By the end of this study skills guide, I hope you will be better-able to:

• develop the art of asking the right questions
  
  
• make yourself "Question Banks" for each of your subjects
  
  
• process your lecture notes regularly and efficiently
  
  
• Make yourself various useful memory aids

Tools in general are for making jobs easier. Many jobs can't be done without the right tools. Learning tools are for making it easier for you to learn all the things you need to, in the limited time usually available. They help to speed up the processes of learning. They can do a lot to help you ensure that those vital processes of retention, recall and communication all occur successfully for you. Above all, learning tools are things that help you answer that important question: "am I doing sufficient work?" When exams or other formal assessments come along you'll be answering other people's questions, and it will be discovered how much work you have actually done. But you don't have to wait till other people ask you questions - you can start asking yourself questions as soon as you like - the sooner the better in fact.

Sooner than you may think, you'll be expected to have done your bit. It's amazing how fast time flies when you're enjoying yourself! It seems no time at all before the exam season is upon you. Then, you'll be expected to be able to do things, explain things, prove things, calculate things, list things, describe things, deduce things, discuss things, draw things, compare and contrast things .... Can you imagine any exam paper without several of those words above in italic letters? These are the most important words in most exam questions. After you've done a bit of studying, you may feel that you know something quite well. How can you measure whether you know it well enough? How can you test for anything that may have slipped? You've got to ask yourself questions, give yourself tasks to do with the knowledge you have.

Suppose you had a small notebook filled with all the questions you could possibly be asked about your course material. Suppose, next, you gradually got yourself into the happy position of being able to answer most of these questions at any time. Exams would be no problem. But how can you decide which questions to collect? By asking yourself one, important question:

Suppose you ask yourself the question above, say regarding the content of a couple of pages of your lecture notes. Suppose next, instead of writing down the answers to that question above, you turned the answers into short, sharp mini-questions. You could end up with quite a list, even from a page or two of notes. It might contain some mini-questions like these (depending what sort of subject you're dealing with)

What's a ....................................... ?
State ............................................. 's Law
Derive the.....................................
Equation List 5 features of ........................
Compare and Contrast................. and..........
Why does ..................................... happen?
Sketch a........................................
How many kinds of...................... are there?

and so on. Now, when you can answer all the little questions, you automatically know enough to answer any bigger ones, which are just combinations of your little questions. Suppose now you extend the technique, to gradually cover all your lecture notes. Suppose also you cover other things such as important parts of textbooks, journal extracts - in fact everything you may be able to do or remember. If you make a complete Question Bank, and practise with it, you'll automatically be able to answer any exam question that might come up. The main part of a good Question Bank is the collection of hundreds of these little questions. However, there are some valuable extra sources which can make your Question Bank even more comprehensive and useful.

See if you can list other sources which it’s useful to use to extend your Question Bank, in addition to those discussed above. Try to think of various sources of questions that you can use as you go through the day-to-day processes of your course.

Think now about “ready-made” questions, rather than the “mini” variety.

Question Bank Components

• lots of mini-questions from lecture notes, etc.

Other sources of questions:

It's also useful to make a "bank" of clues, cross-relating to your Question Bank. Clues are better than answers. As soon as you see an answer you rob yourself of the chance to think it through. When you see a clue, you still have to make that extra little leap towards the answer. The more often you make such little leaps, the more you'll remember making them. With practice, you'll be able to sit in an exam room, and think back to your clues, and leaps, and come up with the answers you need to exam questions. What are you doing with your Lecture Notes? In lectures you make notes. I hope if you've read the study skills guide on "Lectures" you'll be making good notes. But what do you do with these notes after the lectures? Try Activity 2 and see whether your follow-up of lectures is all that it might be.

Do you re-write each lecture, neatly, word-for-word, when you get home?........................................................................

Do you do this within a couple of days?................................

If "yes", how long does it take?.............................................

Could you hope to keep this up? ...........................................

Do you learn a lot re-writing stuff? .......................................

