Punggol Study Skills for Primary and Secondary
How do I make my child study better? How to get A* in PSLE? How to improve in exams? How to make my child listen to increase focus and concentration? A review of our lessons so far. Punggol tutor Ms Yuet Ling teaches how to be a better effective student in this blog post- Be creative and teach students to have good study skills that Punggol students can employ throughout their education and career.
How to study better: Listening
The basis of a class setup is the teacher/student interface where a teacher speaks and a student listens to instruction.
This “How to study effectively” section explores study skills that students needs to excel in their study. Listening is a skill that is much needed by students to do well in school as a lecturers’/teachers’ role is to download information and teaching materials to students every lesson. Some students seem to learn faster than others and one of their skill set weapons is to listen effectively.
With a higher proficiency in listening, students acquires this information faster but more importantly, process it with understanding, harness the full potential of the class and retain the information to be used later in their education or life.
Tips to be a better listener:
Practice listening.
This might sound weird since listening is a natural thing we do everyday and we don’t think twice about doing that but we can definitely improve our listening skills by practicing. Start by picking a topic that you enjoy on Youtube. For example, I get my students to watch and listen to National Geographic or BBC Nature by Sir David Attenborough that are chock full of facts in our English classes for Listening Comprehension.
Now start the video and focus on what is being said. Start noticing the facts and nuances mentioned and take mental notes of the points made. When you finish the video, restart the video and this time round, notice how many things you missed out. You will notice that there will be facts that you missed out on the first pass. That is perfectly alright and an awesome baseline to start your listening effectively journey on.
Keep at it and do this practice again. With more practice, a few weeks later, you will find that there will be lesser and lesser things that you will miss out on the first pass as your listening skills increases. This improvement will definitely come about with practice.
Visualize what is being taught.
While practicing your listening skills on Youtube, it helps to visualize what are the points being said. It is easier to have a picture in your mind than just words as a picture paints a better picture than a thousand words. It is also faster to be able to play it out in your mind in visual form than to memorise it in word form.
Organize what you hear.
Make mental notes in point form. Keep everything simple enough and organise what is being said at the same time it is being said. This keeps your mind agile and balanced to receive information as and when you hear it. Picture the process of learning as a whole, from listening, understanding it and then organising it to be memorised.
How fast you can process all this information depends on how neat its stacked in your brains. The velocity increases once your mind is well organised. It stops any bottlenecking and pinching along your learning process. Like an expressway, there will be no traffic jams if there are no accidents creating chaos for every motorist. If every vehicle is moving at the same speed, is organised and knows where they are going, there will be no disruptions. That is the same analogy that we can apply to our studying process. Streamlining the learning process means you will need lesser time to revise and score higher in the process since you can capture more information during class.
Summary:
Listening is a skill that can be improved. It helps you to learn more if you can pick up more information during class. It also helps you to learn faster and with a good set of study skills, creates an environment where studying is easier, fun and needs less work to do more and score higher. It also helps in life skills and career if one can listen effectively.
