The Science Behind Your Academic Success

I usually talk about my own experiences and I hope that helps you, but this article will be different. I will go in dept into the science of studying and study habits to demonstrate how crucial these two factors are in affecting the academic success of a student.

This topic came up because I realized that everyone learns differently. I am more comfortable with music in the background and I learn better when I have good notes. Every new student will suffer a little until they determine their optimal learning ways. I’ve noticed a lot of my friends having better grades in third and fourth year even though the courses are more difficult. For this reason, I’ve decided to do some research on study habits and learning from scientific journals and have it presented here.

During the research, I realized that there are many studies from the 70-s until a few years ago that looked into the correlation between the amount of time spent studying and the grades of the students. You would think that a majority would come to the same conclusion, but unfortunately, half concluded that studying more leads to higher grades and the other half concluded that studying more either doesn’t have an effect or leads to lower grades. After this conclusion, I realized that I was looking at the wrong subject!

One interesting journal titled -Students’ approaches to study in introductory accounting courses- (Elias, R. Z., 2005) brought up an interesting point. The author talked about two approaches to studying. The first approach was called deep and the other was called surface. A deep approach was when the student looks at the material and tries to understand the concepts and the workings. This results in someone who knows the material and can make connections on related concepts with relative ease. The surface approach is used by students who want to meet the course requirements. This includes only learning the concepts covered and not covering any other theories in detail.

The deep approach is great for courses that require a lot of abstract conceptual thinking and assignments like essays and explanations where the student has to demonstrate that they can competently explain the theory. The surface approach is also useful. It can be used by students to attain great marks in courses that are heavy in multiple choice or set arithmetic. This can easily skew results because students who succeed in courses that simply require the surface approach will spend less time studying. Therefore, it is clear that the amount of time spent studying is not important, what I should be looking for should be how different types of studying affect a student’s grades.

The most informative journal which I’ve encountered was titled -Performance of College Students: Impact of Study Time and Study Habits- (Hudson G. I. et al., 2010). This article looked at three different factors of studying that can affect grades,

1. Ability to concentrate while studying and in class
2. Access to good notes (or able to take good notes during class)
3. Proper scheduling of the term

It concluded very nicely that, -the quantity of time spent studying has an influence on performance, but this influence is moderated by a third variable, the study habits.- With respect to the three factors, it was determined that students who could concentrate properly had more effective study sessions, therefore they could spend less time studying and still attain good grades. An unexpected conclusion was that students who had access to good notes and spent less time studying had higher grades. This was argued true because of the concentration factor. Good notes play a minor role because without having the ability to concentrate, you will have a difficult time receiving higher grades.

Another interesting conclusion was that students who finished assignments at the last second had higher grades than students who planned well. This goes exactly against my previous post (which shows you that you should only look at these posts as just references). It was discussed that students who cram a lot are upper year students with more experience. I personally do not agree with this and believe their argument as being a large pile of bull____.

This idea of procrastinating and getting higher grades intrigued me. So I set out on some more more research and came upon another journal article. It was titled -Procrastination, participation, and performance in online learning environments- (Michinov N. et al., 2010). Although it looked strictly at the online environments, I decided to look at it. It concluded that students who procrastinated less were more successful and also less likely to drop out. The reason for this was that procrastinators did not interact in the online forums and therefore were put in a position to fail. I looked at other articles and they all pointed to this conclusion, therefore I guess we can conclude the same right? Wrong!

Being an engineering student myself, it wouldn’t feel right looking at one perspective, so I wanted to give my input. I believe that procrastination can be useful sometimes. Sometimes a task is not important and it keeps getting tossed further back into the queue because other important tasks come up. I have no problem with this type of procrastination because it still leads to completion of the assignment and it works well with a properly organized student. The bad type of procrastination is when someone has nothing to do, yet they still wait until the last second. This large amount of wasted time will come back to hurt the student and it will show in their final grades.

Please remember that you can easily find studies that prove these wrong. I only suggest that you read every study and see if you agree with their testing methodology and their conclusions. I cannot post the articles on my blog, but most universities should allow you to access these journals through the library.