Great Ways To Study | LBCC Study Skills

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welcome to the great ways to study workshop this workshop today is primarily related to textbook study methods and uh. . .

i don't know if you love textbooks most people say no thank you but when people open text books and try to uh. . .

read and concentrate and learn that's one of the hardest aspects for most people of being a college student people have said if there were no textbooks i would love college but there are textbooks these are the three topics that we're gonna cover today and then there will be a few more related to it next week the first one we're gonna talk about for a few minutes is summaries everybody here knows what summaries are at the end of chapters in text books uh do all text books have summaries at the end of each chapter no they should there should be a law but they don't but whenever there is a summary at the end of a chapter that usually covers fifteen twenty thirty pages worth of material and it boils it down to one or two which is very valuable but i want to see if you can figure this out i ask students all the time when you get to a summary at the end of a chapter what do you do with it what's your approach a lot of people give me a very scary answer what do you think they say yeah they say oh i don't do summaries i skipped those i say why do you skip em and usually they either say because i'm lazy and because when i get to the end of the chapter it's the last thing so if i skip the last thing i'm done and so that's a simple idea and then other people say this they say because everytime i look at a summary there's nothing new in there it's just the same thing i just read in the chapter and i didn't like it when i read it so why would i want to read it again in the summary so they just ignore that i hope you know that's not a very good idea uh. . .

for a person to ignore a summary usually causes their grade on the test to drop so i'm gonna make a guess here and this is all it is the average college class where the textbook is an important part of what you do and that's the most classes my guess is that somewhere between seventy and ninety percent of everything that's in the summary is going to show up on the test in one form or another it may even be closer to a hundred percent in some areas that's because the summary is made up of nothing but main ideas and important facts from the chapter so what i want to show you is this i want you to learn if you haven't already not only to pay attention to the summary but you should be an expert at it because it should help you when the test comes and there are only two ways i know to help a person be an expert at a summary the first one doesn't work very well and that's to read it about twenty times and hope it soaks into your brain that's better than not reading it but that's not the best and the second way to become an expert at this is what i'm going to teach you which is one of my favorite methods it's something that i used a lot when i was in college and whenever you can find something that helps you and it doesn't take a lot of time or effort and it's helpful that's good that's kind of what we want so i wanna have you take a look at this could you pass one straight to the back there and one across thanks ok what you're looking at here when you get this is a summary from a real college textbook in the area of health it's not important that you know any of this but i want you to look at it take a quick glance at it and let me know something that should be a very easy thing what do you notice here that looks different than any summary you've ever seen before yep um. . .

well yeah that to that is just the way that book is but what did you say again yeah blanks 0:04:08. 659,0:04:10. 029 all over the place 0:04:10.

029,0:04:14. 559 i don't know about you but i don't think i've ever seen a summary with blanks in it it's just a 0:04:14. 559,0:04:16.

559 regular text normally 0:04:16. 559,0:04:18. 889 well that means that somebody actually 0:04:18.

889,0:04:21. 959 put these blanks in there inserted them in there uh. .

. who do you think did that yeah me boy you accuse me yeah that's right me i took what you need to have in your hand which is a uh. .

. little tool that's one of the best rules you could have as a student what do you need to have in your hand to create blanks on a piece of paper you need white out right liquid paper white out or whatever you call it and so what i did to create what you're looking at here which again didn't take hours and hours in fact it just took a minutes was i've made a copy of the actual summary that's what this is and then i grabbed my white-out and i read through each sentence and then went back and whited out certain words and then what i was done i let it dry for a while and then i grabbed a black pen and i made the blanks just so that i could see a little better where they were okay all of that that whole process takes very little time and very little effort now two quick things before i go into this anymore um. .

. how do you know which words you're supposed to white-out out how do you determine that because you're the one with uh. .

. the white out in your hands so what kind of words do you white out yeah vocabulary the easiest answer is uh. .

. important words ok i've had a few students misunderstand t his before and they actually went through and waited out words but they whited out the word the and uh. .

