Hi, I’m Dr. Stephen Chew.
I’m a professor of psychology here at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
This is the fourth in a series of five videos on studying effectively in college.
Effective college study is more just a matter of a desire to learn and devoting sufficient
time and effort.
Students have to utilize effective learning strategies.
If they use ineffective learning strategies, they can study long and hard and still fail.
In earlier videos, I described the levels of processing framework, which says that shallow
processing, which focuses on, meaningless, superficial aspects does not lead to effective
learning.
Deep processing, which focuses on the meaning and implications of material, does lead to
connected learning.
Then I discussed basic principles for achieving deep processing.
Effective study strategies employ some or all of these principles.
You can use those principles to develop good study strategies that work for you.
This video will give you a starting point.
I will describe for you some study strategies that are based on these principles.
Think of study strategies as an orienting task, that make you process information at
certain levels.
Good study strategies make you process information at a deep, meaningful level focusing on comprehension
and implications.
Poor study strategies focus on a shallow level which focus on superficial, meaningless information.
Here are three research-based strategies for achieving deep processing while reading..
The first is question generation.
After you have read a chapter or reviewed a section of notes, generate some questions
over the material.
Try to make the questions as meaningful as possible.
Questions about facts are OK, but questions that make you compare and contrast, analyze,
make connections, to think about implications or generate examples are even better.
Here’s a list of questions that you might generate based on the videos so far.
The first question is purely factual about the definition of a term.
That’s OK as long as you don’t just memorize the definition without understanding it.
The second and third and fourth questions that are also about content, but they are
asking about key arguments in the videos, which go to a deeper level than a definition.
Question 5 asks you to compare and contrast, leading to both elaboration and distinctiveness.
Finally, Question 6 asks you to relate the information to your personal experience.
Just generating the questions will help your depth of processing.
Reviewing the material to answer them is even better, and you can always ask your questions
to teachers.
At first, generating questions will be a bit awkward, but like anything, with practice
will become easier and more automatic.
The second strategy is to create a concept map of the ideas you are studying.
A concept map is a diagram of nodes and links.
The nodes are concepts or facts that are linked together.
Here is a concept map I constructed for levels of processing.
Concept maps take time and effort to do, but they don’t have to be neat and perfect and
the very act of creating them helps you process information deeply.
The third method is to practice retrieving and using the information in ways that your
teacher expects you to be able to do.
There are really two parts to this study strategy.
The first part is to practice retrieving the information without referring to your notes
and book.
So close your notes and book and just practice retrieving the information.
Explain it to someone else or write it down.
The second part is to use the information in the way that your teacher expects.
Some teachers test for facts, some teachers test for concepts.
Is your teacher using multiple choice?
Is your teacher using short answer or essay?
Practice using the information in the way the teacher is going to test you.
But just practicing recalling the information and thinking about how it might be used will
be useful to you.
You can take advantage of review questions in the textbook.
Oftentimes companion websites for the textbook will have review tests that you can use.
After you have practiced recalling the test or recalling the information, you can check
yourself against your textbook and your notes.
This will help you identify weaknesses in your understanding of the material.
Now, what about taking notes during class?
Note taking has three functions.
First, it provides a summary of key points from the lecture that you will need to understand
and recall later.
Second, you are creating a set of retrieval cues or memory cues for the information that
you didn’t record.
You are only able to write down a small percentage of the information presented in a lecture.
Your notes help remind you of what you missed writing down.
The third function is that note taking is an orienting task.
Taking notes engages you in the class, and how you take notes determines if you process
the information in a deep, meaningful way or in a superficial way.
Note taking that makes you process the information at a deep level will help your learning.
So as the lecture goes on, think about key concepts, key distinctions, and key relationships
and be sure to write down examples.
On the other hand, if you think of note-taking as writing down as much of the lecture as
possible without thinking about it, then you are processing at a shallow level and your
note taking will not help you to learn.
This is especially a temptation if you take notes using a laptop computer.
I actually prefer taking notes by hand because the flexibility in the format of taking notes.
But, the real danger of taking notes by laptop is the temptation to browse the internet or
check your social networks during the lecture.
This kind of distraction not only reduces your learning, but it distracts those people
around you.
A few other things…
If you miss information during a lecture, be sure to get it right away either from the
teacher or from the classmates around you.
Second, taking good notes is very effortful and usually requires your full concentration.
If you have trouble writing fast enough, then consider asking the professor if you can record
the lecture.
Next, borrowing notes from another student is a poor substitute for missing a class.
You are much better off attending class and taking your own notes.
Finally, notes are only helpful if you actively organize them, review them, and think about
them.
Let’s now turn to using deep processing while reading a textbook.
The same principles for deep processing apply here.
A lot of students like to highlight while they read a textbook.
Highlighting can be seen as an orienting task.
You can highlight for deep processing which will help you to learn the material or you
can highlight for shallow processing which will actually hurt your learning.
Consider the following paragraph, which was modified from an old psychology textbook.
It is tempting to go right to the bolded terms and highlight them.
It’s fast, easy, and pretty much useless.
You’ve skimmed over important information and you’ve set yourself up to memorize isolated
facts, a terrible study strategy.
Here is how to highlight for deep processing.
Read all the text, then be selective about what you highlight based on its importance
and how it relates to other information.
Highlight connections, key distinctions, and applications.
Don’t highlight complete passages; leave out unnecessary text.
Good highlighting requires multiple readings of the text and meaningful decisions.
It is slow and effortful and, to be most effective, you have to go back and review what you highlighted.
Here is how I would highlight the Freud passage.
The first line of highlighting contains the main theme of Freud’s theory.
I highlighted the key parts of the definitions of conscious and unconscious and the breakdown
of the unconscious into preconscious and unconscious.
I have the definitions and the distinctions between them.
Students may highlight a passage differently because they have different perspectives.
The important thing is that you highlight following the principles of deep processing.
Finally, I want to talk to you a little bit about group study.
If the group uses effective study strategies and the norm is that everyone works hard,
then you will learn in group study.
However, if the group norm is that everyone uses bad study strategies and there are a
lot of distractions, then you simply won’t learn.
Studying in groups is one of the easiest ways to fool yourself into believing you have really
learned when you actually haven’t.
Here are some principles for effective group study.
First, remember group study is a business meeting.
Like all business meetings, there should be a goal for the meeting and an agenda.
Everyone should come prepared and ready to contribute.
So, set a goal for the meeting, for example, we will review chapter 8 of the textbook.
Set conditions for participation.
Everyone should have read the chapter and have three questions ready to ask about it.
If you aren’t prepared and can’t contribute, then don’t come.
Everyone keeps the ultimate goal of learning in mind.
Everyone has a chance to ask and answer questions from other group members.
The result should be that any member can express the understanding of the whole group.
In this video, we’ve discussed some concrete ways of using the principles of deep learning
to guide your study strategies in common learning situations.
Developing the effective study strategies for you will take time and effort, but with
practice, they will become automatic and will be effective for you.
But there will be setbacks along the way.
What happens if you blow an exam?
That is the topic of the next video