As we approach the end of the year and the final exams that come with it, optimizing time is crucial for every high school student at Potomac. To shed light on strategies for optimizing study time and student performance during this crucial period, I sat down with Dr. Durham to draw upon her extensive 25 years of experience in education. 

In our interview, Dr. Durham offers valuable insights, practical advice, and proven methods to help students manage their time efficiently, prioritize tasks, and study effectively. We hope this article will help Potomac students prepare well for CAEs, and we wish you the best of luck!  

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Q: What are some of the foundational study habits you believe every student should develop? 

A: Planning. Using some type of planning tool for your work, to plan your day, to know how much time you have. Also, reviewing information that you’ve been taught in school through active processes rather than passive processes. I think a lot of kids often go away from the material, particularly when we have the schedule that we do. You won’t see it for a day, or it could be four or five days, depending on how the week breaks up over the weekend. 

Q: What are some effective note-taking techniques that students can use for better retention? 

A: This is an interesting one, because I don’t think anybody ever teaches kids how to take notes. I know that in the Intermediate School, sometimes they’ll have them use the Cornell notes method, which a lot of students don’t like because it’s really time consuming – but it’s also really effective in retention. One of the things that I have found to be pretty helpful for students is to remember not to write every single word that your teacher is saying, because they’re not all important, and you’ll get caught up in class because you’re trying to write every word down.

Going back to review daily, after class, during your break, or at home that night, you should pull out your materials to rewrite and organize your notes by topic so they’re not all scrambled. If you’re in a bio class, where Ms. Bauer is talking about body systems, your notes are all over. Then, you could rewrite those and organize them by theme or by topic.

Q: Do you recommend color coding for notes, and does that help with retention?

A: Color coding helps with the organization of things. Anything that you can do where you’re actively engaged in rewriting, retyping, and reorganizing, thinking about color coding and how things go together is really good for retention.

Q: How would you recommend students to start developing effective time management skills for their study sessions? What are some strategies for planning?

A: Well, I recommend a planning tool for all things. That could be a digital planning tool because there are some really great ones out there. It could be something as simple as a Google Doc that you keep open all the time and where you’re putting in your work on a daily basis. I prefer doing it by hand just because I like to write, and the hand-mind connection is strong for me. So when I put something in my planner, the act of putting it in the planner is almost enough to remind me that it’s coming up. I also think that it’s important for students to monitor their time to say, oh, this is only going to take me half an hour. After, you check if it really does take half an hour and if you’re setting realistic expectations for yourself. I also think that it’s really important for students to learn how to chunk their work, because there are two least effective study strategies ever, and they’re the two most used ones. One is rereading your notes. You trick yourself into thinking that you spend a lot of time studying because you’re rereading your notes, and so you might reread your notes for an hour or two and think you studied for two hours last night – but it is the least efficient and effective study strategy ever. And the other one is cramming. Chunking your work is going to be really necessary. If I have a test next Thursday, I’m going to do flashcards on Monday and review them on Tuesday. Then, I’m going to do 10 practice problems on Wednesday and review my flashcards again. In summary, being really active in planning, chunking the work out and putting that on your planner and committing 20 or 30 minutes a day to reviewing those things. Because if you end up cramming, you are much more likely to forget it in the moment. 

Q: What are some study methods for tests and quizzes that might appeal to different types of learners? 

A: The first thing that I want to say is that it’s really important to use your friends. Create study groups with your friends, and when you’re making study guides, assign parts of the study guide to students so that you all come together with a big study guide. Also, one of the most effective study strategies is to teach somebody else the information. So you can get in front of the whiteboard with a partner and say, let me teach it to you, and then you turn it around and teach it back. The simple act of simplifying something to teach it to somebody else shows that you really understand that concept. I really like, particularly for vocabulary, creating pictures or visual representations of what it is that you have, and I like mnemonics a lot. I also really like the Leitner flashcard system, which is effective for more factual learning. You have all of your flashcards in the very front of the box, we have some of the boxes in the LRC, and then you go through them. The ones that you get right, you put in the back, and you keep the ones you got wrong in the front. Every day you go and do the ones in the front, and repeat it every day until you get them right. Then, the cards move to the next slot and you only do those every other day. When those move back you practice every third day, every week and then every two weeks. Going over it really helps us with the forgetting curve, which I think in a lot of students we see because students are not really interacting with the material until right before a test or a class.

Q: How can students begin to practice presentation skills? Is memorization an effective strategy in the actual presentations?

A: I think one strategy for presentation skills that’s really been helpful is to make notes that are not on your slide. The worst thing you can actually do is read your slide because the viewers all know how to read, and the presentation would not be engaging. So first, make your speaker notes, print them out, and highlight the important parts of them that you can’t miss. Then practice them, but prioritize being familiar with your content. The point is to be able to just talk off your head, instead of having to memorize those notes – but let them be a guide to become fluid and comfortable. Memorize If you need it, but it’s just better to continuously review and be overly familiar with your content.

Q: How can students most effectively create study guides and summaries of units or even the year for exam preparation?

A: Yeah, first of all, go back to your work. Organize your work, especially if it’s like a large test. Go back to the quizzes and rework the problems that you didn’t understand. Don’t waste your time working the problems you already know. Don’t overdo it and just focus on the things that you don’t know. Also, one of my favorite tips is to think like a teacher. One way that AI can be used for good in academics is to use it as a powerful tool to help you create review problems. If you ask ChatGPT to create 10 problems that are similar to an example that you input, it will create those questions for you. I’d be careful with literature, however. Another thing that students can do, depending on what classes they’re in and what they’re studying, is to look for some quizlets and AP tests that might be out there for the particular unit, especially if they’re in an Advanced class. Many of them cover similar content because they used to be taught the AP exams. One of the big keys is organizing your materials from beginning to end. What do I have? Do I know what goes together? I think that’s it.

Q: Awesome, thank you so much!

Resources from Dr. Durham:

• Active Study Strategies
• Test Taking Strategies
• What Are Cornell Notes?
• The Leitner System
• The Forgetting Curve