How To Take Notes To Maximise Success

April 20, 2021

How To Take Notes To Maximise Success

This article has been written by Lydia McClelland, a VCE French, Music Theory, Literature & VCE English Tutor at Learnmate.

Year 11 and 12 subjects often focus very heavily on content, but rarely upon the methods of learning and consolidating memory. To efficiently learn everything that you need to know, you need to focus on every part of the learning process. Notes you take in class are most likely your best resource, but so many students don’t even take a second glance at their notes until cramming for the exam!

  1. Always focus actively on your notes
    Active note taking involves engaging with the content. A very simple way of doing this is to never write down exactly what your teacher says or has written on the board: by putting notes into your own words, you’re forcing your brain to process and deeply understand the content. This will lead toward better recall of information. Another important aspect of successful note-taking is to organise your notes in a way that makes sense for you. Group and colour-code similar concepts and underline areas you find more difficult so you can later revise these areas more carefully.
  2. Be discerning
    Many students write down as much as they possibly can from lessons, however, on the contrary, you should be aiming to condense the information you’re given as simply and in as few words as possible. Work out which information is most important and leave out extraneous details. Not only will you have less information to recall, but when you revisit your notes, they will be simpler and easier to comprehend.
  3. Revise notes soon after class
    Studies show that you need to regularly revisit notes in order to ensure good, consistent recall. If you engage with notes again within the first 24 hours of writing them, and then again within a week, the chance of laying a solid memory foundation is dramatically increased. This is far better than leaving everything to a week before the exam, when it will be overwhelming and too late to lay down long-term memory!
  4. Do more than just reading your notes
    Revision of notes needs to go beyond just reading them to ensure best recall. If you engage with notes again within the first 24 hours of writing them, and then again within a week, the chance of laying a solid memory foundation is dramatically increased. This is far better than leaving everything to a week before the exam, when it will be overwhelming and too late to lay down long-term memory!

 

If you loved this article, you will LOVE all of our other articles, such as: Why Perfectionism is a Problem, How to Write a Study Schedule and Tips on Studying for Exams – LearnMate Tutoring.

 

 

LearnMate is Australia’s leading tutoring agency offering private lessons in all primary & high school subjects including English, maths, science, humanities, foreign languages, and so much more. Our mission is simple: to provide professional, engaging and enthusiastic tutors to students, while also ensuring the student feels empowered and confident during their assessments! Ultimately, our goal is to empower students all over Australia to achieve amazing results and make their dreams come true!

LearnMate provides you with tailored, one-on-one lessons for tutoring in a variety of suburbs in Melbourne, Sydney, Geelong, Brisbane, Hobart, Canberra, Perth & Adelaide! With hundreds of tutors on the LearnMate platform, you’re bound to find someone local for any primary or high school year level! You can choose to have lessons in-person or online – whatever is easiest for you!

How To Take Notes To Maximise Success
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Academic Benefits of Sports to Students

April 13, 2021 ,

Academic Benefits of Sports to Students

This article has been written by Lydia McClelland, a VCE French, Music Theory, Literature & VCE English Tutor at Learnmate.

 

In a high-pressured period of your life such as late high school, it can be tempting to focus all of your efforts on academics, to the detriment of all else. However, research has demonstrated that such an approach can be counterproductive. Exercise and sports have been shown to improve academic performance – so hold off on cancelling all of your extra-curricular sport for Year 12!

What are some of the academic benefits of sports for students?

Improved sleep: you know that feeling after a long stretch of exercise? Sports and exercise are very beneficial to your quality of sleep, and often help you with troubles falling asleep. Anything that will help the quality of your sleep is bound to come in handy when it comes to academics – sleep has a very important role in the laying down of memory pathways.

Release of endorphins: playing sports contributes to increased levels of serotonin, which creates feelings of happiness. This can only be helpful when long periods of studying are demoralising – sports are a great way of lifting you back up. Regular exercise actually increases levels of energy, giving you more energy towards that late-night study session.

Improved cognitive functions: some studies have demonstrated that sports actually contribute towards improved academic outcomes. Not only do sports indirectly help academic performance, but they have a direct impact upon memory and cognitive abilities. Sports have also been shown to contributing towards reduced levels of stress, which will only benefit academic performance.

Self-confidence: this one is less obvious than the others. However, experiences of victories and losses aid a student to develop self-confidence. After all, one can only improve at something when they have experienced failure. Such experiences help a student take ownership of their study and have the confidence to succeed, often a quality which is underestimated in success.

