Learning Processes Entry #4 (Second Official Submission)

I've been in test mode today, as I've spent the majority of the day preparing for my final midterm of my undergraduate career!!! Because of this and our need this week to look at how we can take our learning strategies and apply them towards helping students use them, I've chosen to attempt to outline my study habits, both throughout a unit and in preparation for an examination on that unit.

Two different processes occur as I prepare throughout a given period of time to prepare for an exam - those that I partake in as I complete readings and assignments for the class and then those that I partake in as I prepare for the exam itself.

Process One: During the Duration of the Class
Many of these processes include those that I have outlined in previous entires, which I'll summarize and add to here:
1. As I'm reading through assignments for the class, especially those that I find more challenging, I tend to use the following method in order to highlight the most important parts of the reading:

• Read the topic sentence in order to preview the paragraph.
• Read the topic sentence again, along with the rest of the paragraph, and highlight the crux of the material.
• Reread the paragraph sentence by sentence, determine its importance, and highlight it if necessary.
• The highlights then serve as a way to quickly refer back to important parts of the reading, whether during class discussions or while studying.

2. If I find that students are having difficulty in paying attention to their reading or their work, I will encourage them to take frequent, but brief breaks. I can incorporate this into my class lessons but not allowing activities to go on for too long without letting students take a "mental" break from thinking about the class material, whether this is through transitions or some other productive use of class time.

3. Because History papers are structured much differently around sources than other subject area papers are, I will emphasize outlining skills to my students. For the first paper assignment for the class I can walk students through a mock outline in order to exhibit for them one way in which they might approach the assignment.

4. During lectures, I will determine the best way in which my students are able to retain the most material. Although my classroom may not have the technological capability to do so, my preference will be to use PowerPoint to supplement my lectures. If I find that my students are able to best understand the material and take notes on it using outlines of the slides, then I will provide them with a hard copy of it. If I find that my students prefer to have fill in the blank or short answer questions to go along with the lecture then I will provide them with that. Because PowerPoint will offer me a lot of flexibility in giving my lectures, I will be able to provide a lot of flexibility for students in order to assist them with their note taking.

Process Two: Preparing for the Exam
In preparing for the exam, I will emphasize the importance of good study skills and how they need to look back at all of the materials for the class, not just the notes that they have taken from the lectures. They need to look back through all of their readings, especially the areas that they highlighted. Just like they should throughout the rest of the class, they will not be able to review all of the material in one sitting. Not only should they not wait until the last minute to begin preparing for the exam, but they should also give themselves frequent mental breaks so that they can process the information that they are reviewing. They should look back at their paper assignments and analyze their conclusions, and reflect on how those contribute to the themes and objectives of the unit. Finally, they should use their notes as an outline from which they should add the other information to.

If my students follow these two processes just as I do now, then they should have no problem in succeeding in my class.