College study skills
S.S.M.R: Memory sheets

The first part of measurement covered college study skills looking specifically at measuring how well you are doing against your plan.  Whilst this is a good first step you do need to take other steps to boost your chances of success.

Boosting your college study skills through measurement can also be achieved by producing memory sheets and personal tests.

Memory Sheets

Memory sheets are checklists of the key points in a topic.  These sheets prove invaluable as you are progressing through your studies.  To produce a sheet you need to add onto a sheet of paper key memory points or proofs from a topic.

One way of achieving this is by using mind maps.  Mind maps are a great way to improve your college study skills.  However there are simpler ways to achieve a similar effect when working from a measurement perspective.

Instead of creating a visual impact diagram like a mind map you simply create a list.  As you are working through your schedule or plan, add onto a separate bit of paper key points.  These should be points that you think really help to bring out the topic.

Your points can be a paragraph, a sentence, a whole proof or a drawing providing they highlight a key point.  Don't worry if you create a lot of these when working through a topic.  It's quite normal to make a long list.  It's hard to figure out the key points when you don't know the whole topic area.

When you first go through the topic write down all the points you think are important.  Put in lots of detail if you feel you need it.

Once you have your first draft of a memory sheet for a topic you need to start to reduce it.  Learning to reduce or summarize these memory sheets is a key part of your college study skills.

Take it slowly at first.  An easy way to start is to remove all the small words like, "a", "the", "to" and so on.  This generally leaves you with a text that you can still scan quickly and one that retains its meaning.

Let's assume you started with seven sheets of paper.  Hopefully by this initial pruning you'd have reduced the total to five sheets of paper.  The next area to tackle is to reduce the large paragraphs into bullet points.

Take each large paragraph and split it into sentences of about six of seven words.  Next take those sentences and put them as bullet points one under the other.  To reduce the bullet points you need to now assess each one.  Remove those which aren't adding a lot of value.

As a general rule of thumb I'd suggest that you should now have reduced the total memory sheets in half.  So you would now have 3 sheets.

Now it becomes much harder to reduce the size of the sheets.  You can try to reduce diagrams and tables and tidy up the text but you might find that you're not getting much benefit.  Instead at this stage tidy the sheets up and put them into a word processor.

If it had been your memory sheets they'd now be complete for that topic.

These sheets can now be used as part of your college study skills.

Personal Tests

For each of the topics you'll now end up with memory sheets.  Your aim is to be able to reproduce these from memory through personal test.  This is where the measurement comes into practise.  You need to set up a schedule for yourself whereby you continuously test your ability to reproduce the memory sheets.

The simplest way for you to do this is to supplement the memory part of your college study skills with a table.  Perhaps the simplest way to do this is to expand the table we've used so far for the SSMR.

You can see I've added three columns to the table.  The first column shows that the memory sheet is available and second two each measure when you've tested yourself on it.

By keeping track of your progress with the memory sheets you'll find you that successful results build up.  The first time you tackle it you might only get 50% of it correct.  However as you practise you'll get more and more correct.

If you aim for an 80% pass mark then you can be sure that you've got the key parts of the topic in your head.  Don't forget if you need extra columns add them to keep score.

When I use this method I generally find that it keeps me really focused on the key points of my topics.  I don't spend lots of time on "extra" work.  This enables me to keep my time in check and make sure I'm successful at the exams.

So to improve your college study skills remember to add memory papers and measurement into you study skills set.