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. All you need to do is ask yourself some questions.

Ask yourself questions about yourself. Write down the questions, then write down your answers to the questions. Ask yourself about your past, present, and future, and compose answers to the questions that are positive, insightful, and motivating to you.

Don’t worry about coming up with the “right” answers—there aren’t any right answers, and your answers will likely change over time. And be as creative as you’d like with the questions and answers since no one else needs to answer or read them but you.

Be sure to structure your questions to include details about your hopes and dreams. The more detailed your questions and answers, the more opportunity you have to dig into some valuable self-reflection (Holothink, n.d.).

Write and Reflect

Journaling is great for many reasons, and it can be used in several applications for introspection.

For this exercise, get a journal , diary, or notebook with plenty of pages to write in.

Every day, write down three things in your journal:

• At least one positive thing that happened to or around you today;
• A question for yourself (you can use one of the questions from the previous exercise, a question from the lists we covered earlier, or something entirely new), but don’t answer it yet;
• A reflection on the question you wrote the previous day for yourself and an answer to it.

Following these steps, you will write only the first two components on the first day but will write three components every day thereafter (Holothink, n.d.).

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In addition to the questions, prompts, writing ideas , and exercises included above, here are some worksheets and tools that can help get you started with introspection.

Self-Awareness Worksheet

The point of this worksheet is to help you know and understand:

• Your beliefs and principles;
• What you value and what is important to you;
• What motivates you;
• Your own emotions ;
• Your thinking patterns;
• Your tendencies to react to certain situations;
• What you want out of life.

There are several sections to this worksheet, each of which has its own set of questions and prompts:

– Talents

• What are your greatest talents or skills?
• Which of your talents or skills gives you the greatest sense of pride or satisfaction?

– Traits/Qualities

• What are your five greatest strengths?
• What do you feel are your two biggest weaknesses?
• What qualities or traits do you most admire in others?

– Values

• What are ten things that are really important to you?
• What are the three most important things to you?
• What are the values that you hold nearest to your heart?

– Perception

• How is the “public you” different from the “private you”?
• What do you want people to think and say about you?
• Is it more important to be liked by others or to be yourself? Why?

– Accomplishments

• What three things are you most proud of in your life to date?
• What do you hope to achieve in life?
• If you could accomplish only one thing before you died, what would it be?

– Reflection

• What is something that represents you (e.g., song, animal, flower, poem, symbol, jewelry, etc.)? Why?
• What three things would you like to change most about yourself?
• List three things that you are.

– Finish the Sentence

In the final section, you will be shown several prompts to complete:

• I do my best when . . .
• I struggle when . . .
• I am comfortable when . . .
• I feel stress when . . .
• I am courageous when . . .
• One of the most important things I learned was . . .
• I missed a great opportunity when . . .
• One of my favorite memories is . . .
• My toughest decisions involve . . .
• Being myself is hard because . . .
• I can be myself when . . .
• I wish I were more . . .
• I wish I could . . .
• I wish I would regularly . . .
• I wish I had . . .
• I wish I knew . . .
• I wish I felt . . .
• I wish I saw . . .
• I wish I thought . . .
• Life should be about . . .
• I am going to make my life about . . .

Once you finish this worksheet, you should have plenty of insight into who you really are and what is most important to you. Use your answers to inform your decisions about what goals you choose to strive toward, what you would like to do in the future, and what moves to make next.

You can view, download, or print this worksheet for yourself.

The average human has more than 50,000 thoughts per day; more than half of them are negative, and more than 90% are just a repetition from the day before (Wood, 2013).

This means refocusing your mind on positive thoughts through introspection is essential for personal ascendance and growth. Most people take the end of the year as an opportunity to reflect on the past and set goals for the following year. However, reflections and introspection are critical at any point in time and enable your clients to grow.

Wilhelm Wundt developed the concept of introspection in the late 1800s (McLeod, 2008). According to him, introspection is focused on thoughts, images, and feelings. Introspective questions are often used in the field of cognitive psychology.

Understanding your clients allows you to learn more about their values, internal thoughts, and feelings. Furthermore, it takes the focus away from fast-paced lives and allows your client to be in the present moment and refocus on fulfillment (Wood, 2013).

