5 Great Study Habits When Pursuing an Online Bachelor’s Degree

5 Great Study Habits When Pursuing an Online Bachelor’s Degree

• Eliminate Distractions
• Study Routinely
• Break Up Study Sessions
• Study With Exercise
• Study Before Bed

Pursuing a bachelor’s degree online requires the student to have great study habits to keep their grades afloat. Life is full of distractions but they should never inhibit learning. Here are a few study habits that can help students to get the most out of their courses.

1. Eliminate Distractions

One of the many challenges of online courses is finding a way to focus on the material and eliminate distractions. A great way to do this is by investing in a quality pair of noise-canceling headphones. With proper headphones, students won’t have to worry about being in a quiet environment when attending their lectures online. They can drown out the sound of any distracting noises and help maintain focus on the task at hand. Movie soundtracks were created to keep the viewer engaged without distracting them from what’s on the screen when it’s time to study. Listening to original scores from fantasy and adventure movies can help to stay in the zone during a study session.

2. Study Routinely

It’s easy to lose motivation when it’s not required to attend classes regularly. Falling behind on the schedule usually leads to incredibly stressful cram sessions before tests or lack of confidence when the testing time finally arrives. Having set times to study can help students to be consistent. Repetition of information that was previously learned helps the brains convert those short-term memories into long-term memories. Studying should be treated as a job with clear goals, planned sessions, and frequent reviews of past material before diving into the new material.

3. Break Up Study Sessions

It’s possible to spend endless hours studying without truly retaining the information. Behavioral psychology shows that breaking up a long study session can help to ensure that the brain is comprehending and retaining as much information as possible. When people focus on one thing for long periods, it becomes more and more difficult to focus. Setting a timer as a reminder to take a five-minute break every half hour may help to boost productivity. In conjunction with studying routinely, students can retain more information for a longer period.

4. Study With Exercise

Exercise activates that fight or flight response that causes your brain to fill with oxygen-rich blood. Normally, this is felt during memorable moments when a person’s emotions are somehow being provoked. Psychology Today explains that controlling your breathing, especially during exercise, allows for better control of the brain and heightens its ability to influence storage, registration, and retrieval. Doing 20 minutes of cardio before a study session can help to reduce stress, concentrate, and effectively retrieve information.

5. Study Before Bed

Because the brain has to continue to process new information, studying in the morning before going about the rest of the day makes it difficult to remember things. When the body is asleep, the brain stabilizes all of the memories from that day. Studying before sleep takes advantage of the brain’s natural processes and boosts your ability to retain information. As long as the correct information is being presented, it can be something as simple as watching a video about the subject or listening to an audio recording of a lecture. Coupled with a decent amount of sleep, reviewing the information before bed can be a powerful memory hack.

Related Resource: 20 Best Affordable Schools in Georgia for Bachelor’s Degree

Following these study habits could be the solution to taking control of the challenges that come with online classes. Everyone is different and study habits that work for one person may not be as effective for another. Earning that bachelor’s degree online may be as simple as adopting effective study habits.