A study partner can help to improve your study for HSC PDHPE both in quality and quantity. Having a friend that you study with can be motivational and can also save you and your teacher time. However, there are a few things you have to get right in order for this to help and not hinder you.
Firstly, you should make sure that you choose a good study partner. That means you should pick someone who will actually help you study and not just be a distraction. The person should be reliable and able to produce good study material. Sometimes it is best to avoid your friends as a study partner because they often become a distraction.
Secondly, you need to set up a routine. You could meet together either weekly or fortnightly, whatever will work best for you in terms of what you need and can commit to. Once the routine is set, you need to stick to it and make sure you arrive prepared for the meetings. Before the meeting, it should be decided what you are going to be looking at or what you are going to share with each other, and then both need to deliver.
This is where a study partner is helpful. Often having to produce something for someone else causes us to do a better job. It could be that you are going to provide summaries for Health Priorities in Australia and they are going to do Factors Affecting Performance. This not only frees you up to be able to spend more time on your summary but then provides you with summaries for a topic that you didn’t have to write. Now, of course, this only works if both partners are putting in the effort.
The other way a study partner can help is to provide someone for you to teach. One of the best ways to learn is to study something in order to teach it to someone else. If you organise with each other to teach the other a particular topic or dot point, then it will require you to learn it well and be able to find answers and other ways to explain the content so that your study partner benefits.
Finally, a good study partner can also help by providing fast feedback. This will save you and your teacher time. The two of you can easily complete practice questions and share them with each other. You then provide feedback for your partner, while they do the same for you. Both of you benefit from reading each other’s work, having to think about the answer and the marking criteria and then providing and receiving feedback from each other. This is possibly the greatest benefit a study partner can provide, fast and effective feedback.
A study pattern will also provide someone for you to complete an oral exam as well. The two of you can sit with each other and answer questions without having to write anything down. This can get you through more questions in a given time period and also provide fast effective feedback.
