HOW TO STUDY FOR CHEMISTRY! (IB CHEMISTRY HL) *GET CONSISTENT GRADES* | studycollab: Alicia

hey guys welcome back to study club in today's video I'm showing you how to study for chemistry so in this video I'm going to walk you through step by step how I took class notes how I prepared for topic tests and then how I prepared for the final exams I took IB chemistry at higher level so my examples will be specific to that however these tips and techniques should be relatively applicable to whatever chemistry course that you're doing before I get into the details in the early stages of your course it's really important that you make yourself aware of different resources you can get for the IB there's a million different resources everywhere so now I'm just gonna quickly outline some that I found really useful so the first thing you want to make sure you have before you start the course is your course syllabus I'll leave a link to the IB one in the description however whatever course it is doing if you just type in the name of the course subject name and then the like just syllabus or course guide it should come up so whatever's examinable is in that booklet so basically when you're writing notes it's really important that you look over that the second category I'd talk about is textbooks for the IB the textbook that I really liked was the ntk chemistry blue it's like a blue textbook this was my favorite textbook just because everything was really concise and explained things really simply however I will say that this is not updated to the most recent syllabus so you have to be aware of what's still included in the syllabus and what's not at certain levels so just as long as you keep your syllabus next to you and you're aware of what's still in the course and what's not this textbook is really good another one that was helpful was the Cambridge chemistry textbook it looks like this that one was good in terms of having questions and worked examples into like different subtopics of each chapter sometimes my teacher would set that as homework or I would just look through it if I was unsure of a specific subtopic the last text book is the oxford course companion this one I didn't really touch I just found that there was a lot of writing in the textbook and I'm someone who wants the information to be concise and just straight to the point so this one kind of like Wendell Donne too long and had too many words for me so I never really looked at that one however I will say there study guide that accompanies this book made by the same publisher and that one's really good for summarize notes I use this for the option specifically because a lot of the other textbooks don't include information about the options so this one's good for that however for the main core material I would use the other two textbooks but just a general tip is that if you're struggling with a certain concept then make sure you review different textbooks because different authors will explain things in different ways you might understand one better than the other finally probably one of the most useful resources for me was looking at other YouTube channels there are chemistry tutors on YouTube like Richard Thornley and M sjcam who explain IB concepts of chemistry very simply in a way that's really easy to understand M sjcam also has a website where there are worksheets pertaining to different subtopics so have a look at those as well and also just generally Khan Academy is usually really good for like everything so go and have a look at that as well so now into actually learning the content I'm gonna walk through two different methods you can use to write class notes as you're learning each chapter so the first method is what I used to use at the beginning of the course I would take sticky notes I had some at the back of my notebook that I would keep there but usually I would prepare six sticky notes onto one page and that way I could write really rough notes in class the things I would write down either what the teacher mentioned is really important and that we had to write down or it'll be things that weren't necessarily written on their presentation but we're still relevant to help you understand the concept this could be like more worked examples this method of taking notes in class is good because you can keep your notes as like rough notes and at the same time you don't have to write down every single detail that's probably already on a presentation that you can just look at at your own time at home also if we were given a worksheet in class I'd write all my rough working out on these sticky notes just in case I like made any errors so then when I got home I could rewrite it out neatly in a way that shows step-by-step how to get to a certain answer and then either the same day or before the next class I would take these sticky notes put them aside open up the presentation that the teacher was presenting in class I would write out proper notes in an eight-way that I could come back to later on when I'm writing my summary notes and I would incorporate all this information that I wrote on the sticky notes in saying that all the information that's on the sticky notes are either key points or went on the presentation so you can use that as a guide to highlight what's most important to remember the second method is my most preferred method because teachers will deliver the content in different ways it probably won't work for all of you but in my case what I like to do it was actually write out my class notes before I would go to class so this sort of acted as preparation for class so what I would do is if the presentation was uploaded enough time before class I had opened it up and write notes from it as if it were a textbook I take the key points write them out and I'd also write out the work examples and if I could I would try and work through them myself don't freak out too much if you encounter things you don't understand at all that's because you obviously haven't been to class and your teacher hasn't explained it to you but you're basically using this as an opportunity to familiarize yourself with