ITEM 8 : CONCENTRATION STRATEGIES

 

Concentration Strategies

Hello readers,

Today, I want to share with you an interesting topic which is Concentration. So, let’s get it!

What is Concentration

Concentration is about focusing our mind on what we are doing. It is important in every single thing that we do. But, let’s just focus on how to improve our concentration during reading, listening and studying.

Before we go further for this topic today, let me show you an activity I had done from my textbook to know how good my concentration is.

Activity 4.7 page 107

From the screenshot of my activity result above, I got 7 total points.

It is stated that high scores indicate that we already have good concentration strategies while low scores mean we still need some improvement. What about your score? Are you better than me? Just give it a try, guys!

Example of the situation we lose concentration:-

-         Thinking of how many pages left to read

-         What time we are going to eat dinner

-         What will the lecturer discuss during next class

-         Etc.

Those examples show us that we can lose concentration little by little right after we start doing our tasks.

Being distracted interferes with our ability to focus and concentrate on something or any task at hand. Actually, from all of the examples above we are concentrating but not on the right thing during reading. That means if we are reading, so we need to concentrate only on reading. Not concentrating on the distraction.

Three Levels of Concentration

What Is Concentration Cycle

Figure 1 Concentration Cycle from Textbook

It is easy to say that we can definitely be focusing only on study as we planned. But the truth is, it is very difficult to concentrate or be in the deep concentration level.

From the figure 2 we know that “A. the ideal study session: good concentration” is our target. We don’t want anything to distract us while we are doing the assignment or studying.

Let says that as soon as we are in moderate concentration, someone distract us by asking to join for dinner or our parents are asking for help. This is the situation where we get distracted and when we want to continue studying we need to start back from the beginning the light concentration level. That is the reason why some of us may not be able to reach the deep concentration level. We may find that this situation is so stressful and finally “I GIVE UP” .

Concentration Problems

Sustaining Our Focus

-- It is also hard when it comes to sustaining our focus during study session. Some of us might lose focus when we have to read a text or writing an essay. While, some other might can keep focusing on mathematics tutorial.

-- The factors that cause all these problems can be: our interest in the study material, difficulty level for the tasks, or even from our motivational self.

Limiting Our Focus

·        This problem usually happen during stressed weeks, when the examination around the corner

·        We need to be focusing on a single text or task at a time. This is difficult to do as our focus might be lingering around thinking about what to do next, can we manage to revise all the topics before the exam and so on.

We can use goal settings or memory strategies to help us for this problem. If you don’t have any idea about what is goal setting or memory strategies, you can go check my previous posts, okay?

Concentration Improvement Strategies

Okay, let’s pause here for today’s post. I will continue discussing about this topic about concentration in the next post. Too much information in one post will make it boring to be read, am I right?

Thank you so much for spending time with me here. See you again and goodbye.

p/s: All of the information above are based on my study skill textbook provided by my lecturer for study skill (UED102) course. All of the images or pictures are just my creativity. I do not own any of them.