How Do I Make a Study Plan?

When and Where Are You Most Productive or Alert?

Tackle your most difficult tasks during this time.

• What time do you study best?
• How long can you concentrate before you need a break?
• Do you work better focusing on one subject/task for a long period of time or switching back and forth?
• Is it more helpful for you to have a detailed plan or a more unstructured one?
• Do you work better in complete silence or with some noise around you?
  • If noise, what kind of noise (talking, music, TV, white noise, etc.)?
• Are you more productive surrounded by people or alone?
• Do you need your own space or a more neutral one?
• What materials do you need to have access to?
  • Do you really need to be near a computer, or is it mainly a distraction?
• Will you be physically comfortable in the location you’ve chosen?
  • Will you be too comfortable and fall asleep?
  • Will you have enough light?
  • Will you have enough space to spread out comfortably?
• Your ideal study space may change depending on what you’re reading, whether you’re doing language study, or even the time of day.
• Book space on campus for your private or group study time.
• Give yourself plenty of breaks while studying to avoid fatigue. Take a 15-minute break for every 2 hours you study—your brain still processes information even when you are not actively thinking about it. Just be careful that a short break doesn’t turn into a long one.

Spend Time Planning and Organizing

• Establish priorities for the semester and reassess them from time to time.
• Keep a monthly calendar and make a daily schedule.
• Spend some time every day on every module. Work on an assignment, read, or review. This way, you won’t need to cram because you’ll always be caught up.
• Make a to-do list and prioritize the items on it—start with high priority tasks and work your way through the list.
• Make a not-to-do list—it’s a great way to break time-wasting habits.
• Try to have a clear and specific goal for each study session (it helps keep you focused on what you need to get done.)
  • Instead of saying you’re going to work after dinner, say you’re going to finish your Greek Civ reading and start your Latin translation sentences.
  • Having a plan of action to refer to will keep you on task and let you know at the end of your study session what you’ve really accomplished.

Keep your books, notes and other class materials in order. You can waste valuable study time looking for a lost book or a missing set of notes.

Work on an assignment the day that it is given, even if you only use the Assignment Survival Kit (ASK) to develop a plan for finishing it.

Don’t spin your wheels—when you aren’t getting something, ask for help.

Use the time between your classes to plan, read, or review. If you’re studying a language, use these pockets of time to review your vocabulary, declensions, or conjugations.

Take some time off. Students often feel guilty when they aren’t working because they think about everything they should be doing. But if you plan out your schedule, you’ll know you’ll have time to get everything done. That way, when you’ve finished your work for the day, you can feel free to relax and enjoy yourself.

How Do I Do All This Reading?

“Active reading” is going to become really important at university. You will have large reading loads, so do some on a regular basis, even if you can’t do it all.

Try out the strategies below and find the ones that work best for you. You may find that some strategies work better for textbooks, others for primary sources, and still others for articles or site reports.

Read in Layers

Skim and scan all your readings initially (top layer), and if that’s all you have time for before class, return to it after class using class notes to guide you in a deeper layer or level of reading.

Before You Begin Reading

• Refer to the syllabus not just for assignments and due dates but for information about the topic and theme a reading relates to. Use the topic to pose a question or set your purpose to guide your reading.
• Ask yourself pre-reading questions. For example:
  • What is the topic, and what do I already know about it?
  • Why has the instructor assigned this reading at this point in the semester?
• Determine why a reading was assigned—how it fits into the course–and what you are expected to take away from it.
• Connect the text to the course. Take 3 extra minutes after you finish a reading to write down how the reading relates to main course themes and/or that day’s topics.

First Read (Layer 1): Skim read

• ‘Skimming’ means you read the first paragraph (or so) and the last paragraph (or so) carefully, skim section headings, read first and last sentences of paragraphs and look for important words that jump out at you from lecture (put a tick near them in the margin).
• Bracket the main idea or thesis of the reading and put an asterisk next to it. Pay particular attention to the introduction or opening paragraphs to locate this information.
• Aim for this process to take 5-15 minutes, depending on the length of what you’re reading.

Second Read (Layer 2): Put Down (or throw away!) Your Highlighter

• Make marginal notes or comments instead. Every time you feel the urge to highlight something, write instead.
• You can summarize the text, ask questions, give assent, protest vehemently. You can also write down key words to help you recall where important points are discussed.
• Write questions in the margins of your reading, and then answer the questions in a reading journal or on a separate piece of paper.
• If you’re reading a textbook or article, try changing all the titles, subtitles, sections, and paragraph headings into questions. For example, the section heading “The Stoic Notion of the Soul” might become “What is the Stoic notion of the soul?”
• Make outlines, flow charts, or diagrams that help you to map and to understand ideas visually.
• Read each paragraph carefully and then determine “what it says” and “what it does.”
  • Answer “what it says” in only one sentence. Represent the main idea of the paragraph in your own words.
  • To answer, “what it does,” describe the paragraph’s purpose within the text, such as “provides evidence for the author’s first main reason” or “introduces an opposing view.”
• Above all, strive to enter into a dialogue with the author.

After Reading: Summarise and Choose Some Questions for Seminar

• Write a brief summary (less than 1 page) in your own words. Capture the essential ideas and perhaps one or two key examples. This is how you can make sure you know what the reading really says.
• Identify comments to make and questions to ask later in seminar. Write these in the text (margin or at the top of the first page), so you can refer to them during class.
• Identify and define any unfamiliar terms.
• Write your own exam or essay question based on the reading.
• Teach what you have learned to someone else! Research clearly shows that teaching is one of the most effective ways to learn (so join a study group!). If you try to explain aloud what you have been studying, you’ll
  • transfer the information from short-term to long-term memory, and
  • quickly discover what you understand — and what you don’t.