Studying

I know this has been done before but I feel that it is always good to know how other people go about looking at things not only is it a beneficial experience for you it is an important skill to learn in life. No where in the real world can you survive totally independent there is some form of communication that must occur with others to do things. For this blog I want to explain how I study and what I find to be effective. Many people focus only on the reading. They think if you read the chapters we are assigned and take the practice test you will do well on the exam. Well for those of you that have done this and have been consistently doing this without success allow me to explain my tactic for studying. Reading the book is helpful but by doing it all at once or even 2 chapters at once is highly ineffective. Their is a lot of content and a lot of material covered over the chapters and I guarantee that you will not retain the information if you read a lot at once. What I would suggest is when you read do a chapter a day and follow the reading calendar. I know it is difficult to do with our hectic lives but try to do the best you can to read with it. Just waiting until the Weekend to do the weeks reading will waste a lot of your time and leave you with little information. When you read, read actively. I know it sounds cliche but when your really reading and understanding the material you will actually understand the content at hand. I feel the difficulty of the multiple choice test lie in the question that they ask. By reading actively and effectively you will be able to make deductions about certain questions based off of the information that you already know. This is the best way to read the content. Most of the important material is talked about during class via the documentaries or lectures but a lot of little information is not mentioned at all and if you want to do very well you need to be reading. The biggest issue on the multiple choice for me are the multiple multiples. Though these seem awful at times they are actually not to bad. The point is that by adding these question you do not breeze through a question picking just one answer. On the AP test more than one answer could be right and it is important to specifically read the question to find the proper one. So my only tip for multiple multiples is to read the question thoroughly and not to worry about the 10% if you think there is more than one mark it. Finally, an effective way to review the beefy content of the section is to study online notes. Just by googling American Pageant 11 Edition you get many different online notes that give a lot of good information. These notes suck out the content of the chapters and leave out all of the useless words that try to flower up the sentences. If time is an issue I suggest reading the notes and then moving on to the chapter and the practice test. Before I leave I want to say we have 4 good nights including tonight to study for this exam. You can easily do well on this exam if you make sure that you feel comfortable with the material. Once you do this it all becomes easy.

Sincerely,
Ryan #DACANNON