Academic Skills
How to handle procrastination, and more.
MANAGING TIME
READING
CLASSROOM LEARNING
WRITING
TAKING TESTS
PROCRASTINATION
ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
Academic Advice taken from from Stanford University's Study Tips Resources:
https://undergrad.stanford.edu/tutoring-support/academic-skills-coaching/study-tips-resources
- When you're planning your schedule and want to be realistic about how long things take, think back to prior assignments that can be your guideline.
- Even the best planning can go astray - an assignment takes longer than you expected, or an unforeseen interruption calls your attention. It's important to be able to re-plan, re-group, and re-align without giving up entirely! Push the re-set button. Start again.
- Even the best managed time will include unplanned interruptions or having something take longer than you planned. Be prepared to reassess and re-plan if things go off course.
- Consider doing your planning a week in advance so you have more total hours to work with. It's really helpful to look at an assignment when it's given so you have the maximum amount of time to plan for and work on it. You may be afraid you won’t be able to do it, but it’s better to find that out early and leave time to go to office hours or see a tutor. Even when you have a loose deadline, or a deadline that is very far off, break it down and structure your own interim deadlines.
READING
- Try reading one page of the assignment and timing yourself. Then extrapolate how much time it will take to read the whole assignment. This way, you'll know how much time to carve out for your reading.
- Since we learn in layers, getting a "foundation" layer down first can help the next time you are reading for detail. It's like framing a house with wood, and then attaching the drywall. Without the framing, the drywall crumbles.
- Forming questions before reading focuses your attention and helps you contextualize the new material within your prior knowledge. Think about what you're trying to "find" in the reading in order to guide your brain and create better focus.
- Memorizing information and facts is a basic way to absorb material, but it doesn't equip you with the right tools to use that information. Thinking about what things mean, why they're important, and how they fit together will help you apply what you know to solve problems.
- Try taking notes that capture your ideas rather than notes that summarize the source text. Source text will be there when you need it, but your understanding -- the words you use in your own head to make sense of something -- is much more fleeting and will be helpful if documented in your notes while it's fresh.
- If you review your notes within a day or so of taking them, you will retain 40% more than if you wait a week, and it drops off after that. So if you don't look at Monday's notes until Saturday, your time in lecture on Monday was kind of wasted since you're going to be re-learning most of it.
CLASSROOM LEARNING
- Since we learn in layers, "waking up" the existing layers of information by thinking about them, makes it that much easier for the new information to become integrated into our minds.
- Anticipating and even preparing specific questions before the lecture or discussion creates a strong neural network that will help you learn.
- College does not consist of four years of directed reading for no reason. Lectures (and homework, and discussion, and testing, and writing) provide a unique mode of knowledge transfer that make up your overall educational experience. Lectures also comprise one of those essential "learning layers."
- We know that you will get more out of class and facilitate your learning by not browsing the web while in class.
- Looking at your notes within a day or so of taking them will help you retain about 40% more than if you wait a week. There's also some new evidence that hand-written notes are more learning-friendly than laptop typed notes, so consider old fashioned pen and paper for note-taking.
- There is research showing that students who attend office hours, connect with faculty, connect with TAs, and feel "known" by their teachers, do better in class than those who remain anonymous and/or don't seek out contact during office hours. Go to office hours! It may seem scary, but it's worth it!
WRITING
- One of the hardest parts of the writing process is getting started, facing the blank page or blank screen. By looking at notes you've taken (and hopefully written in your own words) you are turning to actual text -- really your paper in its roughest form. Use that text as a starting point to develop ideas you've already documented.
- Although it can feel frustrating to toss out sentences you've worked hard to craft, realize that those sentences have done their job: they helped you get to a more concise, better articulated statement. If you really hate tossing out text, save your deletions in a different document for possible later use in another context.
- Writing is an iterative process. ALWAYS write early enough to be able to re-write before the deadline. Otherwise, you're simply turning in a first draft and calling it a final draft. It's not your best work because it hasn't had a chance to be refined.
