Study Skills

The sudden shift in the learning set-up brought a major adjustment to students. Most of

them find it difficult to communicate effectively towards their instructors due to disadvantages of

remote learning set-up which may result to poor acquisition of knowledge among students. In

this case, it is important for students to maintain their focus and learn effectively. One of the

significant contributors of learning is having the ability to sort, manage, and acquire new

information. Study skill is a method and system that helps individual interpret and actively

participate for a certain purpose involving focus to retain information. Over the years,

researchers have been exploring associations between study skills and academic performance of

the students which means that researchers notice the possible impact between study skills and

academic performance of the students. Evidence shows direct and significant positive

relationship of variables that students who frequently used such skills in studying had higher

academic accomplishments (Khodaei & Ghaffari, 2011, as cited in Fazelpour et al., 2017).

However, Olatoye revealed that the inability to improve one’s study skills is more likely to have

poor performance at school (as cited in Poudel. 2016). In addition, absence of interest and

eagerness in studying might be the cause of poor study skills (Avand et al., 2014). Thus, there is

a need to instill effective study skills to students.

Cottrell (2019) in her book “The Study Skills Handbook: Fifteen Edition” study skills

involve capacities, propensities, comprehension and disposition that empower accomplishment

in learning. Though, every student varies from one another, students who might find easy in

simple reading or rereading may not be applicable to another. Study skills can be divided into 4

basic areas namely concentration (Bremer, 2016); test taking (Avand et al., 2014); memorization

and reading (Samuel & Shetty, 2014).

 First, in students’ learning it is important to establish the attention of an individual to the

task needed to accomplish. Li & Yang (2016) presented that concentration is fundamentally

identified with the process of learning and serves as the fuel to cognitive operations. In the study

of Marsh & Sorqvist (2015) concentration are affected when time pressure and difficulty in a

task is present.

Another, test-taking procedures are psychological capacities to manage any testing

circumstance in a proper way and to realize what to do during tests. Most of the test -taking

strategy that is observed from students are eliminations, rechecking answers, reading questions

carefully, and solving easy items first (Dodeen, 2015).

Secondly, memorization is a study skill used to retain and store information either on

short or long-term memory, depending to the number of times the information is needed

(Khamees, 2016). Moreover, there are different ways on how memorization works. It can be

through talking aloud, visuals, and by the use of mnemonics.

Lastly, reading comprehension refers to the understanding the suppositions or context

that the creator or sender needs to covey purposefully (Elleman & Oslud, 2019) . During the

process of comprehensive reading the interaction of the prior knowledge, working memory,

vocabulary skills works. For this reason, students might easily grasp the messages and can

actively participate in studying.