Passive Strategies:
don’t require you to think about the material deeply leading to superficial understanding of the concepts. Examples include:
- Flashcards (sometimes!)
- Rewriting notes
- Rereading chapter summaries
- Looking over chapter outlines
- Rereading textbook
- Reviewing highlighted material from your textbook
Active Strategies:
require you to think about and reorganize information to promote long term understanding of concepts more deeply. Examples include:
- Explaining material in your own words, from memory, without using your book
- Developing a concept map or a flow chart to reorganize the material
- Answering practice questions on the material (self-developed or from textbook or old tests) – avoid “pattern matching”
- Relating theories to made up stories or real life, personal examples
- Looking at the charts and diagrams in your textbook and explaining what is going on in your own words – “break” diagrams
- Answering Higher Order Thinking Questions – Why? How? What if?
Learn more tips and strategies in our online video series or by scheduling an individual academic coaching session.