Analyze Your Process and Product to Improve Your Performance

Post-game review, debriefing, post-mortem analysis… They all have the same goal: learning from experience to improve future performance.

Your test, presentation, paper, or project is over and it is time to grab a nap or hit the beach, right? Well, yes, but the best students also come back to review. Why revisit the scene of the crime, you ask? So you know what strategies you should keep, change, and add to improve for next time.

Review Your Process (I was practically perfect! Mary Poppins has nothing on me!)

Even before grades are out, I suggest reflecting on how you spent your time and attention before the deadline.

When were you the most focused and doing your best work? What were the conditions that might have contributed to that? Extra sleep, coffee, an accountability buddy, excitement about being close to finishing?

Did you procrastinate? Did you tell yourself that doing the laundry was a virtuous form of productive procrastination? Go to check a fact on your phone and get sucked into TikTok for 2 hours?

Did you misallocate your time? Did you spend most of your time studying the first 20% of the material and never get a chance to look at the last 40%? Or did you only review your notes and forget the readings, videos, and discussion questions? Beautifully craft the first half of your paper and do a crappy rush job on the second half? Spend more time finding clip art and making your slide beautiful than researching the content for your speech?

Did you get sidetracked? Did your group study session turn into a pizza party with minimal studying? Did your brother call with a long story, or did your boss ask you to come in to work an extra shift?

Were you a tyrant to yourself? Did you make yourself stay up all night? Skip showering and meals? This might have worked in the short-term, but besides being bad for your health and well-being, I would predict that you will develop procrastination habits in the future (if you don’t already have them) because your psyche will want to avoid starting work because it knows you are going to turn work into endless torture. More sustainable work is best.

Diagnose Your Process (Hmmm, I binge-watched Severance and The White Lotus this semester. Last time I binge-watched Grey's Anatomy and The Residence. Pattern? Nah!).

What are your patterns? Think about yourself and your process this time and how it compares to previous situations.

Identify personal strengths. Maybe you remember terms easily, are a fast reader, or are a dynamic public speaker. Be strategic about how to capitalize on those strengths next time. If you easily memorize terms, schedule more time to review other material and less time to review terms. If you are a speaking rockstar, offer to be your group’s presenter.

Identify personal weaknesses. Maybe you wait until the last minute to start working, you run out of steam and get sloppy partway through, or you are disorganized and never quite know what will be on the test or how many pages the paper should be. Don’t beat yourself up! Everyone has weaknesses. There are solutions for these problems and you can build them into your protocol (more on this below).

Identify process strengths. Think about how you can repeat a successful process you implemented or repeat something that accidentally worked well. Perhaps you stayed on task because you made a list of tasks and had a movie date planned for 9pm, so you ensured you were finished by then. Now you know you do well with checklists and a reward with a deadline. If your cousin showed up unexpectedly and ended up quizzing you on terms and you nailed them, a quizzing partner may be the way to go.

Identify process weaknesses. What went wrong and what can you learn from it? If you scheduled study time for early morning but instead went back to sleep, now you know nighttime studying might be better. If your study environment was wrong, zero in on the specific problems and test-drive new environments. If it was a one-off problem that you probably won’t encounter again (your roommate’s sister showed up drunk), don’t worry too much about it. However, I would still suggest considering what general category (distractions, boundaries to set with friends) it fits into and how you might cope with problems in that category.

Review Your Product and Grade (I got most of the textbook questions wrong. I guess I should have opened the textbook).

For a test, was there a pattern to what you missed? Were they mostly textbook questions, terminology, dates, big theories or small details? Did you nail the multiple-choice questions but forget the terms for fill-in-the-blank questions? Do a post-game review of your testing performance to see where to focus more next time. And it wouldn’t hurt to learn what you got wrong so that you learn it correctly, particularly if this is a class in your major or relevant to your future goals.

For a paper, presentation, or project, read through the teacher’s comments carefully and email or stop by their office to clarify and ask questions. Many teachers write minimal comments because they know most students don’t read those comments, but if you show genuine interest and a desire to improve, most teachers will be happy to spend time explaining and coaching you.