Tips for Daily Practice of Course Content

Practice, Practice, Practice

In college, you might not always be assigned homework, or you might not be required to complete the homework for your course. Regardless, finding or creating opportunities to practice daily with course content can help you solidify your learning and prepare for exams. Practice can show you what you know and what you need to learn. This awareness can improve your ability to self-monitor, which can help give you a more accurate picture of how you’ll do on your tests. To make the most of your practice, consider the following tips.

Student writing in a notebook with a laptop and coffee in front of him.

8 Tips to Practice Course Content

  1. If you don’t know the answer, don’t immediately look it up. Give yourself time to try to draw information from your memory. Actively engaging with information in order to gain comprehension helps make homework effective, and the work to find an answer without looking it up is one of the ways you can be actively engaged. 
  1. Use problem sets to test yourself. Self-testing and practice testing are some of the most effective ways to study, learn, and retain information (Dunlosky, 2013). Don’t try to memorize individual problems or questions. Instead, identify the problem type or the concept and then learn the steps or approach you would apply to achieve a solution.  
  1. Identify the concepts you’ll be tested on. Your instructor may share this, but if they don’t, think about what you know. What are the learning outcomes in the syllabus? What does your instructor want you to be able to explain, do, or make connections to? This preparation helps you think about how problems might be designed and also gets you thinking about how they relate to the larger concepts in the course. 
  1. Mix up problems from different chapters and parts of the term. Mixing it up increases retention and retrieval (Roediger, 2013), helps you avoid a familiarity trap, and gets you thinking about connections within the content you’ve been learning.  
  1. Work toward comprehension. If you don’t understand how to compete a problem or answer a question, go back to the text or your notes and examine the information again. If it still doesn’t make sense, ask a peer, friend, or your instructor for help. Asking for help is a sign that you’re invested in your learning! 
  1. Make up your own practice problems. One of the best ways to prepare for tests is to try to anticipate possible problems or questions and then answer them. You can do this on your own or with peers. 
  1. Distribute your homework throughout the week. This is a proven strategy for effective learning and to prepare for exams (Dunlosky, 2013). It can help reduce your stress because you'll have the time to complete the work at a manageable pace, take breaks, pause when you get frustrated, and return when you’re ready to try again.  
  1. Overlearn the material. This means knowing the information or how to solve a problem so thoroughly that you can retrieve it quickly even during a stressful exam. To achieve this, don’t stop at getting the right answer just once. Test yourself and practice so you can get it right multiple times.