THE 12 PRINCIPLES OF STUDY SKILLS

Principle 1 : Believe in yourself
Every brain has genius capacity. It takes time, effort and guided study to get access to this potential. Set goals for yourself and develop plans for achieving them.

Principle 2 : Prepare
The difference between mediocre performance and excellent grades can often be the quality of your preparation. Preparing your study environment, your attitude and your focus will have an amazingly positive impact on the effectiveness of your learning activity.

Principle 3 : Organize yourself and your work.
Always have a plan for your studying. Write out that plan. Review your plan constantly and revise it constantly. The best thing to do is to expect changes and be ready for the process. Needing to make changes in your plan does not mean failure, it means inexperience at planning and life being inevitably inconsiderate with our plans.

Principle 4 : Spend time on what matters
Set priorities and make sure you are spending time on tasks that will help you accomplish the goals that are those priorities.
in the midst of writing dowm plans, developing seft-discipline and making schedules, many students begin to feel that school is consuming their life. That is missing the point. The work will be there anyway. You cannot avoid it. Studying and homework are major part of what it means to be a student and a learner.

Principle 5 : Discipline yourself
There is no substitute for self-control and discipline. The best stydy techniques, tricks and hints are useless if you have no willpower to put them into practice.

Principle 6 : Be persistent
Just keep on keeping on. Persistence is more important than talent, genius or luck. All those will be useless without persistence but persistence can bring success without them.

Principle 7 : Divide and conquer
The concept of 'divide and conquer' is central to successfully completing any large study task such as term paper, preparing for examination or reading a thick textbook. Simply, you analyse the task, divide it into smaller separate tasks and make a writtem list of all the smaller tasks. The final step is to put the tasks in order of priority. Remember, the drops of rain make a hole in the stone not by violence, but by often falling.

Principle 8 : Become an information filter
When you practise good reading and note-making techniques, you are becoming an information filter; you are learning to distinguish between what is important to remember and what is not.

Principle 9 : Practice output as well as input
To practice output as well as input, it is helpful to think of the brain as a computer. The information you study is data input, the material is processed by the brain, and you are required to create output in the form of lab reports, essays and exam answers. To get the most out of the data, you must actively turn it into information that is useful. You must process it properly and practice output.

Principle 10: Do not fear mistakes
Mistakes are the best teachers. Don't be afrail to try something new just because you don't think you will get it right the first time. Without mistakes we would not have any information about how to do better the next time.
There are four steps to learning:
(a) Take an action and make mistakes
(b) Review the result and identify mistakes
(c) Decide how to do better the next time
(d) Go to the first step (which is now the 'next time') and make different mistakes

Principle 11 : Use all your intelligences to create study tools
Traditional school and study habits use only two of your seven major intelligences. (linguistic, mathematical/logical, musical, visual/spatial, physical, interpersonal and intrapersonal). It has been proven that if you use more than one or two interlligences in your studying, you will learn more, learn faster and will be more likely to recall the information for the exam and even years later. It will become part of you.

Principle 12 : Be active
All the best human data processing and output practice using many of your intelligences have one thing in common. They require that you be active with the material. You cannot be a passive reader or listener and expect to get much out of textbook or teachers. All study, reading and listening skills comes down to the same thing: as soon as you hear or read something, you need to do something with it immediately in your brain. Once you've done the extra thinking, you need to do a second active thing; write in down.