Finals!!

Final exams are quickly approaching. Here are some tips from our Academic Mentors on how to study for and take final exams! Please use these tips yourself and pass some along to your students if you think they are valuable. If you have any more, please add to the list!

Study Skills:

• Prepare for all finals
• Prioritize
• Don’t block one day for one class – study for a few hours then switch topics
• Combine group and individual study
• Find what works for you – for us it was study individually first
• Schedule your time – Decide when and where to start. Add breaks
• Take timed practice tests
• Make color-coded study sheets
• Create your own mock exam on Microsoft Word based on what you think the professor will ask and what you are expected to know. Print and complete without using any notes! Correct using a red pen to point out areas to target for studying.
• Make a “cheat sheet” - pretend you get to bring a cheat sheet to the exam and make one that you would use
• Gather all of your professor/TA related questions regarding content, exam structure, etc. a week prior to the exam so you have plenty of time to ask your professor!
• Practice taking the exam how you will actually take it - ie. at a table, in a classroom, without music, in a timed fashion

 Test Taking Suggestions:

• Balance your time – don’t spend too much time on one thing
• Start with strong suit – Skip over questions you don’t know right away and come back to them
• Read over whole test first
• Read directions carefully
• Use earplugs
• Arrive early and get a comfortable seat
• Try doing some physical activity before your exam
• Quickly write important formulas you might forget at the beginning of the exam

Growth Mindset

Growth mindset is one of the ideas we promote strongly in the academic mentoring program. It can be a valuable tool to help students persevere when there are difficulties or struggles, as there often are in college. We encourage you to share the idea of growth mindset with your student, whether explicitly or by embodying its philosophy during your interactions with your students. Here is what one of our lead academic mentors, Ryan Crass, has to say about growth mindset. Ryan, a pharmacy student at UW, has led the Biology 151-152 peer learning session for the past year.

"Growth mindset is something that I support not only in my students but also in myself. Growth mindset gives you the tools to succeed as a student and ultimately a professional. The power of growth mindset is that it shifts the focus away from the evaluation of success and onto the process necessary to achieve it. We too often as students forget that we are ultimately here to LEARN, not to get A's on exams. Students often get too hung up in the study-binge and exam-purge cycle where information is not retained but simply regurgitated and lost. Growth mindset shines the light onto the process of learning, and when I say learning I mean longitudinal retention of information, not learning to perform and forget. By shifting the focus onto HOW one learns, students are better able to change their studying habits to continual processing of information, which in turn leads to greater long term retention. Our culture is too focused on letter grades, test scores, and performance measures. We tend to pass over the process and look only at the result. Growth mindset mentors praise mentees on effort and not on results. Instead of saying "Wow you did really well on that test" the praise becomes "Wow you worked really hard to get that grade". In so doing, the mentee feels that it was their hard work, rather than their innate ability, that helped them achieve. This idea is especially applicable to students facing stereotype threat who may feel that they have less innate ability than their peers. It is important to emphasis the growth mindset ideal of egalitarian ability differentiated by hard work and dedication. Success favors those who work hard, not those born with ability. Everyone can learn if they work at it! 

  As a future health care provider, I am very much motivated to learn. As you maybe can tell by my lengthy answer to the first question, I am pretty passionate about the idea of growth mindset. During my internship at a hospital this summer, I made many mistakes. I put medications in the wrong stock bins, poorly labeled outgoing prescriptions, and struggled to reconstitute difficult IV medications. A fixed mindset individual may get frustrated and down on themselves for these mistakes and avoid these tasks in the future. I may have questioned my ability to be a good pharmacist if I was a fixed mindset individual. What if I am not able to choose correct medications? What if I can't make the medications patients need? Because of the growth mindset, I never even considered these self-depreciating questions. Instead I looked at the process of how these mistakes occurred and not just the negative result. I found myself asking the pharmacists how I could analyze medications to make sure that I correctly chose those with the right release characteristics. After the pharmacist explained to me that I had not labelled the insulin syringes properly, I asked him what the correct process was. How can I work in order to put the labels on up to pharmacy standards. Finally, the most complicated failure was with the IV medication. This medication cost thousands of dollars and took me almost two hours to make up. Meanwhile the patient waited on the floor to receive it. Despite the fact that I did eventually get the medication made, the delay cost the pharmacy some patient trust. Afterwards, I worked with the pharmacists to see what I could have done differently. I worked on reading the package insert on proper reconstitution techniques, asked the pharmacists for tips, and worked with the technicians to better delineate responsibilities. A big part of being a professional is recognizing when you make mistakes, not getting discouraged, and fixing the PROCESS.You can't dwell on the outcome, you must move on to a solution for avoiding its reoccurrence. 

