study skills - Faculty Focus

Posts Tagged ‘study skills’

July 14 - Study Game Plans: Do Students Know What and How to Study?

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog

“Few teachers effectively prepare students to learn on their own. Students are seldom given choices regarding academic tasks to pursue, methods for carrying out complex assignments or study partners. Few teachers encourage students to establish specific goals for their academic work or teach explicit study strategies. Also, students are rarely asked to self-evaluate their work or estimate their competence on new tasks.” (p. 69)

May 5 - Questions Around Students’ Study Habits, and What Constitutes Studying

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching Professor Blog

I had breakfast with my colleague and friend Larry yesterday. We pretty much cover the higher education waterfront during these morning sessions. Among the many topics covered yesterday was the matter of how much time students spend studying, or as most faculty are more likely to note, how much time they don’t spending trying to master course content. In support of the lack of attention to studying that many of us see in our classes is all sorts of survey data (from the well-known NSSE surveys to findings reported in the new and much talked about book, Academically Adrift). Depending on the survey, something close to 80% of students are reporting that they spend less than 20 hours a week studying.

November 15 - Teaching Strategies That Help Students Learn How to Learn

By: Sara Coffman in Effective Teaching Strategies

What skills do you wish your students had prior to taking your course? Reading comprehension, time management, listening, note-taking, critical thinking, test-taking? Let’s face it, most students could benefit from taking a course in learning how to learn. But who wants to take a study skills class?

October 22 - A New Way to Help Students Learn Course Vocabulary

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Effective Teaching Strategies

Most college students struggle with the vocabulary of our disciplines. In their various electronic exchanges, they do not use a lot of multisyllabic, difficult-to-pronounce words. And virtually all college courses are vocabulary rich—unfamiliar words abound. Most students know that the new vocabulary in a course is important. They use flash cards and other methods to help them memorize the words and their meanings for their exams. Two days later, the words and their meanings are gone.

August 30 - Technology Hasn’t Helped Students’ Study Skills, Research Finds

By: Steve Smith in Teaching and Learning

In the space of one generation, college students have gone from studying with highlighters and wire notebooks to laptops, netbooks and, now, iPads.

But despite the prevalence of technology on campuses, a new study indicates that computers alone can’t keep students from falling into their same weak study habits from their ink-and-paper days.

July 30 - What it Means to be a Self-Regulated Learner

By: Maryellen Weimer, PhD in Teaching and Learning

“Self-regulation is not a mental ability or an academic performance skill; rather it is the self-directive process by which learners transform their mental abilities into academic skills.” (p. 65) That definition is offered by Barry Zimmerman, one of the foremost researchers on self-regulated learning. It appears in a succinct five-page article that offers a very readable overview of research in this area.

July 13 - College Students Are Studying Less

By: Mary Bart in Trends in Higher Education

During my first year in college I remember two stats that were thrown down with such authority that I didn’t doubt them for a second. The first one was delivered during the welcoming address to the incoming freshmen class in which the speaker did the old “look to your left, look to your right, one of you won’t be here by the end of the year.”

May 6 - Why Students Cram for Exams