the content so that once you get to class you can sort of follow along with what the teacher saying and also ask more informed questions at the beginning of the course when I wasn't doing this and like preparing for class I found that if I didn't understand like one portion of what the teacher was saying in relation to that chapter it made the rest of the class really difficult to follow on because you're sort of building upon like the knowledge you learn and that just meant that when I got home I'd have to spend a longer time going through textbooks other resources myself and like really trying to figure out how the concept worked so that's sort of just more time consuming and it's more efficient if you do it this way and prepare if you don't have like slideshows that your teacher uploads then you can always just read the chapter from the textbook beforehand make your own notes off that sort of just do whatever you can to really prepare for the topic and have a slight understanding of the concepts that will be touched upon in class for those of you who are curious to write my notes I use a mu G 0.5 gel pen in black I also use a pen tile touch brush pen in black to write my headers and then I use a Tumbo dual brush pen as my highlighter the paper that I use is from Muji it's just a full line paper I prefer to use loose leaf paper just so that later on when I'm organizing my notes I can put them in chronological order it just makes more sense for me to do that other than having things jumbled all over the place that makes it hard to find things one really important thing is consistency and how often you revise the content I'm not saying you have to do it every day but maybe every two or three days it's good to familiarize yourself with exam style questions as early as you can once you've learned the content you can try and attempt things like multiple choice you could maybe do a five a day or you could do maybe like two or three short answer questions every second day that sort of thing the earlier you can familiarize yourself with exam style questions the better you're practicing applying the knowledge which is really important in chemistry by doing this you're sort of linking it back to the whole forgetting curve concept or if you don't review what you've learned in like a certain amount of days and like you don't repeat that over time the more likely you are to forget the information and not be able to retain it this is really important because it is a two year course so by the end of the two years you still have to remember the information you did at the beginning of the course and the more frequent you do your revision as you go through the topics the easier you're making it for yourself towards the end of your final exams because the last revision you have to do to basically relearn the topics if you forget about it the third thing I'm going to talk about is how to study for topic tests so in my school after we'd finished two or three topics we would have a little assessment that was worth maybe two or three percent of our in China mark and we would basically just get given exam style questions based on the topic we just finished so to study for this there were two things that I wanted to make sure I had completed before the assessment so the first one was writing summary notes this is a really key stage of your revision and it should be done throughout the course so you don't want to leave this last minute before your final exams because it's sort of a more passive way of revising rather than doing active revision in like pass papers so this is a good way to pile all your information together in a summarised and concise manner so what I did to write summary notes was I made revision notebooks you may have seen on my channel I have a video which I'll leave in the end for about an hour where I show you how to make these revision notebooks but I'll just quickly run through how I did them for chemistry so I would take flashcards these are 5 by 8 flashcards and I'd write a title page with a topic number name and also subtopics then when I write these notes I will take my class notes a textbook and also my syllabus so you want to have all these different resources to make sure your notes are as thorough as possible to write these summary notes I would follow the syllabus points make sure that you answer every single one because that's all the examinable content I did my summary notes in chronological order so I would take the first syllabus point so in this case it was like a lewis acid is a lone pair acceptor and a little space is a lone pair donor if it's like a definition and make sure it's one forward with syllabus if not I would follow my class notes and the textbook once I had completed a syllabus point and put it in my notes then I would tick it off as you can see here there was one that circled that's something that maybe I wasn't sure about and I don't really know where that fit in with the class notes and textbook so then I would go ask my teacher about that or I'd come back to it later if it was part of like another topic just make sure if you do circle things make sure you come back to them and ensure that it's incorporated into your notes the way your teacher presents the slide show will probably be in a way that will help you understand the content but then once you've understood the content you really want to summarize it to make sure that you've grouped things together where necessary so that's where you sort of have to actively think this is where I need to group things together to explain this concept as a whole and you don't really want to all over the place because you just want to be able to look at that one key point and know that all the information you need is there so in this example here I write lowest acid electron pair acceptor that's the definition but then later on in my notes I might have found more information about its characteristics so positively charged ion it has empty orbitals where it can accept a lone pair and then like examples might be bf3 and metal ions so I'd group that all together to make sure that when I come look