Exam Prep Toolkit: Building Better Study Strategies

A guided workbook and companion resource set designed to help college students organize, plan, and reflect on their exam preparation.

Role:
Learning Resource Designer

Tools
Canva

Deliverable
Exam-preparation workbook and companion student worksheets

Audience
College students across disciplines

Challenge

Through my experiences as a teaching assistant, tutor, and peer mentor, I noticed that many college students are expected to prepare for exams without ever being explicitly taught how to do so. Students may understand that they need to “study,” but have difficulty determining what to study, how to organize their preparation, which strategies to use, or how to evaluate whether they actually understand the material.

The challenge was to create a resource that provided enough structure to guide students through the process without implying that there is one correct way to study. The workbook therefore introduces multiple strategies and encourages students to identify the approaches that work best for their course, the material, and their individual learning needs.

Goal

To give students a clear, approachable framework for planning, organizing, and evaluating their exam preparation while helping them develop study strategies they can apply independently in future courses.

Optional Next Steps:

Pilot the workbook with a small group of students and gather feedback on usability, clarity, and which tools they find most helpful. I would use this feedback to refine the resource, identify sections that need additional explanation, and evaluate whether students feel more confident and organized when preparing for exams. Future revisions could also include additional accessibility options and versions tailored to different course or assessment formats.

Key Features:

  • Clearly organized sections that guide students through each stage of exam preparation.

  • Reusable worksheets that can be adapted to different courses and exam formats.

  • Multiple study strategies rather than prescribing a single “best” way to study.

  • Practical guidance informed from my experiences as a student, teaching assistant, tutor, and peer mentor.

  • Reflection tools that encourage students to evaluate both their understanding before an exam and their performance afterwards.

Approach

I designed the resource in Canva as a modular workbook that students could move through from the moment an exam is announced through post-exam reflection. Rather than presenting study strategies as a long list of recommendations, I organized them around decisions students actually need to make during the exam-preparation process.

Companion worksheets allow students to apply the framework to different subjects and courses while keeping the core process consistent. I also incorporated multiple study approaches so students could experiment with different strategies and identify what works best for them.

Beyond the project: I also explored direct-to-student distribution and marketing of the resource through Good Grad Ugly.

What You Created

I created a multi-stage exam-preparation workbook that guides students from initial exam planning through post-exam reflection. Students are prompted to identify what will be covered, consolidate course materials, break content into manageable topics, track what they understand versus what needs additional review, select appropriate study strategies, create a preparation plan, and reflect on their performance after the exam.

Companion worksheets can be reused for different courses, allowing students to apply the same overall framework while adapting their preparation to the needs of each class.