There are two types of study skills that you need to be aware of they are receptive study skills and productive study skills. Receptive skills deal with acquiring and processing new information, where as productive skills deal with how you plan and present your own ideas based on information that you have already worked through.
Examples of receptive skills:
• Skimming
• Scanning
• Using abbreviations
• Making notes
• Summarising

Examples of productive skills:
• Brainstorming
• Solving problems
• Improving your memory
• Making inferences
• Empathising
• Assessing your own progress

Different subjects will of course use different types of skill. For example Mathematics will use more productive skills when revising such as practising Maths questions, whereas History will require more receptive skills such as note taking.

Remember when doing a task that may seem daunting it is often best to break it up into more manageable tasks, to tackle the problem one bit at a time. Spread the units of work over a period of hours, days or weeks, depending upon the time scale. Build these sessions into your regular study plan. This skill is useful if you have to write a long assignment for your coursework, or if you need to reschedule a project over several weeks or months. Don’t bore yourself to death with endless repetition. There are better ways of remembering one section of your studies when you proceed to the next. Build into your study plan regular opportunities to review your work. The aim is to renew your interest and clarify your understanding.
Problem solving skills are essential irrespective of the subject that you are studying and even if you are not studying at all.

The most efficient problem solvers use techniques such as brainstorming and lateral thinking to tackle situations. These approaches give us freedom to take a new idea and see where it goes.

There are various ways to help improve your memory whilst revising; these include mnemonics, visualisation and narratisation. A mnemonic is a way of making information memorable by turning initials into a kind of story. For example to remember the colours of the rainbow ‘Richard of York gave battle in vain’ Visualisation involves placing information spatially in your imagination. Let’s suppose that you are studying Chemistry. You want to memorise the periodic table. You could take different sections of the table and, in your imagination; ‘place’ each section in a different room of your home. Or if you are studying English, you could take the plot of the novel and think of it as a journey along the street in which you live.

Using a cassette recorder or recording information digitally onto a computer can be a great way to record your notes that can be played back when you are ready to revise. This is more useful for subjects like English literature where a large amount of information has to be retained about a particular novel relating to the plot, characterisation, view point etc.

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