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Study Tips
Older students sometimes wonder how they'll be able to remember
all this new course material. There are many tips for enhancing
memory, but I think the best advice is: don't memorize. Sure,
there are names, places and dates you'll have to remember. But
the key to learning the bulk of your coursework is taking the
extra time to reflect on what you're learning. Instead of simply
listening, reading and reviewing your notes just before an exam,
make time along the way to try to relate new concepts to your own
experience, on the job or at home, and to your other courses. The
way you study can help. You might try keeping an ongoing "reading
journal" to record random thoughts on the material and to note
questions it raises. When you go back periodically to review your
notes, you'll find new connections to current material and,
possibly, new ways of looking at your subject.
Here are a few more ideas to help you prepare term papers and use
the web in your studies.
Term papers
Start documenting as soon as you start reading your source
materials. This will save you much time and stress when you're
ready to write your paper. In addition to pertinent ideas and
quotes that you plan to incorporate, you may want to briefly
summarize the content, note the author's perspective, and how the
work fits into your thesis. Most important, make sure to capture
all the reference information you'll need for your bibliography.
Process your notes in multiple ways – index cards written by
hand, references compiled in a notebook, notes transferred to a
computer. At each stage, you can regroup your notes by author,
theme, section of your paper, or whatever scheme is most useful
to you at that moment.
Discuss the material. It helps to talk about the subjects
you're studying. Try to get a study group together, even if it's
just one classmate. You'll also benefit from exploring concepts
from your studies with family and friends.
When you're ready to put your term paper together, put away all
your notes and just start writing. Let it flow. You'll be
surprised how you put it all together, and by how much you know.
Don't worry about organizing the material now, you can make
changes later.
For a detailed guide to writing a term paper, see The Gale Group.
Using the web
When you start seriously searching the web for reference
materials, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the variety of
information available, but it's hard to determine what's valid
and what's not. The Internet Detective is an online tutorial on
evaluating the quality of Internet resources. It does take some
time to go through this tutorial, but it's free, and you can work
at your own pace.
The following tips were contributed by Richard Rendine, who
recently completed a Masters of Science program in Management
Information Systems at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Thanks,
Richard.
Use your textbook's web site. Most publishers of college
textbooks have an official web site for the book, which provides
notes in Power Point format and links to topics related to the
book. These Power Point notes turned out to be one of the best
tools I used for studying. Many sites also have multiple choice
quizzes for each chapter, which help for studying.
Search the web for your course text's title and author. Go to
any search engine and put in the author's name or title of the
text. I found this strategy to yield my greatest sources of
information. You will find other classes, professors and students
who are using the text, and sometimes, the author's own personal
web site. On many of these sites, I found chapter summaries,
discussions, quizzes, notes, and more. In one case, I found a
professor at a Florida University who had not only the student
version of notes online from the publisher available for
download, he had also put up the teacher's edition (which was
protected at the publisher's site).
5/03
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