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2023-12-28
The work is licensed under
a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License.
While Tak tries his best to describe a useful strategy, it may or may not work for individuals. There are no guarantees implied in this article!
For those who are impatient, this is a condense version of the content of this module:
Are these recommendations really necessary? I have counterexamples to show that they are not. I know students who can miss classes, fall asleep when they are actually in-class, procrastinate, and still ace a class. The most important questions are:
Lectures are never meant to be the only method to distribute the content of a class! For each hour of lecture, students are expected to spend two additional hours. To do what? Well, reading the printed materials is one of the activities to use these two hours.
I will assume students to have pre-read the material to be lectured.
“If I can learn everything from reading the printed material, then I don’t need to take a class!”
That is a good point. The idea is that you may have questions or points that you do not entirely understand just by reading the printed material. However, pre-reading material that has not been lectured yet should give you a general idea of what topics will be introduced, and how these topics relate to material that is already covered.
An alternative way to look at this is that you can learn everything from text. The lecture can be treated as a reinforcement mechanism so that the materials get understood better. Each lecture is also an opportunity to ask questions or discuss points that require some interaction with the professor.
You may also consider taking notes as you read through the text material. You can jot down questions, as well as how the content relate to what you have already learned.
Reviewing your own notes from past lectures (at least the one immediately before) can help you retrieve the context of a class. This makes a lecture more effective because your mind is more ready to make connections between what is already learned and what is being lectured.
Without reviewing notes from past lectures, understanding new concepts become impossible because there is nothing to connect these new concepts to! Sure, questions can still be asked about “what is XYZ?”, but that wastes precious lecture time.
I will assume every student to have reviewed material that is taught already in a lecture.
Excused or not, an absence in a lecture or a lab causes disruption in the process of learning. Even if a lecture is recorded, an absence means missing an opportunity to ask questions or participate in a discussion. To many people, the interaction with others (professor or peers) significantly help with focusing on the material and to retain the knowledge.
Life happens, so a few absences may be unavoidable. However, try not to miss any lecture or lab!
In my observation, besides missing classes and labs, many students who do not get good grades also do not pay attention in class nor take notes. Many of these students appear (to me) to be texting on their phones, and occasionally take a snapshot of the projection screen.
A better strategy is to pay attention and stay focused on the lecture. This does tie in to pre-reading the lecture content and reviewing notes from the past. Why? Without pre-reading the lecture content and reviewing notes from the past, it can be very difficult to understand a lecture. Not being able to understand the content of a lecture means there is nothing to focus on!
Taking notes is a way to stay focused. Since I usually record a lecture (everything on-screen and my voice), this means there is no need to frantically copy everything. Instead, it is helpful to mark the date and time of when a topic is discussed. The easiest way to do this is to annotate the text material with the date/time of the discussion.
Besides noting the date/time of topics, your notes should also record your thoughts. In a lecture, you may make a connection between two concepts even though I do not mention it. Well, jot it down!
At the end of the day, your notes help you recall what happened during a class. What I say is already recorded in the lecture recording. So the notes can focus on your own thoughts. You can also jot down questions that you may want to address after lecture.
During a lecture, you have little time to write your notes. You may be writing in abbreviations and using other means to make it possible to take notes in real-time.
After a lecture, it is important to go over your notes. Did you write down a question? Try to answer it! You can also expand on terse fragments that you wrote in class and make your notes more complete.
A common misunderstanding is that the professor provides study guide for exams (and other assessments). A study guide is individual to each student.
Why?
Different people make connections between concepts differently. More importantly, different people have different preferences as to how the content is presented. Some people prefer a terse bullet list, some people prefer a graphical mind map, and yet others just want to annotate on provided text material and use colored tabs to highlight pages of importance.
As you review/revise your notes, it is the perfect time to prepare your own study guide. Knowing that the assessments are open-book and open-notes, what format of material will help you the most? There is no single right answer to this question.
While tutoring and study groups are proven effective and important resources, an over reliance on these resources can also negatively impact academic success, especially because most assessments are individual.
The big question is “when should I ask someone (tutor or peer) to help me?”
To address this question, I am going to assume procrastination is not a reason. There are many reasons why people (including myself!) procrastinate, but that is enough material for another module!
Assuming that you get started with your homework or lab early, how do you determine whether it is time to ask for help? This is, indeed, a tough question to answer. The answer to this question depends on personality and many other factors. For example, I am one of those people who seldom (read “never”) ask for help in homework assignments. I am not suggesting this is how everyone should do it!
What I can say is that asking for help too early (or too much) robs the opportunity to train one’s mind and learn how to think independently.
But what if you have done everything in your ability, allocated the necessary resources (time), and still find completing homework or lab assignments challenging? Talk with the professor about your situation during office hour. While your professor may not have a degree in education or psychology, your professor may be able to help.
Study groups can be helpful. Ideally, a study group can provide the following:
However, there are also many ways in which study groups can become an obstacle:
Consider published study group ground rules.