Besides asking your client reflective questions, another tip is to practice active listening. Being able to stay entirely in the present moment without interruption or projecting your own story onto someone is key to helping your clients flourish. When the urge to share your story arises, pause and take the time to listen.

Tool 1: Persona

Before moving on to the empathy map below, first create a “persona,” or a clear character representation of your actual self, your ideal self, and your “ought” self (Kos, n.d.).

In order to create this persona, you will need to thoroughly analyze who you are, who you want to become, and what the social expectations connected to your feelings and behaviors are like in different situations.

Answering questions like the following can help you define these three important selves:

• Why do I want to become [enter a characteristic important to you] ? Who in my life was or is like that?
• Who would I be proud if I were [enter a characteristic important to you] ? Why?
• How are my feelings in certain situations connected with my actual, ideal, and ought self?
• Am I pushing myself to be something I’m actually not?
• Am I being something I’m not just because others expect it of me?

Use your answers to these questions to help you get an idea of who you are, who you want to be, and who you feel you ought to be. Once this preparation has been completed, move on to creating an empathy map.

Tool 2: Empathy Map

An empathy map can help you engage in a valuable and informative process of self-reflection, using all of your senses to help you identify your needs and the disconnections between what you say and what you do (Kos, n.d.). Don’t worry—we all have a disconnect between what we say and what we do.

This exercise can help you figure out where you have these disconnects and how you can best address them to become the person you want to be.

To create your empathy map, simply draw four quadrants on a piece of paper. Each quadrant represents a different aspect of yourself:

Next, consider a situation that evokes a specific strong emotion in you, like having a fight with your spouse or significant other. In each quadrant, write down the relevant aspects of each perspective.

For example, for the fight scenario, you could write down something like the following:

• Seeing: What are some of the things you saw during the situation?
• Doing: What actions did you do and which behaviors did you notice in yourself? What is the behavioral pattern you can identify?
• Thinking: What were you thinking in that situation? What does this tell you about your beliefs?
• Feeling: What emotions were you feeling? Why? Which past situation do they most remind you of?

On the backside of your piece of paper, on another piece of paper, or next to your four quadrants, create a fifth section. Here, you will write down your insights and ideas based on your empathy map.

The following questions can help you with the self-reflection process while you’re working on your map:

• How is the situation connected to your fears and hopes? What are your fears? What are your hopes? Which of your needs are met or not met in that situation?
• What was the environment in which you encountered the situation? What do you remember from the environment? How did you find yourself in that environment and why? What was your sight focused on?
• What hurts you most in the situation or makes you feel good about the situation?
• What was the feedback you gathered from your environment or other people?
• What are all the positives about the situation? What can you learn about yourself, others, and the world by experiencing that kind of a situation?

Do your best to avoid falling prey to cognitive distortions or reinforcing negative feelings while answering these questions. Go deep, and identify why you feel like you do. Observe, but don’t judge (Kos, n.d.).

Tool 3: Life Satisfaction Chart

A life satisfaction chart is a great way to assess how well you are meeting your goals and furthering your hopes for the future. You can complete this chart periodically to track your progress toward your goals and see what needs to be revised, improved, reduced, or eliminated to help you strive toward them.

Draw a scale from 1 (not at all satisfied) to 10 (extremely satisfied) horizontally, and list the following ten areas of life vertically:

• Relationships;
• Competencies;
• Spirituality ;
• Technology.

Assess your satisfaction in each of the 10 areas using the scale you created.

Next, take a second look at all the areas where you are only somewhat satisfied (where you used a rating between 4 and 7). It can be hard to effectively reflect when you don’t have a clear idea of whether you are satisfied with a specific area or not.

Go back through these “somewhat satisfied” areas and rate your satisfaction again, but use only ratings between 1 and 3 or 8 and 10. Limiting your options to either “very satisfied” or “not very satisfied” will help you to make a more decisive judgment about your satisfaction in each area.

