As an academic mentor, part of your role is to give study
tips to your students and help them develop good study skills. It’s important
to not only encourage positive study habits but also warn students against some common bad
habits that masquerade as ‘effective studying.’ We’ve compiled a list of common
studying fallacies that should be avoided!
- Cramming
- Continuous studying without breaks
- Rereading notes and textbook
- Studying at the library but not getting much done because there’s too many distractions – friends, facebook, etc…
- Group studying without independent learning – relying on other members of the group for answers
- Watching tv while studying
- Copying entire textbook into notes
- Taking a practice exam with your notes open
- ‘Blindly’ taking notes
- ANYTHING PASSIVE
We all do some of these once in a while, but make sure your
student knows that these aren’t effective ways to learn material. Are there any
more studying fallacies you can think of? How do you encourage good study
habits in your students?
For additional study tip suggestions, check out this link:
It is a short questionnaire that gets at learning styles in a different way and provides a list of potential new strategies to try to augment what you are already doing.
I shared these studying fallacies with my students before their most recent exam, and they seemed to find them very helpful! What I think is most important from this list is to remember that even though copying notes or re-writing lecture slides can seem usefull in studying, writing is only helpful when you are conciously thinking about what is being written. I am a huge advocate of writing over typing notes, but this reminded me that the 'mindfullness' component of note taking is also very important.
ReplyDeleteI think a common fallacy is highlighting text from the book as means of studying. This can create a mess on the page and does not really help one understand the information presented. An alternative that is more helpful is to write summaries of each page or section instead. This makes someone have to process the information and put it in their own words. It also presents a good guide for going back and seeing what needs to be studied.
ReplyDeleteMy students just finished with their second exam, as part of their exam debrief I am going to have the students go home and take the Vark link provided above to compare their study strategies thus far with what has been recommended per their preferred learning style. I look forward to hearing their results!
ReplyDeleteAs Max and Anna highlighted, I think it is easy to think you are doing effectively studying if you are doing anything while you are reading (highlighting, copying word for word, etc.). What I have found works well for me is rather than just recopying my notes I spend time figuring out how I could organize them better or how things we learned about one day relate to things we have learned previously and make notes of these connections explicitly.
ReplyDeleteAlong with this focus on organizing, rather than simply copying, I have found that when students are given the opportunity to have a notecard or equation sheet with them on the exam they fall into the trap of simply copying all of their notes (or as many as they can fit) onto their sheet. What works for me, and what I have suggested to students, is to make a rough draft notecard or cheat sheet as they are studying on a piece of paper larger than the one they are allotted so they can space out their notes and have room to group notes that are on similar concepts together as they review their lectures. Then I suggest they use this rough draft cheat sheet for a few practice exams and highlight the items they are actually using so they can see what topics might be most important. After this I then suggest thoughtfully transferring the most important info onto their actual cheat sheet in a logical way using highlighting or different colored ink to make different topics obvious. This does take a little more time but I have found that it results in a much more useful cheat sheet during the exam. This is probably most useful for math based exams (physics, stats, chem) but I think it can still apply to other subject areas as well.