Tag: study skills
Studying When You Think Differently
I was a guest on a 90-minute StudentHub Live broadcast on 21st March 2024, about Studying When You Think Differently. I was there as both an associate lecturer supporting neurodiverse students, and also as a neurodivergent person myself who is currently a PhD student and has been an undergrad student. This is the recording of the event.
We’re on the same team
Remember that you and your tutor are both on the same team. So you need never feel afraid about admitting that you’re finding something a challenge, or you’re falling behind, or anything like that. It’s understandable and admirable to think “I’ll try to sort this problem out on my own”. But if you can’t sort it out on your own quite quickly, it’s better to contact me and ask for help. I don’t mind. It’s literally my job, and I love my job. Most students tend to leave it much longer to ask for help than they should. They let problems build up, and with it their own stress, anxiety, and unhappiness. I’d prefer them to contact me sooner. I usually have the answers to the questions they are struggling with. I know about solutions and strategies they would never think of. I can help.
Think about me as a leader on a hike. All my students have joined this hike because they’re excited about being part of it, getting to the end, and seeing all the interesting things along the way. And I’m excited about taking them on the hike, making sure they all get to the end, see the interesting things, and have a good experience. If you get out of breath, or twist your ankle, or your bootlace snaps, I need to know so I can help you out. The last thing I want is to leave you behind and lose you. I’m not about judging people or punishing them or anything like that. That’s not what we’re here for. So there’s no need to hide anything from me that is affecting your ability to keep up with the hike/keep up with the module.
The best order for studying your Open University module
How to identify themes in a module/chapter/study block, using a form of thematic analysis
This is a useful study activity that gives you an overview of a block of study material such as a chapter or a study week. It’s a critical, analytical approach to identifying overarching, cross-cutting themes. It will help your deeper understanding of the material you are studying. It can help your reading by focusing your intention on the important recurring ideas and avoid getting lost in the nitty-gritty details. It can help your note-taking, for example you can use the themes as the basis for a mind map or a table. It can help your essay writing by identifying the big picture, and practising the skill of spotting how disparate parts of the module can all relate to the same question. I’ll use Block 2 of the Open University module E232: Exploring Childhood and Youth as an example, but you can use this process on other texts.
First, I cut-and-pasted the Learning Outcomes from the first page of each study week into a document.
Next, I looked for words, phrases, or ideas (i.e. themes) that occurred in more than one study week. The first one I noticed was “space and/or place”. I highlighted every sentence that included one of those words. I chose green for this theme.
Then I looked for more recurring words, phrases, or ideas i.e. themes. I gave each theme its own colour. Some sentences contained more than one theme. Because I know that all of these sentences have been identified as important by members of the course team, I made sure every sentence was coded with at least one theme.
Finally, I made a list of each theme and associated ideas, drawn only from the text of the learning outcomes
This isn’t the only possible set of themes that can be identified from this list of learning outcomes. Different people doing the same analysis will probably identify different themes. That’s OK. There may be other important themes in the learning material that aren’t mentioned in the learning outcomes. The point of this process is to identify some themes, not to identify the themes. This is because there isn’t one true and correct answer to “what are the themes in this study block”?
Tease Apart a Quotation Free Download
There’s really only two occasions when it’s OK to include a quotation in an essay. The first is if you are quoting someone famous saying something in a famous way. You wouldn’t paraphrase Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream…” speech, or a line of Amanda Gorman’s poetry; you’d quote it directly. The other occasion is when you are quoting an extract of qualitative data; something said by a participant or one of the people the research is about. If you are describing research about people with disabilities, people who have experienced trauma, members of the Roma community, etc, you shouldn’t put words in their mouth but let them speak in their own words.
For everything else, you should paraphrase. Explain the ideas of textbook authors, journal article authors etc. in your words. Paraphrasing, rather than quoting, demonstrates that you understand what they meant. You should also explain why you chose these ideas to answer the question, rather than simply quoting and leaving the reader to guess why you chose that quotation.