Highlight every section rated with a 1, 2, or 3 with red, and highlight every section rated with an 8, 9, or 10 with green. Finally, for all ten areas of life, ask yourself, Why did you rate each area how you did? What would make you change your rating?

Repeat this exercise as often as you’d like to help you keep track of your satisfaction with the way your life is going (Kos, n.d.).

17 Exercises To Foster Self-Acceptance and Compassion

Help your clients develop a kinder, more accepting relationship with themselves using these 17 Self-Compassion Exercises [PDF] that promote self-care and self-compassion.

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There are many books out there on self-reflection, self-awareness , and introspection, but we recommend the books below as resources to help you start your journey.

1. Question Your Life: Naikan Self-Reflection and the Transformation of Our Stories – Gregg Krech

Like the physical bags we carry when we go on a journey, our hearts and our minds only have so much room—but instead of carrying luggage, they carry stories. Some stories inform our lives and help us understand ourselves, while others don’t serve a purpose and can weigh us down.

In this book, Krech will guide the reader through several powerful examples of people who had an important change of heart or mind as a result of quiet self-reflection, including a woman who hated her mother, a man estranged from his father, a pregnant woman hit by a train, a couple who was struggling with their marriage, and a rabbi who neglected his shoes.

Read this book to open yourself up to seeing the world differently, and finding a better path forward.

You can find it on Amazon .

2. Being Present: A Book of Daily Reflections – David Kundtz

Being present can be defined as:

• Paying full attention to what is going on right now;
• Staying in the moment;
• Observing what is, without criticism or judgment;
• Having a balanced concern for things exactly as they are;
• Accepting whatever experience one is having;
• Having an awake participation in ongoing life.

You can use this book as a reminder to be more present through every season of the year and every season of life. The book draws inspiration from poets, scientists, spiritual teachers, children, butterflies, and big cities, and teaches you to accept each day as one full of possibilities and potential surprises.

3. 52 Weeks of Self Reflection – Erika R. Dawkins

You can use this book to guide you through self-reflection. No matter your goal, this guidebook will help you clear your head, see the world from a new perspective, and build a greater understanding of yourself.

In this piece, we defined introspection, described the importance of self-reflection (especially healthy self-reflection), and provided many example exercises, activities, and worksheets for you to enhance your understanding of yourself.

Keep in mind that self-reflection is an intensely personal process. If you find other activities that work better for you, feel free to focus on those—but we’d love for you to come back here and share with us what works.

Do you have any other techniques for self-reflection that you like to use? How important do you think introspection is for the average person, or for yourself? Let us know in the comments.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don’t forget to download our three Self Compassion Exercises for free .

• Bates, S. M. (2012, November 11). Check yo’ self: An exercise in self-reflection. Hello Giggles. Retrieved from https://hellogiggles.com/fashion/check-yo-self-an-exercise-in-self-reflection/
• Cherry, K. (2016, June 14). What is introspection? Wundt’s experimental technique. Very Well. Retrieved from https://www.verywell.com/what-is-introspection-2795252
• Dahl, M. (2017). Sometimes ‘introspection’ is you just making stuff up. Science of Us. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/03/sometimes-introspection-is-you-just-making-stuff-up.html
• Eurich, T. (2017). The right way to be introspective (yes, there’s a wrong way). TED. Retrieved from https://ideas.ted.com/the-right-way-to-be-introspective-yes-theres-a-wrong-way/
• Holothink. (n.d.). The art of self-reflection – 5 exercises to find peace in your life. Holothink.org. Retrieved from https://holothink.org/the-art-of-self-reflection-%E2%80%93-5-exercises-to-find-peace-in-your-life/
• Kos, B. (n.d.). Tools to help you with self-reflection. Agile Lean Life. Retrieved from https://agileleanlife.com/tools-to-help-you-with-self-reflection/
• McLeod, S. (2008). Wilhelm Wundt. Simply Psychology. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/wundt.html
• Tartakovsky, M. (2014). 30 journaling prompts for self-reflection and self-discovery. Psych Central. Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/09/27/30-journaling-prompts-for-self-reflection-and-self-discovery/
• William, D. K. (n.d.). 30 thought-provoking questions you should ask yourself every day. Lifehack. Retrieved from http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/30-thought-provoking-questions-you-should-ask-yourself-every-day.html
• Wood, K. (2013). The lost art of introspection: Why you must master yourself. Expert Enough. Retrieved from http://expertenough.com/2990/the-lost-art-of-introspection-why-you-must-master-yourself
• Woronko, M. (n.d.). The power of self-reflection: Ten questions you should ask yourself. Lifehack. Retrieved from http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/the-power-self-reflection-ten-questions-you-should-ask-yourself.html

