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Math Study Tips For Students
Students often follow wasteful and inefficient procedures in studying mathematics. Sometimes they fail to get at the first step of a process. They do not develop self-reliance. They proceed unsystematically and cannot concentrate.
This list of suggestions is expected to be of help to students for this purpose
- Take responsibility for studying, recognizing what you know and don't know.
- Attend class every day and take complete notes. Each class builds on the previous ones. You must keep up with the Instructor: attend class, read the text and do homework every day. Falling a day behind puts you at a disadvantage. Falling a week behind puts you in deep trouble.
- Fix time and place for study of mathematics and regular in your work.
- Get down to work at once. Do not dally.
- Pay to it deep and sustained attention.
- Do not allow avoidable interruptions after you have started work.
- Work independently as far as possible.
- Take as much time as you need to do all the homework and to get complete understanding of the material.
- The more challenging the material, the more time you should spend on it.
- Be critical of all statements or conclusions whether they are your own or someone else's.
- Form the habit of verification. Always check up your work.
- Be an active participant in the classroom. Get ahead in the book; try to work some of the problems before they are covered in class
- Math is learned by doing problems. Do the homework. The problems help you learn the formulas and techniques you do need to know, as well as improve your problem-solving prowess.
- Take responsibility for keeping up with the homework. Make sure you find out how to do it.
- Prepare a list of all new words and concepts and try to learn them at once.
- Do memorize important rules, formulae and facts, but only after understanding their meaning.
- In memorizing formulae, loud reading is helpful.
- Form the habit of expressing verbal statements in symbols.
- Correlate and compare exercises in algebra with similar exercises in geometry and arithmetic.
- Lay special stress on the application of rules and formulae, in order to fix them permanently in your mind.
- Try to explain out loud, in your own words, how each solution strategy is used .
- When studying for math test, put yourself in a test-like situation: work problems from review sections at the end of chapters, and work old tests if you can find some. It's important to keep working problems the whole time you're studying.
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