*STUDENT STUDY SKILLS: Help students to study smarter!

Student Study Skills Teaching Students How to Learn

I. Note-Taking Skills

II. ’30 Minutes a Day Bring Good Grades Your Way!’

III. Time Management: Fitting your studies in and still have a social life!

IV. Course Selection

V. Fun Motivational Activities for students

Preview: Note-Taking Skills:

A. Making notes a learning tool:

Let’s be honest…most students can take notes. They record the written and oral notes given to them during class. They close their notes never to look at that day’s information until one or two days before the exam. At that time, they will proceed to ‘cram’ as much information into their brains. Sound familiar?

The end result from this familiar process is that most students can squeak a passing or maybe even a high grade out of the ritual. Three to seven days after taking the exam, the material is no longer there. The fact is memorizing for short-term use only gives students short-term results. This is not learning and it haunts students. When they need to have this material for use on a semester exam or application of what they should have learned, their brains send up ‘file not found’ and they cannot ‘remember’ the material.

The media knows this very well. Have you ever just seen a commercial one time? Or heard a top ten song only once? No! They play the commercial and song until you can sing every word of it! Not just in the present time do you know it, but you could hear it years later and STILL remember it! How does this happen? Simply….repetition, repetition, repetition! The media knows how to MAKE you learn something by making you see it over and over and over and placing it into your long-term memory.

This is the key to teaching students how to study without the pain of studying! These tricks work and they are so easy students will not believe you!

First let’s start with note taking. The practice of note taking has been perfected by Cornell University. They created the double-column note-taking skill.

I use this format of their note taking system and have changed it a little to fit my subject. Feel free to do the same to the example on pages 4 & 5. This example is the format that I give my students to teach them how to take notes. They receive a grade for taking notes in this format. This helps them to be rewarded for trying something new!

Following the example, an explanation will be given on how to present this to students. OK…the explanation is really a sales pitch to motivate them to try this. Again, it is so easy students will wonder if their being told the truth!