Discipline: playing sports, and particularly team sports, requires hard-work and discipline. These are qualities which are essential to a successful student, and drawing upon these skills helps to create a pattern of behaviour which can be then easily applied to academics.

Tenacity: playing sports helps develop a person’s dedication and ability to bounce back from failure. This is essential to success in academic pursuits: you cannot let one bad result stop you from performing well; instead, failure can be used to create motivation to propel you forward to work harder in the future.

Teamwork: team sports teach you nearly everything you need to know about working in a team. When it comes to study, it’s important to be able to work with your peers so you can resolve issues which you may not be able to resolve alone. When it comes to group assignments, your teamwork skills learnt from sports will come in handy.

Leadership skills: taking on a leadership role in sports can help you in day-to-day life, as well as academics. Make sure you draw on your confidence and ability to choose a direction when it comes to studying.

If you loved this article, you will LOVE all of our other articles, such as: 3 Facts You Should Know About Your ATAR, Tips for Supporting Your Child in Year 11 and 12! and Will anyone care about your ATAR in a year?

 – LearnMate Tutoring.

 

LearnMate is Australia’s leading tutoring agency offering private lessons in all primary & high school subjects including English, maths, science, humanities, foreign languages, and so much more. Our mission is simple: to provide professional, engaging and enthusiastic tutors to students, while also ensuring the student feels empowered and confident during their assessments! Ultimately, our goal is to empower students all over Australia to achieve amazing results and make their dreams come true!

LearnMate provides you with tailored, one-on-one lessons for tutoring in a variety of suburbs in Melbourne, Sydney, Geelong, Brisbane, Hobart, Canberra, Perth & Adelaide! With hundreds of tutors on the LearnMate platform, you’re bound to find someone local for any primary or high school year level! You can choose to have lessons in-person or online – whatever is easiest for you!

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Cohesion in Texts, and in your Writing

April 8, 2021

Cohesion in Texts, and in your Writing

This article has been written by Liam McAlary, a Years 7 – 12, VCE Legal Studies and VCE English Language Tutor at Learnmate. If you’re interested in private tutoring from Liam then please check out his page here.

 

Time flies when you’re having fun, and term 1 is already done. So is March, and the way that calendars work mean that it is now April, which also means that I am writing another article for your reading pleasure, and educational benefit. The educational benefit that this article aims to provide you with is to deepen your knowledge and understanding of cohesion, for the benefit of your own writing, and because you do analyse it in area of study 2 as a key feature of formal language.

I will discuss cohesion this month, and in May, you can expect an article about coherence.

In a sentence, cohesion is how a piece of discourse is bound. Where a piece of discourse is cohesive, various cohesive ties are used to help the piece to flow and bind different pieces of information together. Putting information flow aside (front focus, end focus, and Clefting), cohesion can be broken down into two main types, being syntactic and lexical. Lexical cohesion falls largely into the subsystem of semantics, and includes features such as:

  • Lexical repetition: the repetition of key content words throughout the text
  • Use of synonyms or near synonyms: For example, the officer instructed the driver to breathe in. She complied with the request and inhaled.
  • Lexicon from the same semantic field: After votes were cast in the 2020 United States election, attention immediately turned to the 2022 midterms, which will be the first elections after redistricting, which happens every 10 years. (American electoral politics is the semantic field).
  • Antonyms: Use of opposites to show contrast
  • Hyponyms: Show a relationship of inclusion within another word (There are mammals in this part of the zoo. For example, that is a gorilla) (Gorilla is the hyponym)
  • Hypernyms/superordinates: Shows a relationship with other words, but they fall within its meaning. (In the above example, mammal is the hypernym).

Lexical cohesive ties help to keep the text relevant to itself and allows the text to neatly flow.

Just because it likes to be a bit less confusing, syntactic/grammatical cohesion falls within the subsystem of syntax, and relate to how a text flows as a result of its grammatical construction. The main features of this are:

  • Anaphoric reference: A pronoun referring back to a noun used earlier. (Liam wrote this article, whilst he was contemplating how the 2022 United States midterms would go).
  • Cataphoric reference: Pronouns that refer to nouns used subsequently. (Whilst he was writing an analysis about North Carolina’s 2022 senate race, Liam remembered to write the article that his contract requires him to write.
    • For chemistry students, think anions (negative, back), and cations (positive, forward), to help remember which type of reference is which.
  • Substitution: Replacing a word with another, shorter word that helps the text to fit together by not being excessively wordy (somewhat of a colloquial explanation). For example: Saying, “I think so,” where so is substituted for something such as, ‘there is a significant chance of a federal election this year.’
  • Ellipsis: The omission of words, usually words which are obvious from contact.
  • Conjunctions and adverbials: See below.