. like that and what you're trying t o create for yourself obviously what this is is like a a test a fill-in the blank test and it's very embarrassing if you do with the wrong way and then you go back later and you see a blank and you're thinking what word goes in there oh i know it's the so what is that right so the words you take out it's your choice totally but they are the keywords and t he other thing um. .

. it's a really smart move on your part not to white-out too many words not to go crazy with the white house there's only one place on this page where i kinda went cr azy with the white out where is that yeah number three uh. .

. blank blank blank blank blank blank all of that normally you don't want to do that why d id i do that here it's because it's a list and i wanted to be able to write in all the words so that i would know when the test cam e uh. .

. if you normally read a sentence in your summary when you go back over it and it says the blank of the blank blank blank is blank good luck even knowing what that's asking so you want to sort of under use the whi te out a little bit and if you look at this carefully i could've whited out five or ten or fifteen more wor ds easily but you don't want to go overboard wi th it so uh. .

. after i was done and there's nothing special by the way about this number there are thirty-six blanks on here so this i s like a thirty six question test now um. .

. after completing it so that it lo oks like this what you would do would be to go to th e cheapest copy place you could find and m ake about five to ten copies of this and then take them home and put them away somewhere you can do this what i just described befo re you've read the chapter while you're readin g it afterward anytime it doesn't matter and then when you're all finished reading the chapter that this is the summary of how much of this information are you sup posed to know yeah all of it i've had some people say maybe fifty one two percent no all of it right because probably most of it is going to show up on the test how do you know if you know it only one way to find out you go to your stash of uh. .

. little quizzes you grab one and you sit there and you take the test and you fill in the blanks as many as you can when you're done you correct it and what do you need to correct something you need an answer key what's the answer key yeah the actual summary in the book right so you put it side by side it just takes a minute to correct it i always used to do this by correcting in a different color because that helps you to sort of see where you messed up and then what you do is you put a number one in the corner meaning that this is my first attempt and then you study it for a while and then you put it away and you go away for awhile even if it's an hour or two now quick question for you uh. .

. how do you think you're going to do on this the first time you try what do you think yeah not so good and i've had some people say oh no i get a hundred percent and i said wow how intelligent you are that's so great why would you get a hundred percent and they said well because i'm the one who took the words out so i know which ones they are and whenever somebody says that to me i look at them and say i think you're giving yourself way too much credit in the memory department if you do what i just showed you and then you put them away for a few days when you pick it up to take it it'll be almost like someone else made it and you'll either know it or you won't just like on any test so i'm gonna give you a number that's just an example and that is let's say that the first time you take this you get fifteen right out of thirty six now that's less than half so what grade is this yeah f not a c_-minus minus minus it's an f it's never fun in life ever to get an f on a test but whenever this happened to me which was often i would think i've just got an f i'm so glad i got this at home two days before the test rather than on the real test right cuz is no harm no foul it doesn't count ok later on that day or the next day i'd go back and i grab another blank copy and i sit for a few minutes and i take it again correct it study it put a two in the corner put it away go away that over and over as many times as you can over the last few days before the test day ok now the second time you take it how should you do yeah uh. .

. better how much better i don't know if you do worse come see me because something is going on but let's say on the second try you get twenty three out of thirty six so that's a nice big improvement well if you did the math on this and you figure out the percentage now you've got a d so then you can go to anybody you live with and confuse them totally by saying guess what i just got a d and they're saying why are you so excited say well an hour ago i got an f in other words things are getting better right and then the bottom line of this why this tends to help in addition to what i've already mentioned is that the night before the real test you grab your last copy maybe it's the fourth one or the ninth one or whatever and you take it one last time how are you going to do on it the last time yeah you should uh. .