 I support growth mindset because it is the mental perspective needed to support lifelong learning. In a year or so when I am a practicing pharmacist, no one is going to be testing me on new medications and changes to therapy. I have to have the drive to learn and to continually improve my knowledge. This is the true power of the growth mindset individual, the tools to be a continuous learner. Life is not a series of tests, but it is a process. As academic mentors, we need to make sure that our students understand that college is only the beginning, exams are not forever, but learning is."

For more on the growth mindset, check out the following audio clip on NPR:
 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7406521

The CAE - What We Do

The Center for Academic Excellence is an academic advising unit that serves first-generation, low-income, and multicultural underrepresented student populations. CAE strives to foster an inclusive teaching and learning environment that helps students reach their academic potential, attain their undergraduate degrees, and realize their human promise as they become citizens of a global community.
CAE Students are supported in the transition to college life through engagement opportunities, community building, advising and peer and academic mentoring.
The Academic Mentoring program works to empower CAE students to reach their academic potential in historically challenging courses and equipping your students with skills to navigate college and beyond. As an academic mentor, you are working to close the achievement gap that exists between majority and first generation and targeted minority students at our university.
Below you can see retention and graduation rates for the general student population compared with rates for both first generation and targeted minority students. These figures illustrate the reality of the ‘achievement gap’ at University of Wisconsin and highlight the pivotal role of the academic mentor and the potential impact you can have.

For more insight on a similar topic, check out this TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/freeman_hrabowski_4_pillars_of_college_success_in_science.html 

Down Time

         Keeping students engaged is one of the main challenges you face as academic mentors. For one-on-one academic mentors, it can be hard to monitor student engagement while explaining complicated concepts to your students. For Paired or group academic mentoring, keeping two students engaged who work at different paces can be a large challenge. The following excerpt from the book A training Guide for College Tutors and Peer Educators addresses this issue.

    “Down time is a chunk of time in a session during which a student neither working nor thinking and, therefore, can be totally passive. Because students complete work at differing paces, downtime is most prevalent in group sessions. In one-on-one tutorial sessions, down time most often occurs when the tutor talks more than necessary, which causes the student to tune out and lose attention. Needless to say, students should experience as little down time as possible in your sessions.

To reduce down time, give students explicit time limits for an activity, which helps students judge how to pace their work. Also, you need not wait for all students to complete an activity before moving on to another whole-group activity. When the first group completes an activity, begin to review content and check answers as a whole group. Then, call on members of the first group to answer the questions or help solve the problems that others have not begun. Or divide up the questions so that groups are tackling fewer questions or problems.

Eliminating down time requires advanced planning. Be prepared to direct the students who finish first to the next step or another activity. As examples, students who finish early can:

• Help other students who are still working.
• Complete an additional activity or set of problems.
• Do a backup activity, such as an extra worksheet, lab sheet, or end of chapter questions.
• Add to an ongoing bank of potential test questions, which can be used for the pre-exam review session.
• Write answers, steps, or reasons on the board.
• Exchange, critique or check each other’s work.
• Begin homework or work on other requirements for the course.
• Review and highlight class notes, outline a text chapter, make study cards, or apply other recommended study strategies for the course.”

Strategies to try...

Sometimes it can be hard to come up with a creative activity or engaging strategy to use during your session. Here are some ideas to try if you feel like you want to bring something new to your session!