I have decided to devote a little bit more to conjunctions and adverbials, because they are so useful to your own personal writing. Words that add new points (moreover, furthermore, additionally, and), compare and contrast (similarly, whereas, on the other hand, conversely), and that show causality (thus, therefore, consequently), all significantly help to bring your writing together and make it more cohesive. When writing a paragraph and you wish to add a new point within it, a word such as, “moreover,” or, “furthermore,” helps to create cohesion and makes your writing read a lot better. Without them, a paragraph can be clunky and almost read like something of a list, rather than a fluent piece of writing. To show this, I often experiment with my clients by removing these words from a paragraph, and have them read the original paragraph, and then the one without those words. Without fail, the client comments on how much better the original reads and flows, as it is less clunky and easier to follow my train of argument. One thing I found useful was to make a non-exhaustive list of these kind of words, (to add, to contrast, to prove, and to introduce an example, so that I had a little bank of words ready to use.

 

Anyway, I hope that this article has helped your understanding of cohesion, and how one particular component of it can help with your own personal writing. I’ll have more for you next month.

 

LearnMate is Australia’s leading tutoring agency offering private lessons in all primary & high school subjects including English, maths, science, humanities, foreign languages, and so much more. Our mission is simple: to provide professional, engaging and enthusiastic tutors to students, while also ensuring the student feels empowered and confident during their assessments! Ultimately, our goal is to empower students all over Australia to achieve amazing results and make their dreams come true!

LearnMate provides you with tailored, one-on-one lessons for tutoring in a variety of suburbs in Melbourne, Sydney, Geelong, Brisbane, Hobart, Canberra, Perth & Adelaide! With hundreds of tutors on the LearnMate platform, you’re bound to find someone local for any primary or high school year level! You can choose to have lessons in-person or online – whatever is easiest for you!

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Top 10 Best Techniques & Methods to Study

April 6, 2021

Top 10 Best Techniques & Methods to Study

This article has been written by Celine Badaoui, an HSC Biology & Personal Development, Health and Physical Education Tutor at Learnmate. 

 

Repetition

It has been said time and time again, repetition is key. For a piece of information to be absorbed by the brain, it typically takes three rounds of repetition. Re-writing notes by hand is the most effective study method, relative to only re-reading or re-typing them.

Flash cards

One of the best ways to study for exams is the use of flash cards. Students’ notes should be continually summarized, and flash cards act as a great tool forcing students to be concise due to their limited space. They are also useful for others to test your knowledge with.

Visual learning

Incorporating the use of pictures and drawings is a great way to study for visual learners. Remembering imagery is much easier for some students as they are more likely to recall a picture over words on a page. For example, biology students can study the steps of meiosis by drawing simple diagrams.

Teach someone

Teaching a parent, sibling or friend the HSC content is an excellent study method as explaining things out loud and having a conversation can be very memorable. This also allows students to test the depths of their knowledge through their ability to answer questions easily.

Acronyms

Acronyms are a simple but highly effective study technique. For example, this can be useful for English essays when students need a reminder of the sentence starters in each paragraph. Silly acronyms are often the easiest ones to remember!

YouTube

YouTube is a fantastic tool for students growing tired of conventional revision methods. Videos summarize topics in a short time and the use of animations, voice overs and even songs can be an effective study change. YouTube also provides explanations from a different perspective for harder to grasp concepts.

Read up

A well-read student is always positioned at an advantage. Background reading from textbooks, articles and online will broaden a student’s knowledge. The more extensive their knowledge of a topic, the easier they will find it is to understand and memorize for exams.

Glossary of key terms

Many courses such as science and business subjects place an emphasis on the use of correct terminology. A study technique to ensure students learn the range of terms in their subject is creating a glossary sheet. This can be particularly effective for multiple choice questions in exams based on definitions.

Write an exam

Above average student’s often make the effort to write up their own exams and use them for preparation. This study method improves a student’s critical thinking and their ability to predict expected questions. This can be achieved by directly following and covering the syllabus.

Past papers

Past papers are a full proof method when studying for exams. They can be completed open book at first, however students should transition to closed book after a few attempts. It is important to check back with the marking criteria and seek feedback from teachers and tutors to ensure they are on the right track.

 

 

To get in contact with HSC tutors and other tutors in Sydney from LearnMate, please learn more here.

