Exam Preparation Using a Five-Day Study Plan (5DSP) [Strategies]
Exam Preparation Using a Five-Day Study Plan (5DSP) [Strategies]
Morgan Jones
What You Will Learn in This Section
The purpose of this resource is to provide students with a guide on how to effectively prepare for exams using a 5-day study plan (5DSP). It details the importance of active preparation and retrieval strategies, as well as specific steps to create a structured study plan. Examples, extra tips, and case studies are included for modeling and practice. By the end of this section, instructors and students will be familiar with a systematic approach to exam preparation that can help reduce anxiety, improve retention, and ultimately lead to better academic performance.
Introduction and Definition[1]
One of the difficult transitions to college revolves around knowledge acquisition. In high school, teachers do most of the heavy lifting to help their students learn. Once you reach college, that onus of learning shifts and now you, the student, are expected to do the hard work of learning after class with the information you gain in class. College students will often report that they thought they studied well for an exam, yet ended up making a D. Sometimes this is due to cramming the night before the exam; often it is due to passive study strategies.
Importance
Having a well-thought-out study plan can reduce anxiety, especially during a week with multiple exams. It provides a systematic approach that ensures you study everything related to an exam. Using active preparation and rehearsal strategies is of vital importance. Active preparation is the process of creating or making the study aids or tools that you will use to learn the material. Active rehearsal (or retrieval or recall) means determining what information has been moved to your long-term memory for later use and what still needs more practice. The rehearsal process can help you figure out what you already know and where to put your time.
Examples
Ideally, a student should study at least five days in advance of an exam. This allows you time to build and strengthen your neural pathways and can give you more assurance that the information will be there when you need to access it. This doesn’t mean that you are studying all day, every day, however. Spreading the hours of studying you need (typically 10-12 hours per exam) over five or more days yields better retention of information for your brain.
The first step is to divide up your study materials into at least four chunks (or parts). You can always increase the number of days for your study plan but it’s best not to do less. A chunk can be anything you want—a chapter, a topic, a week of material, or some other part. If you don’t have enough information for at least four chunks, consider dividing a more difficult part or a larger chapter into smaller chunks.
Example: If you only have one chapter for the exam, but that chapter has eight sections, each chunk could be two sections.
To figure out how many days your study plan should be, each