Learning to learn better You are probably not a good learner Oh please don t get insulted by that phrase It is what a university is a place where you become a much more powerful learner Some students do not realize that They think it is all about atoms molecules integrals bugs forces fertilizers and energies Actually university is more about you and your ability to learn about you and your brain not molecules or integrals This document is intended to give you some pointers about how to increase your learning power Some people think that success depends simply on how much they study In fact it actually depends more on how and when they study One hour of good studying can be as valuable as ten hours of banging your head against the wall So it pays to ask yourself what you can do to be more effective in your learning It may well make the difference between getting a degree and becoming a drop out Besides it may free up time to do something fun too and there is nothing wrong with a bit of fun now and then In fact you need that too to be successful From high school to university adulthood Many people find the transition from high school to university a pretty difficult experience Many things change not in the least because they are now expected to behave as adults This means a lot of things being away from mom and dad making new friends dealing with boyfriends girlfriends living in a dorm but also having far more responsibility for your own learning making choices about what classes to take dealing with a large university system dealing with success and failure Being an adult it is really up to you to find what works best for you and that can be a demanding job This document cannot do it for you but hopefully it will give you some pointers and some things to consider and help you in the process Please keep in mind that this story is written for the non existent average freshman in CH101 It is a compilation of the learning topics I do in my class I am sure that you are not average perhaps not in CH101 or not even a freshman Thus only certain things may apply in your case Other things may not but then they might apply for other students The resources at your disposal University learning is much more about you actively using resources that are put at your disposal than about you passively being taught In fact with 250 students on their hands do not expect to be taught by your instructors at all Rather expect to learn from your instructors That sounds like a subtle play of words but it really is not In one case you sit there passively to be spoon fed in the other you actively go hunt your own food And that can make all the difference One could say that in a sense any university is as good as you make it to be The faculty cannot make you learn any more than they can make a horse drink they can only lead it to the water Vice versa there is little a professor can do to stop you from learning if you are determined to do so Therefore to a considerable extent we faculty depend upon you to make this a good university Go pack Of course we can be very useful to you in your learning but nothing is more demotivating for us that you just sitting there So please be a wolf not a log There is a whole menu of things that you can try and weave into your study practices and you need to do some experimenting to see what works best for you And yes it is part of your job as a student to try them out and optimize your study skills How to use the textbook Get confused The book has many functions but the first and perhaps most important one is this Read your book BEFORE class The purpose of this is to get confused That sounds silly but it is not the truth is that we all get confused by what we are supposed to learn at some point in time The proper timing of your confusion is crucial If you postpone the point of confusion till the evening before the test your test results will clarify your confusion in rather painful ways F s are instructive but not pleasantly so It is much better to get confused before class than after because it gives your instructors the chance to un confuse you in lecture If not you should make them This already means you have used both the book to confuse and the instructor to clarify and thus made a good beginning Studying is not reading Of course just reading the book before class is not nearly enough You need to study it afterwards Studying is more than just reading It means that you work on it sufficiently that you can put it away and teach somebody else what is in it If no human victim is available take a wall and teach it chemistry Obviously just reading the book once more is not going to allow you to do that so you will have to go back to your book quite a few times if your wall does not understand you It is actually the repetition that will allow you to be able to call the contents your mental property at some point Human memory functions at various levels Look at something once and you still know it a minute later but not two Look at it again two minutes later and you may remember an hour later Look at it a third time an hour later and you know it the next day and so on So studying requires a sufficient number of repeats Therefore reading the book before class is a good start of this repetition because then the lecture will already count as repeat 2 Diagrams A good way to convey scientific meaning is to use a diagram Unfortunately people often treat them the way they do with commercials on TV ignore them as useless visuals Study diagrams until you understand what they are trying to say Don t skip them Teach them to your favorite wall Later reactivation Another function of the book is to be able to revisit the things you do forget even after the course is over That makes selling the textbook a very expensive proposition It s like selling part of your memory Most of what you learn in a class will hide itself in this big underground cellar of your subconscious mind No it is not gone You just need to learn how to reactivate it later in life Looking at your old book is a fine way to do that How to use the lectures If a lecture does not exhaust you there is something wrong Ideally the lecture should be the most exhausting part of the whole process because you are being bombarded with one …