Study Skills: A Free Self-Help Library

Read each statement and choose how much it sounds like you. Answer for an ordinary week, not your best one. Each area scores from 0 to 6, and the areas with the highest scores are where to start.

Your answers stay in your browser. Nothing is sent or saved, so you can retake it as often as you like. Prefer paper? The printable version has the same 24 statements and a scoring key.

Every week has 168 hours. Before you can plan study time, you need to know how many of those hours are already spoken for.

A useful yardstick: U.S. federal rules define a college credit hour as about one hour of class plus at least two hours of out-of-class work each week, across a semester.¹⁶ So a student in 15 credit hours of classes is signing up for something like 30 hours of reading, homework and review a week. Individual courses vary, and some ask for much more.

Fill in the time budget below with honest estimates. It adds up your week, shows what is left, and compares that with what your classes expect.

Estimates are a start. A log is better.

People are reliably optimistic about time. In a set of studies on what psychologists call the planning fallacy, students predicted when they would finish academic projects, including honors theses, and most finished later than they predicted. The bias went away in one study when students were asked to think about how long similar tasks had taken them before.¹⁵

That suggests two habits:

• Log one real week. The printable 168-hour log has a box for every hour. Fill it in as you go, not from memory on Sunday night. Then compare it with your estimates above.
• Plan from your past, not your hopes. Before you guess how long an essay will take, look at how long the last one actually took.

Plan the week, then the term

1. Put in the fixed things first: classes, work shifts, sleep, travel. Use the weekly study planner.
2. Add study blocks next to the classes they belong to. An hour after a lecture is a good time to fill gaps in your notes while you still remember.
3. Leave blank space. A plan that fills every hour has nowhere to go when something runs long.
4. In week one, build the term planner. Copy every exam and due date from every syllabus onto one page, so the crunch weeks are visible in week one, not week ten.
5. Work backward from big deadlines. Our free Assignment Countdown turns a due date into dated steps.

Putting work off has causes you can work on. In a review that pooled 691 correlations from procrastination research, Piers Steel found the strongest, most consistent links were with tasks that feel unpleasant, rewards that are far away, low confidence and impulsiveness.¹⁰

That’s a useful map. Each strategy below goes after one of those causes: making the task less unpleasant, bringing the payoff closer, or taking the decision out of the moment.

Ten ways to get started

1. Shrink the first step. Make it so small it feels silly: open the file and type the title. A step that small costs almost nothing to begin.
2. Write an if-then plan. “If it’s 4 p.m. Tuesday, then I open the lab report at the library.” Across 94 tests, plans in this if-then form had a medium-to-large effect on whether people followed through on their goals.¹¹
3. Set a 10-minute timer. Agree to work until it rings, then decide whether to keep going. Stopping is allowed, which is what makes starting easier.
4. Start in the middle. Skip the introduction. Begin with the part you understand best.
5. Leave the work where you’ll trip over it. Book open to the page, document open on the screen, before you walk away.
6. Work next to someone. A library table, a study group, or a video call with a friend who is also working.
7. Remove one distraction first. Phone in another room, or a site blocker on. Just one, before you sit down.
8. Name what’s in the way. Boring? Pair it with music or a small reward. Confusing? Send one question to the instructor. Scary? Write a rough version you’re allowed to throw out.
9. Forgive yesterday. First-year students who forgave themselves for putting off studying before a midterm procrastinated less when the next exam came around.¹⁴ Guilt doesn’t get the work done.
10. End with a note to your future self. Before you stop, write the very next step: “Next: finish paragraph two.” Tomorrow’s start is then already decided.

WOOP: a plan for the obstacle you already know about

WOOP was developed by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen.¹³ It pairs picturing a goal with picturing what will get in the way, then making an if-then plan for that moment. In one study, fifth-graders taught the method improved their report card grades, attendance and conduct compared with a group taught positive thinking.¹²

Reaching the end of a page with no idea what it said is normal. Your eyes did the reading; nothing asked your memory to do anything. Both methods below fix that by making you produce something from memory before you move on.

SQ3R

Francis P. Robinson, a psychologist at Ohio State University, set out SQ3R in his 1946 book Effective Study.⁶ It is still one of the most widely taught reading methods.

1. Survey. Spend about five minutes on the headings, bold terms, figures, summary and any end-of-chapter questions. You’re building a map.
2. Question. Turn the first heading into a question. “Causes of the Dust Bowl” becomes “What caused the Dust Bowl?”
3. Read that section to answer your question.
4. Recite. Close the book. Say or write the answer in your own words. Check it, then fix what you missed. Repeat Question, Read, Recite for each section.
5. Review. Quiz yourself on all your questions later the same day, then again a few days later.

The short version: read, recite, review

If SQ3R feels like too much, try the three-step version tested by Mark McDaniel and colleagues: read a passage, recite everything you remember out loud without looking, then reread it. In their experiments, this beat rereading alone, and it did as well as note-taking while taking less time.⁵

Good notes are less about writing everything down and more about what you do with them afterward. The Cornell system builds the afterward into the page.

Walter Pauk developed it at Cornell University and described it in How to Study in College, first published in 1962.⁷ The page has three parts:

1. Record. During class, write main ideas and examples in the Notes column. Phrases, not sentences.
2. Reduce. As soon as you can, pull key words and questions into the Cues column.
3. Recite. Cover the Notes column. Answer each cue out loud or on scrap paper, then check.
4. Reflect. Ask how this connects to what you already know. Write the summary at the bottom.
5. Review. Spend a few minutes each week reciting from the cues. That’s your test prep, done in small pieces.

