The typical picture of exam preparation is of students staying up all night to cram, studying all day without moving to cram more and eating a lot of fast food 鈥� having it delivered so as not to disturb yet more cramming.
According to Professor MC Schraefel of the Human Performance Design Lab at the University, it turns out that some of the best ways to excel at exams are the exact opposite of these traditional practices.
Here are four tips from Professor Schraefel聽on how to help your body work with your brain to maximise exam performance.聽 鈥淣o matter how much or how little you鈥檝e studied,鈥� says Professor Schraefel 鈥測ou鈥檒l do better by putting these into practice now for your next exam.鈥�
1)聽聽聽聽聽 SLEEP 鈥� getting five complete sleep cycles (usually about 7.5-8 hours) is a great way to optimise information and process it into memory. A lot of the work we do gets sorted while we sleep. Cut that short and we kill performance 鈥� and memory is so important in exams.
2)聽聽聽聽 MOVE 鈥� Get out of your chair at least every 20 minutes. In repeated studies, as little as 20 minutes of moderate activity prior to a test significantly improved cognitive performance.聽 Movement also helps blow off stress like pre-exam nerves. If you have several exams in one day, get as much activity between exams as possible.
3)聽聽聽聽 WATER 鈥� a recent study in the UK showed that exam performance of students who sipped water during their exams did better than peers who did not.
4)聽聽聽聽 EAT 鈥� Berries are a great source of nutrients shown to boost cognitive performance. They鈥檙e also a good source of energy. So pull back on the pizza and up the fruit and veg 鈥� frozen or fresh. A light meal, including berries and some kind of protein (such as meat, fish, legumes or eggs), two to four hours before an exam will give you time to digest the food and be available for brain and body. Eating too soon before an exam means the body will want to go into sleep/digest mode 鈥� not great for optimal exam performance.
Professor Schraefel says: 鈥淲e all sit too much. It doesn’t matter how young or old we are: if we’re sitting for hours at a time, we’re making ourselves聽not only sick but thick.聽The Whitehall cohort study showed that the more inactive we are, the thicker we get. But perhaps even more alarming, has asked if prolonged sitting 鈥� like most of us do every day 鈥� should be considered a coronary risk factor.聽 That鈥檚 like equating uninterrupted sitting with smoking.
鈥淥n the plus side, we can mitigate the effects of sitting just by moving more throughout the day, which also has the other benefit that we鈥檙e spending less time sitting overall. Both these factors show significant and immediate benefits for wellbeing, from things like weight loss to stress reduction to improved cognitive performance.鈥�
To increase the well-being and physical activity of students and staff at the University, Professor Schraefel has developed the . The 12-week gofIT聽challenge uses software and a mobile app developed at Southampton to offer a聽dual physical and digital approach to increase mobility and activity options on campus. Imperial College London and City University London will join Southampton and take up the gofit challenge.