- There's nothing like looking at the comments on your paper pointing out your typographical errors to make you regret not proofreading. Spell-check isn't enough. If you want your teachers to take you seriously, take the time to take yourself seriously. PROOF YOUR WORK.
- Perfectionism, that voice in our head that says "not good enough" while we're working through ideas in writing, is like a cork in a bottle. Uncork yourself! Be willing to write something that isn't complete with the intent to craft it later. Writing starts out messy and unclear.
- There are "hidden" tasks like researching, brainstorming, re-writing, quotation-hunting, bibliography formatting, more research, and so on, that make writing a much longer process than you probably anticipate.
- Take some time to reflect on past experience and see if you can be more realistic about the different steps you'll take to write your next paper. Each of these steps and tasks will take time. If you successfully plan ahead for all the time you'll need, you will have enough time to re-write, and will be far happier with what you turn in.
TAKING TESTS
- Too much adrenaline in your system may cause you to mis-read questions and make mistakes. Take deep breaths. This will help slow down your pulse, dissipate some of the excess adrenaline, and send more oxygen to your brain where it's needed.
- If you tend to get overwhelmed by mountains of words and answer choices, re-write or sketch the question to simplify it.
- About a half hour before the exam, do a problem that gets you thinking the way you'll need to be thinking on the exam. Don't take a super hard problem that sends your anxiety through the roof. Just something that will wake up the parts of your brain you'll need for the test.
- Whereas many people see intelligence as fixed, it turns out that intelligence can grow with effort and time on task. Consider learning more about your ideas about intelligence since research has shown that students who see intelligence as malleable do much better in school than those who see it as fixed.
PROCRASTINATION
- If you ever find yourself thinking these things, you may be procrastinating: "I work best under pressure, so I'm waiting until I get that adrenaline surge at 3am the night before it’s due." "I don't know how to do start this worksheet, so I'm waiting until I know how before I do it." "Relax. The world won’t end if this doesn't get done." "I waited until the last minute last time and it worked out okay, so why not this time?" "I spend the first 4 hours staring at a blank screen. I might as well do something else for 4 hours and then just start writing after that." "If I work on this, I'll miss out on…" "The thing that caused me to delay was a fluke." "I’m burned out."
- Facebook. YouTube. Texting. Tidying your tidy room. You know… take a real minute to think about what you gravitate towards when you're avoiding doing something else.
- Breaking down large, amorphous, or due-a-long-time-from-now assignments will make them more do-able. No one climbs Everest in a day.
- Procrastinating may temporarily relieve anxiety about work, but it produces more stress and the anxiety usually comes back even stronger. Reducing stress is vital to your success as a student. Increases in cortisol (the hormone released when we are stressed) will interfere with neurotransmitter production making learning and thinking more challenging.
ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS
- It's important to find some place that works for you that's quiet enough to focus on your work. Earplugs can help. Your room may not be the ideal space since that's where you should be sleeping, relaxing, and being social.
- Not sleeping enough may seem like a good short term solution to a last-minute push to get work done, but chronic sleep deprivation (technically 8 hours or less over a 24 hour period) is bad for your health and especially bad for learning. Being sleep deprived causes your body to release hormones that, down the metabolic line, interfere with the neurotransmitter production needed to learn new material. There's a point of diminishing returns, so if you're not sleeping enough at night, take a nap!
- Large classes, tons of people, more noise than you're used to -- these are all challenges. It's normal to feel overwhelmed, and it's especially helpful to talk to others about your experiences to get support.
- If you're struggling with that adjustment, talk to someone about it. You're not alone, and good advice is out there.
- It's intuitive, but needs to be said: you must keep your body as physically healthy as possible in order to deal with the stress of school. Exercise, hydration, sleep, and quality time with friends are key ingredients.
Academic Advice taken from from Stanford University's Study Tips Resources:
https://undergrad.stanford.edu/tutoring-support/academic-skills-coaching/study-tips-resources