Study Smarter: Giving Your Ideas Legs

Whether you’re a teacher looking to instil in your students the idea there are a wide range of scientifically-demonstrated techniques you can use to improve your performance in examinations or a student looking for a quick fix to improve your recall and presentation skills, there’s no-doubt “study skills” (or whatever you prefer to call them) are an integral part of the learning process.

And while the ability to master these skills – from better note-taking to improved memory and increased productivity – isn’t going to magically transform you into a Grade A student without you putting in the academic mileage (despite what you may have seen on YouTube or, possibly even worse, TikTok) there’s no-doubt that combining an understanding of how to study (metacognition) with a strong study ethic (you attend classes, do the reading, contribute your ideas to lessons…) is a winning formula.

But, as I’ve just indicated with the two film clips above, not all study skills “secrets” or “tricks” are created equal. While most of the stuff you see on social media is banal (“concentrate more!”), weird (“take a cold shower after studying to boost your adrenaline and memory”) or quite possibly both (“treat yourself like a dog!”) there are things you can do to improve your ability to study effectively.

There may be, for example, times when you’re faced with writing a particularly obtuse and seemingly intractable essay.

Or times when you’re trying to get to grips with an idea introduced previously in class.

It’s in these situations that you need a little creative boost to get things moving in the right direction and one simple thing you can do to provide it is, according to a study by Oppezzo and Daniel (2014), to take a hike.

Literally rather than figuratively.

In a series of four experiments the researchers tested how different types of walking – inside on a treadmill and outside in the open air – impacted on an individual’s creatively (using Guilford’s Alternate Uses (GAU) test of creative divergent thinking).

And what they found was that even under different experimental conditions, some form of walking exercise resulted in a measurable creativity boost for a large majority of the participants. As they put it:

“The effects of outdoor stimulation and walking were separable. Walking opens up the free flow

of ideas, and it is a simple and robust solution to the goals of increasing creativity and increasing physical activity”.

Walking, it seems, can be good for both the Mind and the Body.