Tip #4: Make a compendious study guide

When I taught Advanced Placement Biology for seven years, I was charged with preparing students for a challenging, comprehensive exam.  From the start of the academic year, I encouraged them to think about the long game since topics from early in the fall would be tested in the late spring.  For each unit we studied, I coerced my students (homework bonus points!) into making a compendious study guide—one that is complete yet concise.  There are so many benefits to making a compendious study guide: it fosters a deeper understanding of the content, saves time, and encourages collaborative studying.  

Echoes of tip #1 remind us that making a study guide is a helpful form of active studying for students because they are creating something new.   Taking ten to twenty pages of notes and summarizing them into one or two compendious pages encourages a more complex understanding of the material.  When students condense knowledge into fewer pages, it’s an opportunity to review information that might have been misunderstood the first time it was presented and helps connect details with larger themes.  (Spoiler alert: tip #6 is about connecting details and larger themes.)

When knowledge is to be recalled for a comprehensive assessment, using a compendious study guide is a tool that saves time: it’s faster to look over a few pages of material than it is to look through ten to twenty pages.  For a course like AP Biology, students may have two entire notebooks teeming with knowledge by the time they finish the year.  Re-reading an entire year’s worth of notes is time consuming and potentially detrimental.  Some students are captivated by what they understand and will skip over what is confusing—and this practice won’t improve test outcomes.  If there’s a study guide for each unit, it’s easier and faster to recall what makes sense and identify where further studying is warranted…and at that point the original notes might be helpful.

There are many ways to present and connect details in a concise manner, and we all view the world through different lenses.  As such, students will make unique study guides based on the same information.  Some might create charts or diagrams; others might be skilled at summarizing text.   By comparing each other’s guides, they will see how others visualize the material.  This will boost comprehension and potentially introduce other ways to format future study guides.  Moreover, they might be reminded of information inadvertently left off their own guide when they collaborate with others.

You may have noticed this tip includes a “fancy” word: compendious!  Even after moving on from the stage in life where you create study guides for tests, you should never move on from taking part in intelligent discourse involving a few fancy words—they can be the icing decorating a tasty cake of conversation.  Conversations bereft of intellect are like cake with no frosting.  Leading with humble intelligence (and kindness) elevates our conversations and helps bring out the best in others.  Be warned: just as a cake can be ruined by the wrong amount or flavor of frosting, an otherwise enjoyable conversation can be derailed by fancy words.  No one likes a conceited show-off who uses large words to hijack a conversation or to upstage others, but there’s generally no reason to dumb yourself down—use your words, even if some of them are fancy!