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Fantastic article and each of the Reflective Question is like a light house taking us deep inside of our life experiences. Thank You with deep appreciation in preparing this.

Great article! Self-reflection is necessary for improvement!

A very informative article. I learned alot.

I would say ”Best” information I’ve ever read about Self-reflection

I am really impressed with your writing style. Keep it up. The way you explain a complex topic in an easy to understand way is really impressive. Thanks for your inspiring thoughts which guided me well during my journey and gave me the hope I was looking for in personal and professional life. Hats off for this content…

First of all, Thank you for writing this article. It was very useful for Self Motivation.. All the points are very important to our personal and professional career. This will be a useful book for everyone.

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Chapter 6 Test Taking

6.3 Techniques During a Test

You’ve done all you can within reason and within your circumstances to prepare for the test. You’ve studied hard, practised questions, and got a good night’s sleep; you ate nutritiously, and arrived to the test early and prepared. Now it’s time to write the test. There are specific strategies you can use in the midst of the test that will help you do the best you can do.

During-Test Strategies

Here is a list of the most common–and useful–strategies for test-taking.

• Choose your seat wisely. Sit where you are most comfortable. Scan the room and look for considerations that might affect you (e.g. sitting away from windows or doors that may be drafty or distracting). That said, sitting near the front has a couple of advantages: you will hear directions more easily; you may be less distracted by other students; and if a classmate comes up with a question for the instructor and there is an important clarification given, you will be better able to hear it and apply it, if needed.
• Cut down on distractions. Wear ear plugs, if noise distracts you. Put your phone on do not disturb before you arrive.
• Bring water. This helps calm the nerves, for one thing, and water is also needed for optimum brain function.
• Listen carefully to instructions given by the instructor or test invigilator.
• Write it down. Take a couple minutes to write down key facts, dates, principles, statistics, concepts, memory cues and formulas that you memorized to help you on the test. Write them on a piece of scratch paper or in the margin of the exam paper. Do this right at the start. Then you can refer to these notes as you take the exam.
• Scan the test. Before starting to do any of the questions, scan the test so you know how many test items there are, what types there are (multiple choice, matching, essay, etc.), and the point values of each item or group of items. There is nothing worse than getting a big surprise when you have no time left to do anything about it. You don’t want to think you’ve almost finished the test, and then with five minutes left, you discover the last question is a forty mark essay.
• Mark the questions as you scan the test. Star or highlight the questions that you know really well. Put question marks beside the ones that you might have more trouble with. Always focus your attention on the questions you know well first. It ensures that you get the questions done that you have the most chance of getting high marks on, and it builds your confidence from the start. Spending time on a question that you are struggling with is wasting your time which could be spent answering the questions you know the answers to. Skip the ones you don’t know and come back to them later if you have time. You might even get some clues to the answers from some of the other questions covering similar information. On computerized tests or answer sheets where you can’t or shouldn’t make marks – write down the numbers of the questions you skipped or weren’t sure of on scrap paper so you can find them easily later.
• Create a Plan. Evaluate the importance of each section as you scan the test. Determine which way you want to approach the test. Some students start with the easy questions first, that is, the ones they immediately know the answers to, saving the difficult ones for later, knowing they can spend the remaining time on them. Some students begin with the biggest-point items first, to make sure they get the most points. Determine a schedule that takes into consideration how long you have for the test and the types of questions on the test. Essay questions, for example, will require more time than multiple choice or matching questions. Keep your eye on the clock.

