How to Use a Study Guide to Improve Your College Grades

Study guides can be found in college bookstores and are regarded as condensed versions of the material that is presented in a college course.

Once you learn how to properly use study guides, they can help you improve your college grades. Further, you can most effectively use a study guide by thinking of it in terms of a 3 step process.

Course Overview

You can use a study guide to improve your college grades by regarding it as a general overview of the course. This means that you should read the entire study guide even before the college course begins.

As you gain this head start in becoming familiar with the contents of the college course, you will be more alert to key ideas when you hear the professor talk about them in class. Your study guide will help to improve your grades because you will learn to determine the ideas that are most important in advance.

Textbook Supplement

Another way to use a study guide so that it will help you improve your college grades is by thinking of it as a supplement for the course textbook.

Again, if you read the study guide before you read the assignment in the textbook, you will be more aware of that information that is considered most significant. The textbook might present the topic in a more thorough way, but the study guide can point you in the right direction.

Additionally, study guides are simplified. This means that what you might find confusing in the textbook is conceivably clearer in a generalized study guide. The study guide and the textbook work hand in hand to help you improve your college grades.

Practice Test

Finally, using a study guide can help you improve your college grades if you use the study guide as a practice test.

This means that after you have attended class and studied the textbook, you can use the key ideas that are in a study guide to rehearse larger passages of knowledge. The key ideas that are concisely presented in a study guide can be used to trigger the deeper level of information that is hopefully already in your mind

This can be considered step 3 of the study guide process because you are using it as a mechanism for testing your knowledge.

In sum, you can use a study guide to improve your college grades by thinking of of it in terms of a 3 step process.

You can refer to a study guide as an overview of the course, a supplement to the textbook, and as a way of testing your knowledge about what you've already learned.

Source: Personal Experience