. let's say this let's say this is your seventh try you get thirty five out of thirty six because you're a human being so you miss one right everybody here knows what grade that is right and so i forgot to mention earlier that what some people have told me is they took it the first time and they did really badly and so they crumble it up and threw it away cuz who wants to keep something like that but you don't want to do that you keep them all and that's so in the end you have this final payoff you grab all seven copies or however many there are and you find a table or the floor in your living room or whatever and you lay them all out one two three four five ectera and then you go back and look at the first one and then look at the last one and then just stand there and admire yourself okay and what are you admiring yeah your progress your improvement right and what is that supposed to do for you the next day yeah confidence if i had you read this summary five times and then you came back here some other day and i was going to give you a test on it and i met you right at the door and i said are you ready you know everything really well all you can do if you read this five times would be to say hope so i read it a lot and i think it's in there somewhere but there's not a lot of confidence when you do this you have physical proof of the fact that you've improved that always encourages people now want to tell you one last thing about this uh. .

. this should be kind of obvious but i always like to mention it if you uh. .

. study this way it's a very helpful way whenever you have a good summary in a text book but just knowing what words go in a bunch of blanks doesn't make you completely ready to take the test you have to study in other ways as well but again the idea back to this is that virtually every fact on this page would be on your test and if you don't know the keywords that go in the blanks that's usually a bad sign so you continue to do this and again it doesn't take hours to do it's pretty simple and it's also kind of turns it into a little bit of a game you're competing against yourself to see if you can do better each time and that sounds a little better than just staring at it hour after hour ok so that's the idea on this one any questions on this ok um. .

. the second one of the three that we're going to talk about today is a method that most people have never heard of and hardly anybody has ever tried but it actually works great in certain textbooks not all but in certain ones and that's called reading in layers what i'm gonna do to teach you this is i'm going to do this sort of backwards instead of explaining what we're doing i want to actually do this with you so you're gonna learn by doing and i'm gonna hand this to you and i'm gonna ask you to do me a favor i'm gonna hand it upside down which is kind of a strange way and i don't want you to turn it over and look at it until i get back to the front because i want us to turn it over at the same time and do this little activity together so you can just keep it in front of you but no peeking yep in just a minute when everybody's set i'm gonna ask you to turn the page over and what we're going to do is we're actually going to read this together i'm gonna read it uh. .

. outloud you just follow along silently and we're not gonna read the whole page that would take way too long we're only gonna read certain sentences that have been selected i'll explain later why and you'll know which sentences we're gonna read because they're numbered on there and what i want you to try to do i know this is kind of difficult but i want you to try is stay with me as i read the sentences and don't let your eyes wander and read other things on the page i know there's a temptation to do that but just focus on what were doing and then i'm going to kind of put you to the test on this a little bit so go ahead and turn it over and let me read these sentences number one eating disorders are grouped into three categories obesity bulimia and anorexia nervosa number two obesity is the condition of being overweight to the extent that a person's health and life span is adversely affected number three while the majority of cases of obesity are psychologically based some have been demonstrated to have a biological component number four bulimia is sometimes called the silent killer because it is difficult to detect number five this disorder involves a cycle of eating binges and purges and number six anorexia nervosa is a nutritional deficiency disease characterized by severe prolonged weight loss okay now here's what i want you to do i'm gonna give you about a minute and i want you to go back and re read those six sentences as many times as you can don't read anything else on the page again just focus on those and just soak it into your brain and then i'm gonna put you to the test on it so you got one minute to uh learn these a little bit better alright what i'd like everybody to do is go ahead and take that handout and turn it over so that you can't see it no peaking okay and i'm gonna ask uh. .

. just for volunteers really quickly to go through here what was one of the eating disorders on the page bulimia another one obesity and anorexia nervosa um. .

. the definition was given for obesity and it was kinda long so it's always kinda hard to remember but it says the person is overweight and two things are affected anybody remember one or both health and life wow you're doing well health and life span that's good um. .

. what is the source of obesity usually according to that psychological and then every once in awhile biological and what's the nickname given to bulimia silent killer why's it called that hard to detect and what does it involve binge and purges and then the last part and if you can get this all i'm very uh amazed the definition was given for anorexia nervosa long definition it describes it as a certain kind of disease and also describes the weight loss with two words that describe it what do you remember ohhh everybody got quiet all of a sudden that's uh. .