Create a Test Plan

Look for opportunities where some areas of the exam are worth more points than others. For example: An exam consists of 21 questions, with 10 being True/False, 10 being multiple choice, and one essay question. The T/F questions are worth 1 point each (10 points), the multiple-choice questions are worth 2 points each (20 points), and the essay question is worth 30 points. You know that the essay question is the most valuable (it is worth half of the value of the exam). And we should allocate our time for it accordingly. Do a quick analysis of time to be able to spend your time on the exam wisely. You want to spend some time with the essay question since it is so valuable, without sacrificing adequate time to ensure the T/F and multiple-choice questions are answered.

Often, the order of the exam in this scenario will be: T/F first, multiple choice second and essay third. Most students will go in the chronological order of the exam, but you may want to start with the essay, or at least decide on the essay question (if there is a choice between given options) and write the outline (plan) for the essay with key points before diving into the rest of the exam.

If this exam were to last for 40 minutes, a student could make a rough plan to spend 15-20 minutes on the essay question, ten minutes on the multiple choice, three-five minutes on the T/F and 5-10 minutes reviewing answers, checking over the essay, and going back to questions that were skipped.

• Read the directions carefully. Then reread them. Do you understand what is expected of you? If not, re-read the questions, or ask the instructor to be sure you are clear.  Common errors from not reading directions carefully include either missing one part of the question (e.g. answered the first part but forgot about the second part) or not noticing that you only needed to answer 3 out of 5 of the short-answer questions (hence wasting time that could have been spent somewhere else on the test). Too many students lose points simply by not following directions completely!
• Read the questions carefully. Underline key words in each question. Think about where you have heard these key words before. Think about other questions on the test for clues. When you have finished writing your answer, go back and read the question again to make sure you actually answered it. (It is not uncommon for students to go off on a tangent and then not actually answer the question.)
• Do the easy questions first. By getting the easy questions out of the way, you’ll feel more confident about the test and have more time to think about the tougher questions. Start with the objective sections of the exam first (multiple choice, true or false, and matching columns). As you answer these questions, keep an eye out for facts, terms, or concepts you may want to use later in an essay question. You’ll know because you read the essay question already and did your outline. Circle key concepts and jot them into your essay outline as you answer questions throughout the test.
• Keep an eye on the time. Keep as close to your plan as possible. If you see that you are running out of time, don’t panic. Move to those questions you think you can still answer accurately within the remaining time.
• Move. Try to stretch in your chair from time to time to relieve tension and assist the blood to the brain! Roll your shoulders, circle your feet and hands, clench your butt, circle your neck.
• Reduce anxiety . Remember to employ strategies to reduce test-taking anxiety (covered earlier in the Chapter 6.1 Test Anxiety and How to Manage It ).
• Check your work. This doesn’t mean going through all your calculations again. Start by ensuring that you have complete answers according to the directions. Then look for other common mistakes, such as a misplaced decimal point, dropped words (especially those that can modify the answer, like “not”), and any incomplete or incomprehensible phrases.

Video: “Mr. Bean – The Exam” (length 5:56)

Exercise: Test-taking Tips

Write a letter of advice to Chen incorporating 10 test-taking tips and strategies you think will help him.

Chen believes he is good at organization, and he usually is–for about the first two weeks of classes. He then becomes overwhelmed with all of the handouts and materials and tends to start slipping in the organization department. When it comes to tests, he worries that his notes might not cover all of the right topics and that he will not be able to remember all of the key terms and points–especially for his math class. During tests, he sometimes gets stuck on an item and tends to spend too much time there.  He also changes answers sometimes but finds out later that his original selection was correct. Chen is also easily distracted by other students and noises which makes it hard for him to concentrate, and, unfortunately, he does admit to occasionally “cramming” the night before.

Strategies for Specific Exam Formats

As well as using the above strategies during the test, it is important to be aware of the five principal types of questions on tests and to know specific strategies for each type to help maximize success.

