How to Study

A Short Introduction

Joan Turner

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781446229804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Forschung im Bildungswesen

`This book is a must-read for all students trying to grapple their way through and somehow ?finish college?? - Sharada Prahladrao, The Decan Herald

Any student can improve their learning in higher education if they want to, and the aim of this guide is to help you along this route, not by claiming there is only one right way to do things but by building awareness of different approaches, attitudes, and strategies. Key to this is the notion of active learning which is highlighted throughout the book with the acronym ASCERTAIN whose individual letters signal a range of different strategies and attitudes relevant in different contexts.

Throughout, there is an awareness that among the different cultures students participate in, academic culture has its own set of values which academic staff tend to take for granted, but which students may need to have a greater awareness of, and build into your thinking and working.
SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

Part One

BECOMING AN ACTIVE LEARNER

Nobody is ever completely prepared in advance for university life, and arguably it would not be good if you were. Going through university should be a transformative experience, making you a different person from the one you were before you began your studies. Being willing to go through the process of familiarisation with a new context, new ways of thinking, and new ways of doing things is perhaps the most important ‘study skill’ you should have, but you can develop a range of other skills and strategies which help you to make your way successfully through undergraduate study.

Studying is not just about learning particular content, whether in courses across one main subject area or in ‘modules’ from different subjects, it is also about actively managing the process of studying. To help you manage this process, the three chapters in this part of the book look at learning, memory, and time, respectively.

Chapter 1 helps you to reflect on the process of learning itself and gives you an insight into the various approaches and strategies that others adopt, what is generally effective, and what to avoid. Chapter 2 helps you to think about how you might best use your memory in learning, and introduces you to a range of mnemonic techniques. Chapter 3 encourages you to use your time wisely and shows how time and particular study strategies are interrelated.

The relationship between managing your learning and learning is symbiotic, the one feeds and nourishes the other. If you have a good learning experience, for example you work in a particular way on an essay writing task and you get a good result, you are likely to develop and refine that way of working. The same principle applies even if you get a bad result, only instead of refining, you change your way of working!

The important thing is that you reflect on what you’re doing and take responsibility for what you learn and how you manage that learning.

1

Routes to Learning

warm-up exercise

Look at the following quotes from students. What do they have in common?

I like to work through things, parrot-fashion.

I was absolutely convinced I was doing things in the right way, but I got 43%.

The more they [lecturers] do and the less you do is better. [Talking about getting handouts with lectures rather than taking own notes.]

It’s so easy to get off on the wrong track, you never really know what they want [talking about essay writing].

In the oriental tradition, teachers take care of the students – very straight – to give advice, or to instruct – they don’t digress. The British way is to say: ‘oh, it’s a very good idea … but …’ – in a way they digress, it’s not straightforward.

Discussion

All of the above quotes imply in one way or another that learning happens in a straight line. You move from one thing to the next, you learn ‘parrot-fashion’, as the first quote suggests, or there is a ‘direct route’ where you don’t go ‘off the track’ or which is the ‘right way’ to do things. There is also a suggestion of a direct link between the tutor and the student. What the tutor teaches, the student learns, as if the tutor were handing over a piece of cake which the student ate. The first four quotes are from British students, but the last one comes from a Korean student. It is often seen as a cultural difference that western education is more ‘learner-centred’ while East Asian education is teacher-dominated. While this is broadly true and has much wider ramifications than discussed here, we see from the above examples that assumptions from at least some ‘western’ students’ viewpoints are that they will get ‘handouts’, both literally and metaphorically, from the teacher. Such a viewpoint does not seem to involve the active engagement of the learner. The student is just a passive receptacle for the teacher’s or the textbook’s knowledge, or a parrot!

LEARNING IS A JOURNEY

Much of the above discussion can be related to the concept of a journey. Is the student responsible for mapping out her/his own route through university, or should the way be already paved by the tutor? The concept of a journey underlies life itself. We go through life and we experience all kinds of things along the way. Similarly, we talk about ‘going through’ university. Going through university is like a stage in life. For some people it happens after school and before ‘the rest of life’. For others it will happen later in life, after a few years of working perhaps, or after having children, or after losing a job and looking for a different kind of job by getting different or higher qualifications.

For whatever reason you set off on a university degree, it is as if you’re going on a journey. Sometimes you will feel that you are sauntering along, taking everything in your stride, while at other times you will be very much aware that you’re on a steep learning curve. The learning process is not smooth – its pace varies, as does the amount of effort and energy needed.

The mental journey of getting a university degree requires:

a great deal of practical organisation as you go along;

the mental flexibility to get round obstacles and cope with a wide range of social, psychological and intellectual challenges;

the mental (and physical) stamina to stay on course.

Some elements of the university journey are well known in advance, while others are unknown. The fact that you progress through the university system means that you have to meet certain requirements at each stage. Every degree programme is different, but that kind of information will be mapped out in advance. This means that you will know things like the number of courses or modules that you can take in a year, the range that you can choose from, the number of assignments you have to do for each and how much each assignment is worth. In some universities, you can choose between different pathways through your degree, where you have quite a wide choice of modules in different subject areas, while in others you follow different aspects of the same subject, some of which are compulsory and some of which are optional.

You will also need to know such things as the ratio of assessed course work to end-of-year exams, and the weighting of assignments relative to each other and to the year in which they are undertaken. For example, some examination administrators talk about ‘exit velocity’, which means that the courses you take in your final year are worth more than those in your first year. There is therefore usually a hierarchical progression of difficulty and value to the courses you do each year.

All of this information is mapped out in course handbooks or student guides, which you will probably be given in your first week or so at university. As you receive a lot of information at this time, it is essential that you don’t put such guides away and forget all about them, but have them ready to hand for quick reference. They are a bit like physical maps through the assessment system, telling you what you need at each stage in order to graduate.

Finding your Way Around the Subject Landscape

Even if you have begun to study at school the subject or subjects you’re studying at university, you are always going to be a relative newcomer to that field of study. However, the field itself has already been extensively researched and therefore a number of maps of what it looks like will already have been drawn, as it were. Of course, I’m not talking about the kind of maps that you can buy in the shops to help you find your way round a strange town – I’m talking about conceptual maps. The various questions that have been asked in the past will have generated a lot of literature, which in turn will have been distilled in the various textbooks that you have on your reading lists. Nowadays, most questions that are asked in different fields of study are also approached from different theoretical perspectives. It is these perspectives that you will have to become aware of as well as how the different kinds of information that are available fit into them. This is a bit like trying to find your way around a very complex map – not of places, but of arguments, people, and methodological approaches.

You may be like an explorer going into uncharted territory, but the territory itself is already mapped out (see also the discussion in Chapter 9 on finding your own academic voice).

My viewpoint throughout this book is that you should take charge of your own learning, think for yourself, and be prepared to work hard. However, as the quotes at the beginning of this chapter show, it is not always easy to do. You have to work at taking charge of your learning in the same way as you have to work at understanding the topics you are studying. It is not simply a question of having a natu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introductory Overview
• PART ONE: BECOMING AN ACTIVE LEARNER
• PART TWO: ACADEMIC TASKS AND CONTEXTS
• PART THREE: MINDING YOUR LANGUAGE
• PART FOUR: MOVING ON AFTER UNIVERSITY
• References
• Index