. that's almost exactly right what kind of disease is it nutritional deficiency disease you can read that twenty times and it's hard to stick in your mind cuz it's a long phrase and then it's severe and prolonged those are the weight loss ok now want you to go ahead and turn the page back over and uh. .

. what we just did was called reading in layers it but now we want to go back and figure out what was that all about what is that and um the basic way you do this is that you read certain sentences that you've selected and then you test yourself on what you just read and every time you can't remember something what do you do yeah you cheat oh yeah and then you say it and you keep practicing until you can say the whole thing like we just did ok so uh. .

. what is this all about well when you read in layers this method uh requires you to read three types of sentences the first two are the most common for sure and then the third one is every once in a while when you look at these sentences and you look at sentence number one three four and six all of those have something in common with each other i want to see if you can figure out what that is it has to do with location that's my hint one three four and six where are those yeah beginning of a paragraph so the number one thing this is kind of the primary feature of this is that you read the first sentence of each paragraph okay in those obviously aren't hard to find you can locate them quickly and you read em why is it may be helpful to read the first sentence of the paragraph what's the point of that yeah topic sentence and then what does the rest of the paragraph do give details right now is that always the way paragraphs are written no uh. .

. if i were made the king of all text books or whatever i would make that a law cuz it makes your job a lot easier as a student sometimes in a textbook the main idea of a paragraph's the last sentence or it's buried in the middle somewhere that makes it very confusing but a lot of textbook authors actually write their books this way where most of the time the first sentence of a paragraph is a definition or some other big fact and that helps you so that's why you focus on that in this method now sentence number two is not the first sentence of the paragraph obviously and this is hard for people to see so you have to just kind of trust me on this the word obesity at the start of sentence number two is in bold print it doesn't really look like it that much because this has been copied so many times but it is so the second type of sentence you read when you do this is you read any sentence with a bold print word and again those are easy to find you don't have to hunt for them they're right there why is it important to read a sentence with a bold print word because it has a bolt print word right so the author is saying this is an important word so you read that sentence ok so these are pretty easy and then there's only one sentence here that we haven't really accounted for yet which is sentence number five if you look at that that is not the first sentence of a paragraph it has no bold print words so why was that pick and the answer is in the sentence right before it sentence four if you look carefully at sentence four you know that not only is that the first sentence of the paragraph but it also has a bold print word the word bulimia is in bold so when i was doing this when i was setting up this page and i saw that it had a bold print word and it's the first sentence of a paragraph what did i assume i would read in that sentence yeah the definition of it right did i get that in there no i got an interesting little nickname right silent killer but it didn't really tell me what it was so i had to look a couple sentences further down and then i found it so what does that mean well it means this the last part of what you do which won't happen a lot but every once in awhile is you read any other sentence that seems important so even if it's not the first sentence of the paragraph even if it has no bold print words if for some reason your eyes are drawn to it you read that to ok and when you do this with text books by the way you're not supposed to get out your pen or pencil and number the sentences in your book the reason i did that was so that you can see where i wanted you to uh. .

. look but obviously you can find these easily and sort of spot those so you just basically read ok now this is how you do it it doesn't work with all text books because all textbooks are not written where the first sentence has something significant but what i wanted to tell you about this is sort of the purpose when people first learn how to do this they think oh this is going to be my favorite reading idea ever because you skip all kinds of stuff and think how fast you could read a chapter in a book when you just read those and you think oh man i'm a speed reader this is great uh. .

. sorry to tell you this is not a substitute for reading the whole thing if i gave everybody in here a test right now on those six sentences most of you would pass to get an a if i actually gave you a test on the whole thing it would be an f for everbody because you haven't even read the page yet so this is actually a step of preview it's something that you do first and then you go back and read the whole thing and people always say you mean there's something else i have to do i'd rather just read it but the purpose for this and this is kind of where i'll end with this by the way let me go ahead and uh. .