at my notes I know that that's all the information relevant to a Lewis acid in these summary notes make sure you include at least one example your class notes may have more than one but what I did was chose the most common like exam style question included that or I would just choose the most difficult one that I wasn't really sure of how to do or like it might need to refer to later on I'd make sure that's in my summary notes for future reference so as you can see here towards the end of your course once you've had like all your topic tests you should be left with a whole bunch of revision notebooks or summary notes so as you can see here I have like a million the way you can check if your summary notes are up to standard and like good in a sense is that once you complete a pass paper if you are unsure of something you should be able to just refer to your summary notes without having to look at like a textbook or class notes and all the information you need should be in that book if it's not then make sure you incorporate whatever you missed once I had written my revision notebooks that's when I would just target questions and you'll say from now on in the video I'm going to emphasize the importance of practicing and just doing question after question because really that's the most effective way to study for chemistry because it's a lot of recalling information about like certain concepts drawing mechanisms and also doing calculations so what I did was I compiled a bunch of questions into a question booklet per topic so this one here I'm showing you as acids and bases at the front I've got like a little title page with the subtopics and then inside they're all past IB exam style questions just based on acids and bases so the more you can sort of practice the same type of question that's how you prepare for the topic test but it also will help you get more confident on answering like certain calculation questions and it'll also show you what are common questions they ask like every year so it might be like a certain definition for example in like hey Chel they always asked what is a buffer like every second year that will ask that definition and you'll see those sort of trends and patterns as you complete like this question booklet to make this question booklet I have actually compiled it all for you onto a Google Drive on my website you'll find it study - collab comm under resources and chemistry if you scroll down to the bottom I've listed up her topic for you with whatever is contained in this question booklet I'm showing you now I've just binded it together but you can do it in a separate notebook or whatever is easiest for you so what I did was I attempted the SL multiple choice and the HR multiple choice but I only did the HL short answer questions because just to save time I went straight for that but multiple choice is a really great place to start when you're first attempting exam style questions because it's a really quick test of your knowledge making sure you can like recall and apply the information you've learnt because they give you like a certain set of answers it could be once you're more confident with that you can attempt the short answer questions and then there is like a booklet which I've also uploaded onto the drive that has exam style questions from like 2008 to 2016 and to prepare for the topic test just tackle out these questions do as many as you can get familiar with like how to do calculations because most of the time you'll see that they lost very similar questions they'll just like put different numbers in it might be a different equation so the better you can get at adapting your knowledge to different questions the better and all of these have marks games on the back of them so that's really great to check your work see where you went wrong and also find those gaps in your knowledge which you can go back to your summary notes and revise that if you finish with the IB exam style questions there's also other ones in the textbook so the Cambridge textbook has exams are questions with multiple choice and short answer and they specify which ones are HL and and which ones aren't so that's really clear to you they have answers to these questions as well I like to do these in a separate book where I that one book just has all Cambridge textbook exam style questions and like my approach to them I like to do this just before the topic test as well to make sure I really wrap my head around different questions that could be us because a lot of the time your topic test will just be passed paper questions so if you're able to do a proportion of them confidently you should be able to apply that knowledge to whatever's asked in your test and then if you make all these booklets like me towards the end of the course you'll have about a billion that way like 10 kilos this is really great to refer back to in your final stages of revision if you find a topic that you keep getting questions wrong for you can go back and revisit these question booklets and just focus on that type of question until you feel more solid and confident with it so those are the methods are used to study for chemistry throughout year 1 and like half of you to my next video is going to be a part two to this video where I'll explain how to study for specific IB papers like paper one multiple choice paper two short answer and three the option and like experimental work I'll go into more depth about exam tips and also how to approach the final stages of revision so that about wraps up part 1 of this video if you enjoyed it give it a thumbs up leave a comment down below letting me know what you thought of the video be sure to subscribe to my channel turn on the notification belt if you want to be notified when I post next and I'll see you in my next video bye

Channel: Alicia Wong

Views: 160,441

Keywords: chemistry, how to study for chemistry, chem, revision, high grades, ace your exam, science, back to school, how to revise, chemistry tips, ib chemistry, ib chemistry HL, A level chemistry, ib resources

Id: rjPzBPfDUKs

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2019