If you loved this article, you will LOVE all of our other articles, such as: 5 Ways to Best Prepare for the HSC!,The Best Way to Reduce Stress in Year 12: It’s Not What You Think and Study Tips for HSC English This Year!

 – LearnMate Tutoring.

 

LearnMate is Australia’s leading tutoring agency offering private lessons in all primary & high school subjects including English, maths, science, humanities, foreign languages, and so much more. Our mission is simple: to provide professional, engaging and enthusiastic tutors to students, while also ensuring the student feels empowered and confident during their assessments! Ultimately, our goal is to empower students all over Australia to achieve amazing results and make their dreams come true!

LearnMate provides you with tailored, one-on-one lessons for tutoring in a variety of suburbs in Melbourne, Sydney, Geelong, Brisbane, Hobart, Canberra, Perth & Adelaide! With hundreds of tutors on the LearnMate platform, you’re bound to find someone local for any primary or high school year level! You can choose to have lessons in-person or online – whatever is easiest for you!

Top 10 Best Techniques & Methods to Study
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How to Teach Soft Skills to Students

March 29, 2021 ,

How to Teach Soft Skills to Students

This article has been written by Lydia McClelland, a VCE French, Music Theory, Literature & VCE English Tutor at Learnmate.

 

What are soft skills and what makes them so important?

Soft skills are often also referred to as ‘people skills’ or ‘emotional intelligence’. The term basically refers to a person’s ability to get along well with other people. These are in opposition to ‘hard skills’, which are skills that are easily quantifiable, such as data analysis experience or graphic design ability.

Do not be tempted to write soft skills off as inessential: they are extremely relevant when it comes to so many areas of life – relationships, interaction with other people, communication. These are skills which are important in school situations, in any work situation and also in general life. If you don’t have a grasp on these soft skills, you may find yourself falling behind in many areas, and unable to reach your full potential.

How are soft skills relevant to high school students?

  • School life is full of conflict, often in your own friendship groups or in others. Knowing how to communicate calmly and kindly is essential, and will be of great help throughout school.
  • Although you’re still at school, many students seek out part-time or casual jobs to earn a bit of money while they are still studying. If you want to find a job, developing on your soft skills is very important, as employers are nearly always looking for well-rounded workers and adept communicators.
  • Learning soft skills will prepare you greatly for university, where you are treated like an adult capable of handling your own study load, and where you are also expected to act like an adult. The capacity to communicate well and carry out problem solving in tricky team situations (yes, there will probably be group assignments) will be of great help.

Which soft skills should students be taught?

It’s worth remembering that having soft skills is not a dichotomy: it’s not that you’re either skilled or you’re not. Most people have a better grasp on some soft skills than other areas, which means that pretty much everyone could improve at some areas.

Some important areas which many students could benefit to develop are:

  • Adaptability and quickness to learn – are you able to learn as you go? This goes beyond traditional tests of intelligence or performance on examinations.
  • Leadership ability – this is not just a question of whether you’ve been the School Captain, but can you take on a leadership role in difficult situations? Do you know how to step up in a tricky situation and begin to solve an issue?
  • Original thinking – it’s all very well if you can score 100% on a test, but are you able to exhibit lateral or creative thinking? This is an area where many students struggle, in their quest to find the ‘right’ answer.
  • Patience – this skill is key in helping you be able to work well alongside other people.
  • Critical thinking – do you accept everything you learn, or are you able to look at things through a critical lens?

 

If you loved this article, you will LOVE all of our other articles, such as: 3 Facts You Should Know About Your ATAR, Tips for Supporting Your Child in Year 11 and 12! and Will anyone care about your ATAR in a year?

 – LearnMate Tutoring.

LearnMate is Australia’s leading tutoring agency offering private lessons in all primary & high school subjects including English, maths, science, humanities, foreign languages, and so much more. Our mission is simple: to provide professional, engaging and enthusiastic tutors to students, while also ensuring the student feels empowered and confident during their assessments! Ultimately, our goal is to empower students all over Australia to achieve amazing results and make their dreams come true!

LearnMate provides you with tailored, one-on-one lessons for tutoring in a variety of suburbs in Melbourne, Sydney, Geelong, Brisbane, Hobart, Canberra, Perth & Adelaide! With hundreds of tutors on the LearnMate platform, you’re bound to find someone local for any primary or high school year level! You can choose to have lessons in-person or online – whatever is easiest for you!

How to Teach Soft Skills to Students
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