. start the sign-up sheet if you would uh. .

. is this when people read the sentences that i've shown you first and they go back and learn them everything else they read once they start reading this all these details fits into what they've already learned it's almost like they took a bunch of folders labeled them and every fact they just sort of stick in the right place and usually when you do that first and go back everything just sort of fits into your brain and you remember it a lot better that's the purpose behind this and so again uh. .

. for it's almost too late for now because your finals are just a couple weeks away but for spring when you first get into a class that has a big textbook and you think i remember that reading in layers method take one page read the first sentence of each paragraph and and sentences of bold print words just that and when you're done you'll either think wow i've got a lot of important information from that which means that that book is probably good to use this for or you'll get to the end of that you'll think i have no idea what i just read and the reason is because in that book it may be that the first sentence of each paragraph for example is just an introduction and the main important points are way down further so then this won't work so you can figure out really easily whether it's sort of clicks or not ok any questions on this one all right okay this is from an anatomy book i don't know if you have had anatomy or not but uh. .

. that's like a separate foreign language that you have to learn and um. .

. the information at the on this page which you'd never know unless somebody told you or you had background is actually about the brain different parts of the brain and this uh. .

. as you look at the top you see that it's from page four o eight to four ten that's three pages how could i fit three pages worth of textbook material on here it's because the rest of it was all diagrams of the brain so this is the actual text from three pages now let me read a small part of this and then i'll get to the point behind giving it to you the white matter underlying the cortex consists of myelinated and unmyelinated axons extending in three principal directions one association fibers transmit nerve impulses between gyri in the same hemisphere to comissural fibers transmit impulses and already i'm getting a headache and i'm think'n are you kidding to learn this not only do you have a dictionary by beside you but this is only three pages out of a thirty page chapter so can you imagine learning ten times this much to get ready for a test is pretty overwhelming well rather than learning it this way by just reading it and then going over and over and over it there's another way that i think you're gonna find kind of interesting to learn this and it has to do with outlining and so i want you to keep that handout uh. .

. in front of you for just a minute and i'm gonna give you another handout that i want you to compare with that one and then i'm gonna do an exercise with you and see how all of you are incredibly sharp on that first one so now i'm at my expectations are really high for you so that may be dangerous uh. .

. take a look at this right beside your other one kind of back and forth ok um. .

. as you see on the uh. .

. original page the actual text there are two main topics on that page which are white matter and basal ganglia then you look over on the outline and what are the two topics there the two main topics white matter and basil ganglia so in other words these two are exactly the same except the way they're put on the page ok and i want to demonstrate something to you and so i want you to take this handout the first one of the two and i want you to turn that over so you can't look at it anymore and i just want you to keep this uh. .

. outline in front of you and this is called class participation so that means i need to hear a lot of voices don't raise your hand i just want you to go for it i'm gonna ask you a few questions first with this right in front of you so that's about as easy as it's ever going to get so again how many topics are on this page two what's the first one white matter second one basal ganglia underneath white matter how many topics are there there are two what's the first one basic fact second one types of fibers ok now that's pretty easy right turn the page over so you can't see it how many topics are on the page two first one white matter second one under white matter how many topics two first one basic facts second one types of fibers how many basic facts are there how many types of fibers i don't know. .

. we haven't looked yet go ahead and take it and look again ok again same repeat just repeat with me k how many topics on the page two first one white matter second one basal ganglia under white matter how many two first one how many three second one types of fibers how many three okay and then take a look under types of fibers and you see the names of the three fibers there when you look at the first letter of each one of those three what word can you make out of those three letters you can make two actually one would be cap the other one would be pac well we'll go ahead let's go ahead and use cap alright so while you're looking at it which one is this some of you are looking at me like what's the answer look here right let's start here again what's this one comissural and projection ok now turn it back over and we'll see how smart you are ok how many topics are on the page two uh. .

. what's the first one white matter the second one basil ganglia yeah under white matter how many topics two first one basic facts second one types of fibers uh. .