Think how much more useful it would be to spend 10 minutes actively processing the notes from each lecture. What could you do in a mere 10 minutes? Well, you could make two useful learning tools to help you with your future task of getting to grips with the lecture material. You've probably guessed one of them already. They are:

• Question Bank Components
• A Short Summary

The short summary could be what you could jot down in 5 minutes - the main points or principles of the lecture. In 5 minutes writing down Question Bank mini-questions, you could probably write sufficient short questions to be able to test yourself entirely on the content of the lecture. You don't have to be able to answer all these questions yet, of course - that's where practice comes in. It's still useful to know what you are aiming to be able to answer, even at a very early stage. In fact, it's very useful to find out the questions you can't yet answer. If you know that something is going to take a bit of time, effort, and practice to get under your belt, you're more than halfway there. The biggest problem in fact, is "not knowing what you don't know", or in other words being unaware of the bits of material that could cause you difficulties. With a good Question Bank, you quickly discover what you don't know, as well as the good news about what you do know. You're then in an ideal position to work on the things that you still need to polish up. If you cultivate the habit of doing something active and useful (even for just 10 minutes) with the content of each lecture, you'll have a feeling of satisfaction, and more important, you'll have made some learning tools, to help you with the job of getting to grips with your subjects. Far happier than to file all the notes away, hoping that the day of reckoning will not loom up! Armed with a good Question Bank, you are able to know the answer to the question: Am I doing sufficient work? You can measure your progress, at any time - not just when preparing for exams. You can measure your progress from day to day, well before any formal assessment is due.

How often have you needed to remember something, but it just won't come back? It'll probably come back later, but not when you need it. It's not that it's gone from your mind - in fact the retention is probably quite alright. What's the faulty step?

Mnemonics is a word sometimes used to describe memory aids. I guess this may be one of the first mnemonics you came across: E G B D F What does it stand for? Many people learned the notes of the lines of the treble clef in music with the phrase "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour". Did you? If you did, how long ago did you learn this? Quite a while ago I guess. The message speaks for itself - good mnemonics stick for a long time! Most memory aids work by some form of association. It's useful if the images or ideas you link to key information are highly memorable, maybe by being funny, highly visual - or even a bit near the mark!, Let's look at a different sort of example. Suppose there are some numbers that you need to remember. For sake of argument, suppose you need to remember "pi" to eight significant figures. It is: 3.14.515927

Learn pi for a minute or two, then get up, walk around, then try to write it down again on a piece of paper (without looking of course). Then, check whether you were correct, and look at my response for a sure-fire way of learning pi!How I wish I could calculate pi quickly 3 1 4 1 5 9 2 7

See the connection? The number of letters in the words in the little sentence give the respective digits of pi! It takes far less time to learn this little sentence than to learn the 8-digit number itself!

Now let’s look at a more complicated mnemonic. It’s to do with Moh’s Scale of Mineral hardness. This table shows ten naturally occurring minerals in increasing order of hardness. Never mind if you don’t need to know Moh’s Scale, you can adapt the principle to all sorts of needs of your own.

Moh’s Scale of hardness:

1 Talc
2 Gypsum
3 Calcite
4 Fluorspar
5 Apatite
6 Olivine
7 Quartz
8 Tourmaline
9 Carborundum
1O Diamond


Spend a few minutes with Moh’s Scale above, then see if you can write out the table without looking back. Then turn to the response, for a much easier way of remembering the Scale!

People who learn this table need to be able to get these ten minerals in the correct order. Imagine how many monkeys you’d need to find one who got them in the right order by chance? For people learning Moh’s Scale, it’s not the names themselves that are difficult; it’s getting them in the correct order.

Now having read my response to the activity about Moh’s Scale, you’re probably thinking “what possible use is all this to me?” Well, suppose you were anticipating an essay-type question in a forthcoming exam. Imagine you’d spent some time preparing an ideal answer, in case that question should come up. Next, you could extract the keywords from your main points in the essay, and put them in a vertical list (such as the one below.) You could then compose a suitable little memorable sentence, which would let you get back to your keywords again (using first letters, for example). So, in the heat of the exam, you could jot down your memorable little sentence on scrap paper, and translate it back into the key points for your essay. The points would automatically be in the correct order. What’s more important, you wouldn’t have missed out any of the key points, as you might otherwise have done without your mnemonic.

We've looked at three kinds of learning tools: question banks, summaries, and mnemonics. There's one danger with tools however: they can go rusty if they're not used regularly. The moral is simple: when you make learning tools, keep them sharp. Practise using them regularly. Decode your mnemonics once a week at least, till they stay permanently in your mind. Practise answering your question bank questions, observing which are the awkward ones that need a bit of working on. Regularly spend a few minutes with each of your summaries, mentally filling out the detail behind the summary, and occasionally looking back at original material to make sure that you are indeed remembering all the detail you need to. All these bits of practice with your learning tools may look like a lot of work. However, it's the sort of practice that you can do a bit of in just a few minutes. You don't have to wait till you've got a solid spell of time available for study. You can use up some of those odd little bits of the day which would otherwise be quite wasted as far as learning is concerned. There's a lot of mileage in carrying your learning tools around with you for such use (should we call it a learning toolkit now?!)

