Summary

We’ve looked at three kinds of learning tools: question banks, summaries, and mnemonics. There’s one danger with tools however: they can go rusty if they’re not used regularly.

The moral is simple: when you make learning tools, keep them sharp. Practise using them regularly. Decode your mnemonics once a week at least, till they stay permanently in your mind. Practise answering your question bank questions, observing which are the awkward ones that need a bit of working on. Regularly spend a few minutes with each of your summaries, mentally filling out the detail behind the summary, and occasionally looking back at original material to make sure that you are indeed remembering all the detail you need to.

All these bits of practice with your learning tools may look like a lot of work. However, it’s the sort of practice that you can do a bit of in just a few minutes. You don’t have to wait till you’ve got a solid spell of time available for study. You can use up some of those odd little bits of the day which would otherwise be quite wasted as far as learning is concerned.

There’s a lot of mileage in carrying your learning tools around with you for such use (should we call it a learning toolkit now?!)