Twelve Strategies for Learning
- Decide to remember: Focus your attention and generate interest.
- Build on what you know: Call up facts, opinions, associations,
examples; assign personal value to the subject.
- Aim for understanding: Insist on understanding rather than rote memorization and monitor your comprehension.
- Write to learn: Write summaries and notes in your own words.
- Reduce and simplify: Rewrite complicated ideas in a few words
you can understand. Also, chunk and label.
- Visualize: Create mental images, draw, diagram.
- Transfer material to your long-term memory: Process the material
you want to remember; write notes and lists, reorganize, label, reduce,
summarize, associate, recite.
- Organize the material: Rearrange, use a sequence or an organizational
pattern, list and number.
- Recite from memory: Cover the material, look away, repeat
it aloud or write it until you know and understand it.
- Use mnemonics: Use rhymes and acronyms.
- Space your learning; sleep on it: Give yourself time to learn
difficult new material.
- Review periodically: Read your notes and summaries every week
or two and understand the sequence of ideas being developed.
Four Strategies for Making Connections
- Make connections in each class: Integrate reading and lecture
notes, relate them to assignments, and study professors’ feedback
to create workable wholes.
- Make connections among your classes: Gain greater insight
and understanding into the subjects that you study by analyzing their
treatment in more than one class.
- Make connections between skills classes and other classes:
Practice using new skills to improve your performance in every class.
- Make connections between your prior knowledge and new material:
Use information you learned in one class to help you learn and understand
related information in another class.
Twelve Strategies for Critical and Creative Thinking
- Identify the subject: Clarify the subject so you have a focus
and a goal for thinking.
- Call up what you know: Recall not only what you know but
what you presently think.
- Ask questions to develop background and understanding: Describe
it, define it, examine its present status, and compare it with something
familiar.
- Elaborate on it to understand it better: Add explanations
and examples.
- React and respond to what you read and hear: Use texts and
lectures to help you think.
- Ask the questions that explain how: Consider its history,
what it is a part of, what are its parts, what would happen if . . .
, and how it works or can best be used.
- Ask the questions that explain why: Ask questions that help
determine cause or motive, like what happened, where, who did it, by
what means, and for what purpose.
- Analyze controversial issues: Ask what happened, what is
it like, what caused it, is it good or bad, and what should we do about
it.
- Take a position on an issue and defend it with reasons and evidence:
Complete the statement “I think . . . because . . . ,” plan
refutation by agreeing and disagreeing, elaborate with evidence, evaluate
your conclusion, and consider the implications.
- Stay open to new developments: Be prepared either to remain
neutral, to agree or disagree, or to change your mind in light of new
reasons or new evidence.
- Think outside the box: Think in new ways. Think backward
from the conclusion. Or, find new applications, ask what is included,
what is left out. Try to look at the subject in a whole new way.
- Understand how thinking changes from one academic subject to another:
Notice the big questions your professors and textbooks seem to ask repeatedly.
A Summary of the Writing Process for a College Paper
Prewriting: Inventing Ideas and Shaping the Paper
- Decide what to write about; select a topic.
- Focus your topic; narrow and define it.
- Ask some questions to help you establish what you already know and
what you need to learn.
- Invent additional ideas by brainstorming, listing, reading and reflecting,
writing, discussing, listening, observing, and interviewing.
- Pay attention and use the ideas and connections made by your subconscious
mind.
- Shape and plan your paper with lists and outlines.
Writing: Drafting the Paper; Incorporating Sources
- Write the first draft. Use the method best for you: Write fast and
keep on writing; or write, reread, and rewrite as you go along.
- Incorporate your source material into your first draft.
- Use the information you learned about main ideas, subideas, supporting details, transitions, and organizational patterns.
- Get someone to read your paper and give ideas for revision.
Rewriting: Revising, Proofreading, Preparing the Final Copy
- Revise your paper by improving th eorganization, clarifying the ideas,
adding supporting detail and transitions, sharpening the introduction
and conclusion, and improving the sentences.
- Proofread for surface errors.
- Read your paper out loud and do a final check for errors.
- Prepare the final copy.