True or False Questions

Look for qualifiers. A qualifier is a word that is absolute. Examples are: all, never, no, always, none, every, only, entirely. They are often seen in false statements. This is because it is more difficult to create a true statement using a qualifier like never, no, always, etc. For example, “All cats chase mice.” Cats may be known for chasing mice, but not all of them do so. The answer here is false and the qualifier “all” gave us a tip. Qualifiers such as: sometimes, many, some, most, often, and usually are commonly found in true statements. For example: “Most cats chase mice.” This is true and the qualifier “most” gave us a tip. Here is another example. “Delia flirts with every man she meets.” Though the statement may seem true because you know Delia, there was a time 5 years ago that she met a man named Bob, and she didn’t flirt with him.  Though the temptation is to say, “true”, the one instance that it didn’t happen (when she met Bob) makes the actual answer, “false”. Similarly in a test, if you can think of one exception in a statement with an absolute qualifier (i.e. even one instance that the statement wouldn’t be true), then the answer is false.

Make sure to read the entire statement. All parts of a sentence must be true if the whole statement is to be true. If one part of it is false, the whole sentence is false. Long sentences are often false for this reason.

If students don’t know the answer, they should guess on True or False questions unless there is a penalty for an incorrect answer. There is a fifty percent chance of guessing correctly! And if you have to guess, guess the one that seems to make the most sense to you, and if you still have no idea, guess True, because most tests include more true statements than false.

Multiple Choice Questions

It is important to read each statement carefully. Think of multiple choice questions as four (or five) true or false statements in one. One of the statements is true (the correct answer) and the others will be false. If you have options such as “all of the above,” or “both A and B,” make sure each item is completely true (no exceptions) before selecting those options. If you know your material well, you will be able to pick out the true statements. If you are unsure of the material, there are some strategies to help you come up with the right answer.

Apply the same strategy toward qualifiers as you did in the True False questions. If you see an absolute qualifier in one of the answer choices, it is probably false. If a statement says something “always” happens and you can think of even one exception, then it is false. Try to identify the true statement, but before you choose it as the right answer,  always read the other statements because you may find another statement that sounds true. Eliminate answers you know to be false.  Then discern between the two true-sounding statements. While working through a question, it is helpful to x-out the ones you know are false; it will save time if you need to go over the question again.

If there is no penalty for incorrect answers,  guess if you are not certain of the answer. If there is a penalty for incorrect answers, common logic is to guess if you can eliminate two of the answers as incorrect (pending what the penalty is). If there’s a penalty and you cannot narrow down the answers, it’s best to leave it blank. You may wish to ask your instructor for clarification.

Answers that are strange and unrelated to the question are usually false. If two answers have a word that looks or sounds similar, one of those is usually correct. For example: abductor/ adductor. If you see these as two of the four or five choices, one of them is usually correct. Also look for answers that are grammatically incorrect. These are usually incorrect answers.

Matching Questions

Although less common than the other types of exams, you will likely see some matching exams during your time in college. First, read the instructions and take a look at both lists to determine what the items are and their relationship. It is especially important to determine if both lists have the same number of items and if all items are to be used, and used only once.

Matching exams become much more difficult if one list has more items than the other or if items either might not be used or could be used more than once. If your exam instructions do not discern this, you may wish to ask your instructor for further clarification.

Students should take a look at the whole list before selecting an answer because a more correct answer may be found further into the list. If one column is short phrases and the other column is single words, work from the column with phrases and look for the single words to match (not the other way around). If both columns have single words, group them by parts of speech (nouns with nouns, verbs with verbs etc.). Mark items when you are sure you have a match and cross out these options to eliminate answers for the remainder of the matching. Guessing (if needed) should take place once you have selected answers you are certain about.

Short-Answer Questions

Short-answer questions are designed for you to recall and provide very specific information (unlike essay questions that ask you to apply critical thinking to that information.) Read all of the instructions first. Budget your time and then read all of the questions. Answer the ones you know best or feel the most confident with. Then go back to the other ones. If you do not know the answer and there is no penalty for incorrect answers, guess. Use common sense. Sometimes instructors will award partial credit for a logical answer that is related even if it is not the correct answer.

Make sure to look at the marking system. If short answer questions are worth 3-5 marks out of 100, then likely the instructor is looking for about 2-3 relevant sentences, not a full paragraph. If they are out of twenty marks, you’ll want to include more information in more depth.