. how many basic facts are there three what are they i don't know. .

. um how many types of fibers three ok what's this one comissural. .

. yeah what's this one association and projection now before we go any further when you leave here today if you run into somebody you know and or maybe even when you get home somebody in your family if they say what did you do in school today you say why i did a few things but i went to a workshop and i learned some things what did you learn well i learned that in the white matter of the brain there are three types of fibers and they look at you and go wow that's very impressive what are they you say well uh. .

. to remember that most effectively i use the acronym cap and the c is for comissural the a is for association and the p is for projection and they look at you man you learned a lot today and then here's what they ask you what do those different fibers do and you say gotta go and then you run right because you haven't gotten that far yet so go ahead and turn the page back over if we continued with this what you would be doing is and again this is the benefit of outlining is that you start on the left and you keep repeating and then you add one little layer each time like we're doing and the next thing you would do would be to learn the basic facts and then after that you would start to learn what is about uh. .

. what the truths were about the different fibers just kind of layering on each set of facts now uh. .

. if i uh. .

. tested you next week in the workshop and a by the way i'm not going to do that cuz otherwise nobody's gonna come back but just assuming okay that had when you walked in i gave you a test on this material uh. .

. but i said this i said you know uh. .

. when you leave here in a few minutes uh. .

. you're not allowed to take both of these with you you're only allowed to take one that's all you can take which one would you take to study yeah almost everybody says the outline I say well why it's the same thing and everyone says no it's not ok it's the same thing but the way it's packaged makes it look a little more hopeful for most people a lot of times people look at this and you see all the words that are in bold print your thinking boy those are all terms that i would need to know for my anatomy test and if you read this and you highlighted certain things and you read it twenty times you'd have no real idea whether you had it or not but if you actually studied the outline and you kind of did it the way that i showed you at the very end you'd realize that you learned way more than you thought you could now it would be nice if every text book had every page like this than everybody would get a's in every class and all that but it's not the case uh. .

. can you take the time to take everything in your book and turn it into outlines of your own uh. .

. yes if you never wanna sleep again and you never want to eat again you can actually sit there it takes time to do but my main point here is that most people and this is not true everybody but most people learn a lot better when they can see connections in relationships like this rather than just seeing a bunch of black ink on a paper and if you are ever in a class that's pretty tough and you read through one or two pages and you realize that those pages were just filled with one definition after the other kind of dense or compacted then you just think it how in the world am i gonna learn all this what you do is say let me try to make an outline out of it and see if that's easier for me to study um one of these days after this semester is over if you still have these if you haven't made paper airplanes out of them or use them as scratch paper you can always sit for a little while and go back and look back and forth and try to see how this was constructed sometimes people look at this and they see well small a three and it seems like it's extremely complicated but it's not that difficult once you are able read things and know how to plug them in and of course most things you get in college are not quite this advanced and difficult so if you can learn how to do it with this you should be able to learn how to do it with some other things as well and so that's the goal of all of this is to say again that this doesn't work with every text book or every class if you tried to do this with the math textbook have fun i don't think that would work so again you try to learn a whole bunch of different strategies and tools and then figure out which one is the perfect fit for that book as opposed to that one and no method works great for every book and also no method works great for every student it depends on how your brain works et cetera but if you have all these as kind of ammunition and you remember em you can just experiment early in the semester and find out what the perfect fit is and there should be one sometimes people can even use two or three of these techniques uh. .

. in the same class other times only one works but whatever works is kind of helpful okay so uh. .

. any questions on this one clear to everybody okay and then i want you to look up at me do not look down what are the three fibers again comissural association and projection when you leave here in a minute if i walk down the hall and i hear you saying cap cap comissural i'll be so happy even you say i'd never need to know that in my entire life well it just shows you that when you learn something a certain way it sticks and then you can show off your knowledge and then hope nobody asks you any follow-up questions cuz then you gotta run ok ok thank you very much for coming today and i wanna get uh the sign in sheet. .