Best Study Methods

First things firstget organized Make a full-semester study schedule on a calendar for all your courses. Include midterms, assignments and study times. Plan ahead for your assignments start working on them early. Most profs recommend 3 homework hours per class hour; take these estimates seriously. Schedule study time for times of the day when youre least tired and least likely to be distracted. Find a quiet place to do your studying. Leave time for fun, but remember your reason for being here. Watch the Thinkwell lectures before class Allow yourself half an hour per Thinkwell lecture. Watch actively. You can watch a lecture as if it was television, but watch it a second time and take notes. Write down the Key Concepts when they appear. Under each Key Concept, write down the important points and any detail you need. Write down terms you dont know and their definitions. At the end of the video, review your notes to make sure they make sense to you. Write down questions to ask in class about the lecture material. Pay attention to each of these parts of the Thinkwell lecture screen: Key Concepts: These are statements of the main ideas of the lecture that will form a scaffold of ideas for the course material. Definitions: Special terms are defined here. You might also find scientific laws, formulas and other important stuff. Write down the terms that appear in the definition box, theyre the specialized language of your discipline. Content: In this box youll see graphics related to what your Thinkwell lecturer is describing. Pay attention to headings, bulleted lists, and diagrams. In class lectures If your prof uses class time to lecture, note-taking is important. Take readable, complete notes the first time; you wont have time to rewrite them. Structure your notes according to the structure of the lecture. Pay attention to headings, lists and diagrams. Note-taking is the first step in the learning process. See Preparation for Exams for what to do with your notes. Thinkwell website resources Notes. Every lecture has this summary document. A note can be used to supplement your own notes. Or, print it and write your own comments on the note itself. Glossary terms. Every subchapter has a list of glossary terms. Be sure you know the meaning of all terms introduced in the lectures. Exercises. Depending on how your prof uses them, the Thinkwell exercises can give you practice at problemsolving. Preparation for exams Here are three approaches to preparing for exams, use them all: PRACTICE PROBLEM SOLVING. In problem-solving courses, such as this one, its very important to know the method for solving every kind of problem you might see on an exam. This is only done through practice. Do as many practice problems as you can. Learn algebra by doing algebra. There is no other way. OUTLINE YOUR NOTES. One effective way to study is progressive outlining of your notes. This method works best if you write your outlines by hand, even if you took the raw notes on your computer. Start with the raw notes you made in class or from your Thinkwell lectures and make a new set of notes that summarize these in an outline format. Keep important headings, subheadings, lists, and the brief explanations you need to understand the ideas in a topic. From this second set of notes, make a new, even more compact, outline. Each time you make an outline you are organizing and repeating the important ideas of the course and learning them. It might be possible to distill the essentials of a course onto one or two pages, but really what is happening is that you are committing the background to memory. KNOW WHATS ON THE EXAM. This means predict the questions that will be on the exam. This isnt as hard as it sounds and is a very good way to prepare. There shouldnt be any surprises when you finally see the exam.

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StudyMethods.doc rev 08/18/2004