Strategies from a lead academic mentor:

•  I like to create a quiz based off of our prior session. I usually do this the first 1-3 times, to make sure they are internalizing the information weekly, as opposed to learning it all before an exam. I have them self correct using a red pen, to highlight their mistakes/what they need to study more. Once I feel they are ready, I have them design their own quizzes for themselves and have them bring it to our one-on-one session. They complete the quiz within the last 15 minutes of our session, and once again I have them correct.

Some take offs on that idea:

• Instead of having them design their own quizzes at home, you can also have them design some quiz questions as a closing activity and open with the quiz during the next session as a review and to gauge your students progress.
• Similarly, at the end of your session, as closing maybe, have your students write down a practice problem or question based on the material they learned during that day. Do this at the end of multiple sessions, and use these questions as a review before your next exam! Or bring them up at the next session to recap what happened at the previous session.

• An activity I've found to be helpful to students I refer to as "Math Fatal Errors." I put problems and their solutions up on the board and the students:
  
  1) state whether the solution is correct/incorrect
  2) if correct, explain why and show how it was completed
  3) if incorrect, use a red marker to address the errors made
  4) then, solve and explain what was done wrong to begin with.
  
  I find this activity to be helpful because students have to explain in words WHY a question is correct/incorrect. It is also nice because you can address common mistakes made in their algebraic reasoning and address them head on. It is also a nice chance for the students to correct work, which will be helpful on exams and homework when they will need to be able to correct their own work.

Hopefully one of these ideas will be useful in your session! If you have any new ideas to add, let us know!

Accessing Learn@UW

Accessing Learn@UW - How to contact professors

In addition to checking out a textbook, contacting a professor about getting access to their learn@uw site can be an incredibly helpful tool to stay on top of your students material. Having access to learn@uw allows you to follow along with lectures and prepare relevant and helpful sessions for your students. It can make your life easier when preparing for sessions! Professors are usually quite open to the idea of granting learn@uw access to tutors.

Below, we have drafted a sample email that can help you figure out the best way to contact your student's professor. We encourage you to use it if you think getting in touch with the professor is something you are interested in!

Dear Professor     ,

My name is             , and I am a tutor for the Center for Academic Excellence, a program that supports first-generation, low-income and underrepresented students of color on campus. The Center for Academic Excellence provides free tutoring to our students, a program we have termed Academic Mentoring. The Academic Mentoring program aims at creating a safe, supportive environment that encourages active learning.
I am currently tutoring          , and my student is enrolled in your section of the course. I was wondering if it would be possible to obtain access to the learn@uw page for your course. This would allow me to follow along with my student and support them more thoroughly throughout the semester. In the past, professors have granted tutors from the CAE visitor/auditor access. If this would be possible, please let me know and I will pass along any necessary information. Additionally, if you have any other resources that you think would be helpful, I would be very interested in knowing about these.

Thank you for your time,

Ten Basic Rules of Intercultural Effectiveness:

• Give people the benefit of the doubt. Assume goodwill. This rule assumes that most individuals seek psychological comfort and congeniality.
• Minimize confrontations by asking questions such as, "How's that?" and "How so?" Or say, "Please help me understand why you see A or B the way you do." Here the emphasis is on giving the "other" and opportunity to explain his or her point of view.
• Ask for clarification. "Would you give me an example of A or B?" or "I'm not sure I understand what you mean, would you elaborate further?"
• Use "I" instead of "you" to deflect blame. Say "I'm having some difficulty understanding A or B" rather than, "You are not explaining the origins of chopsticks very well."
• Try to look at people as individuals rather than as members of ethnic groups.  Some stereotyping will occur, of course, since we generally do not start each encounter with a clean slate of impressions.
• Seek common ground.  Learn about things that you share in common with others – for example, “My friend Yoshiko and I both love the singer Brittany Spears.
• Be flexible in selecting words and actions.  Learn how to respond positively to conditions, people, and situations as they arise.
• Learn how to distinguish between things that happen to you because you are White, Latino, Chinese, male or female, and things that happen to you in spite of your sex or ethnicity.
• Recognize the fact that people communicate differently – for example, some people smile a lot, others do not.
•  Develop empathy.  Try to infer the feelings and actions of others.

Study Skills - Use your memory effectively!

