Study Strategies

Defining Learning Expectations

Proficient learners define expectations by clarifying what they intend to learn. They create multistep plans for bringing thought into the learning act. One way of defining learning expectations is previewing, when proficient learners look over what they are to learn before examining it closely. They preview printed materials by surveying many sources of information: titles, headings, italic and boldface print, and other typographical aids; illustrations, maps, graphs, and other pictorial aids; introductions, first sentences of paragraphs, summaries, and conclusions; guiding questions, stated objectives, end-of-chapter exercises, and other adjunct aids. Previewing helps learners define learning expectations by establishing a general idea of what a passage has to offer.

Another aspect of defining learning expectations involves setting a purpose. Learners set purposes when they discern what they should acquire from a passage, lecture, video, CD, DVD, or other teaching device. Learners incorporate what they gathered from a preview with their understanding of the learning task to decide what deserves special attention. They attend to their instructors’ stated and unstated cues about what they should learn. The age-old tradition of “psyching out” vague instructors to anticipate what should be in a paper or might be on a test exemplifies part of this strategy. When learners set a purpose, they decide what they want to or need to learn and go after it.

Questioning

Students who read and then answer questions tend to learn more than students who only read (Peverly & Wood, 2001). Answering prepared questions often seems like busywork to students, but it can be a potent study strategy.

Self-questioning taps learners’ creativity. To learn how to self-question, students might be encouraged to pattern their questions after the teacher’s, using certain stems like the following:

• What have I learned about _______?
• What should I remember about _______?
• What does _______ mean?
• What are the components of _______?
• How are _______ and _______ alike? How are _______ and _______ different?
• What are the strengths of _______? What are the limitations of _______?
• What caused _______ to happen?
• How does _______ affect _______?
• How does _______ relate to what I already know? How does _______ relate to _______ in the passage?
• What does _______ look (and sound) like?
• What is the significance of _______?

More open-ended self-questions include the following:

• What might be other examples of _______?
• What conclusion can I draw about _______?
• Why is it important that _______?
• What would happen if _______?
• What do I have to say about _______?

Organizing Information Graphically

Graphic representations arrange key terms in order to depict their relationships. Outlines, time lines, Venn diagrams, and webs are different formats for graphically organizing concepts. They all show how selected concepts are organized. A graphic representation of the desert, for example, could consist of terms arranged about such topics as climate, location, plant life, and animal life; it would not be an illustrated scene of coyotes and cactuses.

Writing

Although such strategies as defining learning expectations and questioning might involve writing, study strategies grouped under this heading typically refer to other techniques. Writing strategies that promote learning progress from simply recording facts to assimilating and reflecting on bodies of knowledge. These strategies activate thinking when learners compose the message; they also provide a record for review or revision.

Study cards are one kind of writing strategy. Each study card usually contains a question or vocabulary term on one side with a corresponding answer or definition on the other. These cards are especially useful for factual learning. Many students would not have been successful in fact-filled courses without resorting to study cards.

Note taking is another writing strategy that promotes learning. Note taking assumes many forms. Learners sometimes copy definitions and key ideas verbatim from a passage, comment in the margins of texts, paraphrase information, or add personal examples. They benefit from rewriting their notes, clarifying and consolidating information from class presentations and readings.

Summarizing uses writing to involve learners in selecting and condensing important information. When summarizing, students may abstract important contents.

Learning logs/journals are a variation of class notebooks that require summarization. Students summarize when they record information from class presentations, readings, or outside experiences. Later, students sometimes develop their summaries into more lengthy compositions. In addition, they sometimes use learning logs or journals to pose questions or state confusions about what they are learning. Many mathematics teachers have students write—rather than orally ask—questions about their homework in order to clarify the questions. This practice often leads the students to reach independent solutions.

Essays that call for integration of subject matter or persuasive writing from a particular point of view are forms of writing that powerfully promote content learning, even though they are also time consuming for teachers to read. Most of us still remember papers we wrote in high school and college classes even though we have forgotten much of the rest we learned in those courses.

Creating Mnemonic Devices

Mnemonic devices—memory aids named after the Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne—include several disparate techniques (Glynn, Koballa, & Coleman, 2003). Analogies stress the similarities between phenomena. For instance, the cell structure of a plant might be compared with the factory structure of an industry. Effective speakers, writers, and teachers frequently use analogies to help students use what they already know to help them understand and remember new knowledge.

Images become mnemonic devices when they are used to represent abstract concepts. For example, a visual image of mist coming from a block of dry ice might be used to represent the physical process of sublimation, the change of a solid directly into a gas. Most of us associate personal or public events of the past with certain images that make those events come alive for us even now.

Mnemonic devices also take such forms as abbreviations (FBI, NAACP, NCAA), acronyms (HOMES for the first letters of the Great Lakes), acrostics (“My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas” for the first letters of the planets in order from the Sun), and rhymes (“In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue”). They also can be phrases that help with meaning (“Hang on tight” for remembering that stalactites are on cave ceilings rather than floors) as well as pronunciation (“It’s hot again” indicates the accent to Betatakin, a cliff dwelling in Arizona’s Navajo National Monument).

Creating Special Word Associations

A set of mnemonic devices that is large enough and important enough to warrant separate treatment involves individual words. Because understanding and remembering subject matter vocabulary consumes a great deal of students’ attention.

Meaningful word parts, or morphemes, are found in derived words with their prefixes, roots, and suffixes. Contractions and compound words also contain these parts. Students often benefit from attending to the meaningful parts of such words as underground, triangular, and immortalize. Identifying the meaningful parts of words provides control of them and a tool for identifying new words.

Idiosyncratic associations are similar to meaningful word parts, although the word parts are not from our linguistic heritage. Knowing that the principal should be your friend and that latitude runs the same way as the equator represent idiosyncratic associations.

The mnemonic keyword method requires first an acoustic link, then a visual one. For instance, to remember that a credenza is a piece of furniture like a buffet or sideboard, the students might recode the word to an acoustic link, such as dents. A visual image of someone bumping into and denting the furniture could then be constructed.

Mental Learning

This somewhat amorphous category of study strategies produces no written or visual products. It stresses learning activities to be done either with others as part of a study/discussion group or inside one’s own head.

Retelling is one way to initiate mental learning. After reading, students individually or in groups recount what has been learned. They focus on specific information, sometimes repeatedly verbalizing or paraphrasing it and sometimes reading it aloud. When uncertainties occur, proficient learners return to the source to clarify it or make a note to ask the instructor for clarification.

Discussing is an open-ended arrangement for students to come together and refine their learning. They might retell particular portions of subject matter, teach it to one another, or ask and answer questions about it.

Test-taking Strategies

As standards-based accountability systems increasingly control education, students take more and more tests. And test performance substantially influences the futures of students and their schools. Consequently, preparing students for tests is a study strategy that now is an educational priority.

Test preparation is not the same as test practice (Kraemer, 2005; Santman, 2002). As one student who felt authentically ready for testing put it, “You prepare us for the test without teaching to the test.” Teachers who prepare students for tests authentically connect test demands with coursework, integrating what is tested into the ongoing curriculum rather than only allocating separate time to isolated activities. These teachers do not focus on raising schools’ test scores; they focus on improving youths’ reading proficiencies. They first teach students how to improve their reading, then they teach how to succeed with tests.

When the focus is on succeeding with tests, teachers approach the task like any other genre. They explain the special forms and functions of tests, calling attention to how tests are similar to and different from other types of reading. They engage students in the genre, talking through the process of understanding it. They have students read test items carefully, deliberate with others over appropriate answers, and generate guidelines for succeeding with this genre.