Cornell University’s Learning Strategies Center still publishes its own guide to the system.

Listening in a lecture

• Before: skim the reading or your last notes for five minutes, and write down one question you hope the class answers.
• During: listen for signals. “The main point is,” “there are four causes,” anything repeated or written on the board. Write the instructor’s examples down; they often turn up on tests in another form.
• When you miss something, leave a gap and mark it with a question mark instead of falling further behind.
• After, the same day: fill the gaps from the slides, the reading or a classmate, and write your cues and summary.

The study habits that feel most productive are often the weakest. Rereading and highlighting feel like progress because the material looks familiar. Familiar isn’t the same as remembered.

In 2013, John Dunlosky and four colleagues reviewed the research on ten common study techniques and rated how useful each one is.¹ Their ratings:

“Low” doesn’t mean useless. It means the evidence was weak or the benefits were narrow. Summarizing, for example, helped students who were already trained to do it well.

1. Test yourself instead of rereading

In a well-known experiment, students either restudied a passage or took recall tests on it. Five minutes later, the restudy group remembered more. Two days and a week later, the tested group remembered substantially more, even though the restudy group felt more confident.² That gap between feeling and result is the main reason students under-use self-testing.

Ways to do it: close the book and write down everything you remember; use the Cues column of your notes; do practice problems without looking at the worked examples; explain a topic out loud to an empty room.

2. Space it out

A review of 317 experiments found that spreading study sessions apart beats massing them together, and that the best gap between sessions gets longer the longer you need to remember something.³ For a test next week, a day or two between sessions works. For a final exam, come back to early material every week or two.

One way to start: study a topic today, quiz yourself on it in two days, again in a week, then once more before the exam. The SQ3R sheet has check boxes for this.

3. Mix problem types

When practice problems are all the same type, you know which method to use before you read the question. In a math study, students whose practice problems were shuffled did worse during practice but much better on a test a week later.⁴ Once you can do each type, mix them.

4. Ask why, and explain it

When you read a fact, ask why it’s true. When you solve a problem, explain each step to yourself. Both were rated moderate: worth doing, with less evidence behind them than self-testing and spacing.¹

For a readable book-length treatment of this research, see Make It Stick by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel.²³

Most of the work happens before you walk into the room. Some of the most useful work happens after the grade comes back, and most students skip it.

About a week before

• Find out the format: which topics, what kinds of questions, how long, what you can bring.
• List the topics and mark each one solid, shaky or lost. Spend your time on the last two.
• Quiz yourself rather than rereading, and spread the sessions over several days (see Memory and review).
• Do at least one practice run under time pressure.
• Take the topics marked lost to office hours, a tutor or a classmate while there’s still time.

During the test

• Read the directions, then look over the whole test before answering anything.
• Budget time by points. A question worth a third of the grade deserves about a third of the time.
• Answer what you know first. Mark the rest and come back.
• For essay questions, jot a quick outline before you write.
• If your mind goes blank, breathe slowly, move to a different question, and write down anything related to the one you’re stuck on. It often brings the rest back.
• Keep the last five minutes for checking.

After it comes back

For every lost point, ask why. Didn’t know it? Misread the question? Ran out of time? Careless slip? Each has a different fix, and the pattern across two or three tests tells you what to change. The exam checklist has a table for this.

Test anxiety

Some nervousness before a test is normal. When it’s strong enough that you blank on material you know, there are things to try. In a study published in Science, students who spent ten minutes writing about their worries just before an exam scored better than a control group, and the benefit was largest for students who were usually anxious about tests.¹⁷ It costs nothing to try before your next one.

If anxiety is affecting your grades, sleep or daily life, talk to your campus counseling center or disability services office; many students qualify for testing accommodations. The National Institute of Mental Health has plain-language information on anxiety disorders.²¹

There’s no single right place to study. There is a right place for you, for a particular kind of work, and most people have never checked which places actually work.

Check a place you study

Run through these questions for one place you study, then for another. The printable Study Space Check turns them into a rating sheet.

• Can you find everything you need within a minute of sitting down?
• Does the noise level work for you, or can you fix it with headphones?
• Can your phone be out of reach and out of sight here?
• Is the light good enough to read without straining?
• Are you comfortable, but not so comfortable that you get sleepy? (Beds usually fail this one.)
• Will people interrupt you?
• Is this place available at the times you actually study?
• Do you usually get more done here than you expected, or less?

Distractions

The most effective fixes tend to happen before you sit down, because resisting a buzzing phone is harder than not hearing it. Put the phone in another room or a bag, close tabs you don’t need, and decide in advance when your next break is so you aren’t negotiating with yourself every five minutes.

Study strategies only go so far if you’re running on four hours of sleep. This section covers the basics and points to people who can help with more.

Sleep

The CDC recommends 8 to 10 hours of sleep a night for teens aged 13 to 17, and 7 or more hours for adults aged 18 to 60.¹⁹ If your time budget doesn’t leave room for that, sleep is usually the wrong row to cut. An all-nighter before an exam trades the sleep you need for one more pass over material you could have quizzed yourself on earlier in the week.

Stress

The National Institute of Mental Health’s “I’m So Stressed Out!” fact sheet suggests, among other things: keeping a journal, regular exercise and meals, a steady sleep routine, cutting back on caffeine, challenging unhelpful thoughts, and staying in touch with people who help you cope.²⁰ It also says to get help from a professional if you’re struggling to cope or your symptoms don’t go away.

For college students, your campus counseling center is usually free and often the fastest place to start. High school students can talk to a school counselor.

If you are in crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text 988 in the United States to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time of day.²² If you’re in immediate danger, call 911.