Time is flying by, and you desperately want to know about the 5 best ways to improve your grades before the end of the school year.
Let’s face it – it is all about powering up your study skills.
Do that, and you will get better results. Here are some ideas to get you thinking and planning ahead.
5 Best Ways to Improve Your Grades Before the End of the School Year
1. Timing
Plan your study time so that you have breaks built-in.
Forget the marathons.
Do this ahead of time, and you are on to a winner.
Get the breaks you need.
The downtime lets your brain process and digest what it learned, convert it into longer-term memory, and prepare for newer information.
Without this break time, there’s a higher likelihood you’ll forget what you learned.
The Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting shows how people are more likely to remember what they learned at the beginning and the end (primacy and recency) than the middle.
Shorter study sessions with breaks in between are more effective because the gap between the beginning and end is less, and therefore you remember more.
Walk around the room or even better, go out for a walk.
Physical movement of any kind helps the circulation in the brain.
In turn, this helps you focus better.
If you are into charts and planning timetables, use these because as you cross off periods of studying done, this will help you to stay motivated.
This is much more important than you might think.
2. How Do You Study?
Seems like a dumb question, right?
Actually, identifying how you learn best has a lot to do with your learning styles.
Take the FREE Learning Styles Quiz on the home page at HowtoLearn.com first, and it will tell you how you prefer to learn best.
Everybody is unique, so we cannot generalize too much here. But if you like listening and are better auditory learners, you can try the following :
- record yourself reading out notes that you have memorized so that you can test yourself. This is a great confidence booster when you realize that you have learned a lot.
- if you are a more visual type learner, you can go for visual aids and lots of highly colored highlighters to help fix things in your mind. Making flashcards is also instructive and fun.
- when you feel tired, just start reading the facts out loud. As you have to slow down to do that, this will help your memory and focus.
- are you into studying with your classmates? If you are, this is a great way to get help and also compete with each other.
Testing and quizzing each other will motivate you even more, especially if you’re a kinesthetic learner!
Whichever way you study, you want to maximize your time to help recall, repeat, and eliminate errors.
3. Resist Media Temptation
Another of the 5 best ways to improve your grades before the end of the school year is to make pact whereby you only check your social media accounts every two hours, or whatever you decide is reasonable.
Reward yourself with a break or healthy snack if you manage to keep to this.
If you do not manage, try extending the time for the next round.
This is a natural consequence of losing time.
If you are studying online, this might be more difficult to do, but you will save time and also feel that you are on top of the situation.
Losing focus while you are learning or concentrating on something can take up more time – your brain can take up to over 20 minutes to refocus on what it was doing before getting distracted.
So, for your own good, put the socials off – they’ll still be there when you get a significant chunk of your workload done.
4. Ask the Teacher for Help
What are you making mistakes in?
What is preventing you from learning something?
Try to identify your weak areas and ask the teacher to help.
You may also want the chance to do a quiz, test, or homework again so that you can improve your grade.
Very often, the teacher will say yes.
5. Lifestyle and Study Environment
If you consume too much stimulants and caffeine drinks like coffee, then try to cut down.
Opt for green tea instead, which contains l-theanine along with some amount of caffeine.
This gives you the boost of alertness you need to study, without the jitteriness of coffee.
The best beverage of all is water and plenty of it.
Build in healthy snacks into your breaks.
Dark chocolate and nuts are great to help you get over those cravings – and are good for your brain and its learning capacity.
Cut down sugar as that can give you a temporary boost – if you crash, then you are left feeling low, affecting your concentration.
Take breaks – go and get exercise.
Make sure to take short breaks about every 20-30 minutes or so, too – remember primacy and recency from earlier in this article?
This is one of the best of the 5 best ways to improve your grades before the end of the school year because just understanding primacy and recency will help you as you take more breaks.
Then review the middle portions at the beginning and end as well, so you have it all covered.
Build in your periods for chilling out with music, TV, or with friends so that you can get rest and relaxation. You will study so much better afterward.
If you do not, your levels of attention and memory get less and less efficient. But after a break, you are ready to give it your best.
As you can see, there is nothing mysterious or magical about the 5 best ways to improve your grades before the end of the school year.
All you have to do is power up the way you study – you just need motivation and discipline.
I’m eager to hear which of the tips you’ll be trying out, and how they go for you!
Robert Locke, MBE, is a health enthusiast specializing in children’s health and has written extensively on ADHD, parenting, mental health, anxiety and depression. You can discover more by visiting the Problem Kids Blog.
[ Updated – October 14, 2020 ]
Recent Comments