Common Mistakes and Pitfalls made by Students in their Academics

One of the important aspects which can give your academic performance a huge setback and a really tough fight is the study habits you employ. So, whether you are a college or university student, high school or secondary school student; lectures, seminars and classes would not be fruitful if you stick to and follow the normal self-study procedures and research methods that yield very minimal results.

However, majority of Nigerian students make a huge mistake in this scenario. The study pattern of most students have been evaluated by educational researchers who published their results in academic journals. As to the results, only few students live up to their expectations and reputations. Many students often employ habits like highlighting, re-reading, summarizing, etc which are just quite low utility habits that actually greatly affect the performance.

The question is does it really work. Somewhat! Various studies have shown that re-reading helps in memorizing data and is beneficial for students who have to work with two dimensional data like grammatical rules, terminology, structural details, formulas, etc. With regard to comprehension, it is different.

When it is about the criterion task, then you can say that the effect of the rereading will be durable. But researchers feel that most of the effects are related to recall based memory steps while the benefits it has on comprehension is still vague. That is why there is a great need to distinguish between your analytic and mnemonic capacity. Here you need to think whether a lot of regurgitation of the material has to be done or not. Sometimes you may get a positive answer, but if it is not. Thereby it means that you may just be wasting your time.

Now with regard to underlining and highlighting, you have to really understand the concept. Unless, the properly mapping of the argument is done in the passage, you are just distorting it. This is the reason why highlighting can not only be a waste of your time, but would pull down your performance.

Researchers have come to the conclusion that in most of the situations, it has been found out that highlighting does very little in boosting the performance of the student. It may be beneficial for students who have knowledge required to highlight contents more effectively or when the given text is difficult. However, on higher level tasks, it will deeply hurt the performance and will need inference making.

While reading in sequence, it is important that your highlights are not or should not form disjointed in-dept details and should provide a bullet point summary of the passage. Else, you brain will be following two different versions of a given text. Together with the given commentary and annotation, proper highlighting shows a significant aspect of the transition from a high school or secondary school academics to the next level known as higher education.

Just like highlighting, summarizing is an example of metadata. This metadata is the supreme grail of all the academic analysis and is the supreme foundation of all scientific inquiries. Simply, restating a normal chapter from a textbook for central argument is quite difficult and is not something which is preferred until you reach the final year of your college. Unless you are a graduate student, this will most certainly lead to misrepresentation of the various aspects of the passage or the internal logics. And professors can be the irremediable sticklers for logics as they would be often teaching from their own textbooks or resources.

Therefore, instead of simply giving your own and verbal summary, it is best if you could interact and interpret the argument in various ways. Some of the best examples of effective study habits are schematic representation, case applications, etc.