Author’s Story

I have a tendency to write too much on short-answer test questions. I want to write down everything I know about the topic. It’s great because I’ll usually get full marks on the question, but an instructor once told me that I would have had full marks with my first few sentences. The trouble is that if you spend too long on a short-answer question, you may run out of time for other questions, especially a long-answer essay style question that really does require you to go into depth. Write down a few of the most relevant things on your short-answer question and come back and write more later if there’s time at the end.

— Mary Shier, College of the Rockies

Essay Questions

Knowing the format of the exam can help you determine how to study. If you know that you are taking a True-False or Multiple Choice exam, you will need to discern whether a statement is True or False. You will need to know subject content for the course. But if you are studying for short answer and especially for essay questions, you must know a lot more. For essay questions, you must have much greater content knowledge and be able to make a coherent argument that answers the question using information from textbooks, lectures or other course materials. You will have to connect themes with examples. Essay questions evaluate your thinking and reasoning skills applied to the course material. You will have to place a lot more time and thought into studying for an essay exam than for True-False or Multiple Choice exams.

Read the essay question(s) and the instructions first. Underline or circle key words in the question. Plan your time wisely and organize your answer before you start to write. Make a quick outline to organize the essay and include all key points. Address the answer to the question in your first paragraph and reiterate it in your last paragraph (conclusion). You would be surprised how many essays are written that discuss all kinds of things about the topic, but actually never answer the question! It may help to restate the original question. Write clearly and legibly. Instructors have difficulty grading essays that they cannot read. Clearly state what you are trying to say. Don’t expect that the instructor knows what you mean. Write the essay as if you are explaining it to someone who knows nothing about the topic. Please note that essay questions often have multiple acceptable answers, so don’t question whether your answer is correct or not. Just make sure you’ve backed up what you’ve said.

Save some time for review when you have finished writing to check spelling, grammar and coherent thought in your answer. Inevitably you will find things that need to be clarified. Write your essay double-spaced. This leaves room to add in words or phrases in the proof-reading stage without making a mess of your paper. Finally, make sure you have addressed all parts of the essay question.

Exercise: Test Your Knowledge

Key Takeaways

• Be prepared. Get a good night’s sleep! Arrive early and get comfortable.
• Scan the entire exam before starting to answer questions.
• Develop a plan (including a “time budget”) for completing the exam.
• Read questions carefully. Underline keywords in questions, particularly in essay questions and science questions.
• Do the questions you know well first.
• Unless points are deducted for wrong answers, it pays to take educated guesses.
• Pay attention to specific strategies for different types of questions.
• Keep a close eye on the time. Don’t be caught off guard.

Lastly, if you finish the test early, use the remaining time to review your answers and make corrections or additions before submitting your exam.

Make sure you have written your full name on the test. It’s shocking how many students write their first name only and expect the instructor to figure it out. It’s also shocking how many students forget to write their names at all. You don’t want to go through all that preparation and stress and then not get credit for your work. Lastly, make sure to hand your paper in!

Video: “Funny school video of kid taking a test” (length 1:04)

Text Attributions

• Points under the “During-Test Strategies” heading has been adapted from “ Taking Tests ” in University Success by N. Mahoney, B. Klassen, and M. D’Eon. Adapted by Mary Shier.  CC BY-NC-SA .
• The “Words to Watch for in Essay Questions” table and the Crossword puzzle activity have been adapted from “ The Secrets of the Q and A’ s” in University Success by N. Mahoney, B. Klassen, and M. D’Eon. Adapted by Mary Shier. CC BY-NC-SA .
• Text under “Strategies for Specific Exam Formats” has been adapted from “ Test-Taking Strategy Specifics ” in Blueprint for Success in College and Career   by Dave Dillon. Adapted by Mary Shier. CC BY .

Video Attributions

• “ The Exam | Mr. Bean Official ” by Mr. Bean . Standard YouTube licence.
• “ Funny school video of kid taking a test ” by jerodtnt . Standard YouTube licence.

Media Attributions

• Crossword © University of Saskatchewan is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license

6.3 Techniques During a Test Copyright © 2020 by Mary Shier is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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