I’ve attached a downloadable worksheet which guides you through the process of teasing apart a quotation to help you paraphrase it rather than quote it. I’ve adapted the worksheet with permission from an activity by Natalie Lancer of unicoach.org I highly recommend Natalie’s workshops for academic writing.
If this article didn’t answer your question, click here
Related articles
Dealing with unfamiliar words
Choose Your Own (Study) Adventure
I like playing video games, so video game metaphors make sense to me. In video games you can often choose your difficulty setting. You can choose Easy Mode in which all of the monsters and puzzles are easy to beat, you start out with more health, and your ammo lasts longer. But in Easy Mode the rewards are small. In Normal Mode the monsters and puzzles are normal difficulty and the rewards are a bit higher than Easy Mode. In Hard Mode the monsters are really hard to kill and the puzzles are hard to solve. You don’t have much health or armour in Hard Mode so you die a lot. But the rewards for this mode are the best.
What on earth are you going on about, Melanie? What do videogames have to do with studying for a degree?
You can choose your difficulty setting in your studies as well. In Hard Mode studying you try to read every single page of the textbook and make detailed, colour-coded notes. You do every single online activity. You try to write every assignment to the best of your possible ability. It takes a long time to study on Hard Mode. But if you have that time available, you can earn the best rewards – you’ll get the best possible grades at the end of the module.
In Normal Mode studying you read as much as you can but you don’t always get around to reading every single thing. Sometimes you skim-read sections and don’t make notes except perhaps highlighting or underlining some sentences on a page. You skip the online activities when you don’t have the time. And you have a good try at the assignments but sometimes you rush them a bit. You’ll comfortably pass the module on Normal Mode (probably – it depends on you and on the module), but you won’t get the best possible grade.
Studying on Easy Mode you do the minimum you can get away with whilst still doing enough to pass the course. You only read the bits of the module that are essential to write the assignments. You don’t read them in detail with the goal of understanding; you just skim them, looking for things to put in your assignments. And you work on the assignments until you’re pretty sure you’ve done enough to pass and then you submit them. The maximum reward you hope for on Easy Mode is to barely pass.
All of this is to say – you don’t have to study on Hard Mode. Your family, your job, and your own physical and mental health are all more important than your studies. I’m writing this in the midst of the COVID pandemic, which has made everything so much harder that we all have to make compromises and get our priorities very clear. So it’s OK sometimes to decide to shift your effort down to Normal Mode or even Easy Mode. You can always step up the difficulty again later if things get better (they WILL get better by the way. I don’t know when, but they will).
Extensions are a Double-Edged Sword
I don’t think I’ve ever said no to an extension request from a student, but I always ask “What are your plans to catch up?”. I can give students an extension but what I can’t do is stop time. I wish I could – that would be a wonderful superpower. All an extension does is give the student permission to hand in their assignment late. But whilst they’re taking an extra week to write their essay or analyse their data, all the other students are cracking on with the next week of studying. When the student finally hands in their assignment they are already a week behind with the reading and learning. Unless they can somehow compress 2 weeks learning into 1 (or 3 into 2 or whatever) they’re going to need an extension on the next assignment, too. And the next one. But they can’t have an extension on the exam or the end of module assessment, so sooner or later time will catch up with them. That’s what I mean by a double-edged sword.
It’s not the end of the world. I help my students to make catch-up plans when they are behind. I advise them what parts of the module are vital and what parts are skimmable or skippable. I help them make realistic plans to ramp up their study hours temporarily whilst avoiding burnout. Sometimes I recommend they submit an incomplete assignment and push on with the reading, because there just isn’t time to do a thorough job of it and still get good marks in the next assignment or the exam. I explain to them that they may have to come to terms with lower grades than they hoped for when illness or other circumstances mean they aren’t able to study as thoroughly as they otherwise would.