Activity 1:

Here are some of the extra sources you can use to extend your question bank, to make it all the more comprehensive and useful. Exam questions from past papers

Actually, if your mini-questions are sufficiently all-embracing, they will cover all possible exam questions. However, it’s still useful to have real exam questions available. Real questions give you something extra: they help you see how much you’re expected to be able to do in a given time. For example, you can tell from them how much you may be asked to do in, say, halfan- hour during an exam. It should be possible for you to break down any exam question into the mini-questions you need to be able to handle it. One exam question could be an aggregate of ten or twenty miniquestions. Breaking down old exam questions into their component parts usually gives quite a few useful additions to your collection of mini-questions. This means you have more chance of practising your answers to such questions - more guarantee of success in coming exams.

Objectives and Learning Outcomes

Sometimes, you’ll be given lists of syllabus objectives or learn i n g outcomes. These say “at the end of the course, you should be able to ..” with all sorts of completions of that sentence. Naturally, such objectives and learning outcomes are a direct answer to that question “What am I expected to become able to do?” Some lecturers will give you objectives or learning outcomes for each lecture. “By the end of this lecture, you should be able to and so on Objectives and learning outcomes can be directly slotted into your question bank. You may prefer, of course, to break down any rather complex objective or learning outcome into its component parts. What you want is to know all the details of what you’re expected to master. If you can do all the little things, you’re automatically able to do several of them together, and master more complex things.

Worked examples in class

L e c t u rers will often solve problems, or run through case-studies, as examples of the sort of thing you’re going to be asked to do yourself. What happens, though, if you look back at such a worked example in your lecture notes? Your eyes have hardly started to read the question, when they skip ahead to see how it was answered. This robs you of the chance of really finding out whether you can do the problem by yourself. The remedy is simple: separate the question from its answer. Put the question itself into your question bank, maybe with a reference telling you where you can find the answer in your lecture notes. You are then able to have a go at the question, and then look back to see how well you did.

Homework

“Homework” sounds a bit like school! However, it doesn’t stop when you get into university education. It may be called different things, like “assignments”, “Project”, “essays” and such like, but it’s still homework. Most homework starts with some sort of question (even if the question is simply a title). You can easily separate the question from your answer, and file the question separately in your question bank. As with worked examples in class, having the question separate gives you the chance to have a go at the question for practice, without seeing the answer prematurely.

Clues

Often in a lecture, you’ll get the feeling “the lecturer seems to be plugging this”. It could well be that there is a question coming up on the thing being plugged. You’ll get better at spotting such clues, as you get to know your lecturers. It’s all too easy to forget what things seemed like clues. But there’s a safe way to store them: turn them into questions, and store the questions. This allows you to rehearse your answers to all the things you had the feeling were hinted at by your lecturers.

Other people’s question banks

Suppose you and a few friends each made a question bank on a given topic. Suppose next, you pooled your ideas on what may be the things that you were expected to become able to do. You’d probably find that each member of the group thought of some questions that no-one else had devised. If you then pooled your question banks, and added on those extra questions, the resultant question bank would be quite a bit more comprehensive. Does this sort of “sharing” go against the grain? It shouldn’t, it’s not as though you were sharing the effort of doing some homework. At university, you’re not so much competing with your classmates, but rather competing against the standard of your course. There are some things where you can help each other meet the standards you’re aiming towards - sharing question banks can do just that.  

Activity 2:

Can you see what I’m getting at? If you have got into the habit of rewriting lecture notes, is it doing you much good? It’s all too easy to rewrite page after page, without really thinking about any of it. The danger with re-writing is that it tends to be a rather passive way of spending your time. Also, there’s just not time to re-write everything. If you were to rewrite all of your notes, you’d be spending almost as much time re-writing as you spend in lectures - before you even start to get down to the real job of getting to grips with the material involved. It’s much better to process your lecture material than to re-write it. Please return to the text for more about how to make lecture follow-up active and productive.