We have all felt overwhelmed by school at some point. That there was no way we could learn all of the material we needed in such an impossibly short period of time. Maybe it was your Intro Bio class when you learned the entirety of the human body in 6 weeks, or Gen Chem when Organic Chemistry was taught in four weeks. Or maybe when you had a cumulative final in a Math class that just finished going through a 400 page text book. We all know that in large, introductory courses, hundreds of pages of material are crammed into a few weeks, and every student can begin to feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information. Because there is so much to know, many go about studying the wrong way. Below is a little advice on how to use your memory that might help your students study more effectively in their courses.

John is a pretty typical student taking a large introductory course. He really wants to do well, and is spending a lot of time studying. What is wrong with John’s study strategy?

Although there are some good things about John’s study habits, this is a very passive way of studying. It is also boring! John is going to get distracted easily. Studying ACTIVELY is much more effective.

Keys to using your memory effectively:

• ·        Structure
• ·        Repetition
• ·        Different Memory Types
• ·        Studying Actively

Structure:

Take 20 seconds to memorize the words on each list.

Repetition:

Retention improves with repetition. The things that are most difficult to remember need the most repetition.

**Indicate in your notes what you find difficult to remember so you can spend more time on it when you are reviewing for your exam.

Types of Memory:

•      Kinesthetic Memory – memory from movement (ie writing)

•      Auditory memory – listening (ie commercial jingles)

•      Visual memory – images, color, etc (ie remembering pictures on a page)

**We usually have a preference for one type of memory, but for best results try using a variety of strategies!

Study Actively!!

Reading and listening are PASSIVE activities (Passive à low concentration à less retention)

Study Actively with your books closed!

 If we study with our books open we tend to trick ourselves into thinking we know more than we do.

Always read through the text but then CLOSE THE BOOK when talking, writing, etc.

BEST WAYS TO STUDY ACTIVELY:

·        WRITE – be efficient because writing is slower than talking, so use abbreviations and shorthand

·        MAKE MIND MAPS – Visually connect different concepts

·        TALK – Teach an imaginary audience. Recitation is a very powerful study technique – it involves hearing, speaking and thinking and provides immediate feedback as to whether or not you know the material

Notes from Lead Academic Mentor Training

We would like to share some notes from the Lead Academic Mentor Training discussions. We talked about important concepts like Growth Mindset, stereotype threat and test anxiety and brainstormed ways to address these concepts in our mentoring sessions.

        

  How can you apply the Growth Mindset Approach in conversations with students?

• Remove focus from innate ability, shift it to hard work
• Compliment effort, not talent
• Focus on effort, not grades
• Relate personal experiences as examples of struggle
• Emphasize ability to change
• View failure as a learning opportunity
• Note personal progress
• Make learning enjoyable

Questions for First Sessions

These are the open-ended and probing questions our returners came up with during the returner meetings. Please feel free to use these and other questions as you plan for your first sessions!

• What goals do you have for yourself academically this semester?
• What are your long term goals?
• What has been your favorite course here and why?
• Why are you taking this course?
• What do you do to relax and de-stress?
• Why are you interested in your major? Why did you choose it?
• Give an example of a learning experience you benefited from.
• What has been your best learning experience?
• What activities on campus are you involved in?
• What other courses are you taking this semester?
• Describe yourself in X amount of words.
• What are you passionate about?
• What would you do if time and money were unlimited?
• Why do you enjoy Madison?
• What colleges did you consider attending besides UW?
• What are your favorite breakfast items?
• What would your best friend say is your best trait and why?
• Who is someone you admire and why?
• What was your favorite hobby or game as a kid?
• What is your family like?
• What has your biggest accomplishment been so far in college and what makes it special?
• If you were a city, which one would you be and why?
• Are Badger Saturdays meant for football games, farmers’ markets, or something else? Why?
• What movie/tv character can you most relate to and why?
• What do you really like to do outside of school and why does it interest you?
• What is your favorite part of being a UW student?
• How was your summer? What did you do for fun?
• What is your career goal?/What are your post-graduation plans?
• What do you want to take away from this class aside from a letter grade?
• How do you feel about BLANK class?
• What is the most successful thing, in terms of your study habits, that you did last year?