If you’re my student you can always have an extension if you need one. But don’t be complacent about extensions. If a week has passed in which you did no studying (because of illness, or a family crisis, or a busy week at work, or any other reason) then that week has gone and you can’t get it back. You can (probably) still submit your assignment but you are somehow going to have to work extra hours to catch up, or else you are going to have to skip some of the reading and take the hit to your grades. One way or another you are at a disadvantage compared to if you hadn’t needed the extension.
If this article didn’t answer your question, click here
Related content: The Swiss Cheese Study Method: or What To Do When You Get Behind
Writing In Your Own Words
It’s normal to find writing in your own words hard at first. One thing that makes it much harder is when you read one sentence from the textbook, and then try to put that sentence in your own words, and then you read another sentence from the textbook and try to put that into your own words. It’s almost impossible to do that without just paraphrasing, which is a form of plagiarism. What you should do instead is to read a whole paragraph or section of the textbook and then close the textbook and try to explain the key ideas from that section in your own words. When I say “in your own words” I mean in the way you normally talk. You could use a voice recorder app on your phone to record yourself while you explain in words what you just read. Don’t try to sound “academic”, just use your normal way of talking as though you were describing something to a friend. It might sound something like this:
“Ummm, so there was this guy Booth and he did some research in London and he went round people’s houses in every street and made notes about who was living there and their ages and occupations. And he also made some notes about their ummmm I guess, like, their social class or status. And they seemed sort of judgmental calling people some people dirty and vicious and other people he called respectable. And he coloured in a map with different colours for the different social classes so you can see where the rich people lived and where the poor people lived. It’s important because, erm, because he was sort of inventing social science, how to do social science”
Then you can write that up into notes, tidying it up a little bit (removing the umms and errs for example) and maybe looking up the odd important detail, such as Booth’s first name and the date:
“Charles Booth did some research in London between 1886 and 1903. He went round people’s houses in every street and made notes about who was living there and their ages and occupations. He also made notes about their social class or status. These notes were sometimes judgmental, for example he called some people dirty and vicious, and other people he described as respectable. Booth used these notes to make a map with different colours for the different social classes. The map made it so you can see where the rich people lived and where the poor people lived. Booth’s work was important because he was inventing how to do social science. (Book 1, Chapter 1, pages 9-11)”
Now those are your notes, written up in your own words. None of these sentences are the same as the sentences in the textbook. It’s all your words.
When it comes to writing an assignment, you should use your notes as the primary resource and only refer to the textbook for references and to pick up additional details. For example if you were answering a question such as “How does social science differ from other ways of investigating social life, for example journalism or art?” and you wanted to write a paragraph about Booth you might write something like:
“One way that social science differs from other ways of investigating social life is that it attempts to be systematic. For example, one of the first systematic studies of social life in London was a survey done by Charles Booth between 1886 and 1903 (Blakeley and Staples, 2014). By visiting the houses in every street and making notes about who was living there and their social status, Booth produced a colour coded map of the city which showed where the rich people lived and where the poor people lived. This differs from a journalist or an artist because they might only talk to a few people and ask them different questions each time. But Booth visited every house and collected data about the same things in each one i.e. he was systematic. In some ways though Booth’s research was more like journalism or art because he also made moral judgements about people. For example he called some people dirty and vicious, and other people he described as respectable. Modern social scientists are supposed to avoid making moral judgments like this.”
After some practice you’ll be able to skip the voice recording part and write notes in your own words after reading a paragraph or section.
Step by step guide to writing in your own words
- DON’T read a sentence from your textbook then try to write that sentence in your own words.
- DO read a whole paragraph or section of your textbook at a time
- THEN close your textbook and record yourself explaining the main points of that section in your own words
- WRITE UP your spoken notes, tidying up the “umms” and “errs” and adding in important details checked from the textbook
- BASE YOUR ESSAY mainly on your notes, using your textbook for additional details
If this article didn’t answer your question, click here
Melanie Rimmer 