B.Ed.II Yr. III Sem. EnglishOSS

UNIT II

STUDY SKILLS

Introduction: Study skills comprise two peculiar words study and skill. Study means the time devoted by a particular person to gaining knowledge of an academic subject, typically at school, college, or university. Skill means the practiced ability to use one's knowledge effectively and readily in execution or performance. Study skill it is an approach applied to learning. They are generally critical to success in school, considered essential for acquiring good grades, and useful for learning throughout one's life.

Study skills are defined as strategies and methods to efficiently manage learning. Study skills consist of time management strategies, note taking and active listening abilities, and summarization and analysis skills. Study skills are an array of skills which tackle the process of organizing and taking in new information, retaining information, or dealing with assessments. They include mnemonics, which aid the retention of lists of information; effective reading; concentration techniques; and efficient note taking.

I. Need and Importance of Study Skills:

1. Study skills are the skills you need to enable you to study and learn efficiently they are an important set of transferable life skills.

2. These are the most important skills to master to get good grades. Honing your study skills not only helps you succeed academically, it will also help you do well in life.

3. Some of the benefits of improved study skills reduce test anxiety, increase confidence, competence, and self esteem.

4. You will realize that good grades are not always achieved through studying long hours. You can cut down on the number of hours you study by studying efficiently through knowing how to study. Once you learn these skills, you will be well on your way to becoming the successful student you’ve always wanted to be. Academic coaches and tutors at MyGrade Booster will give you useful tips and tools you can adopt when you study or prepare for exams.

5. The so-called smart students are not the ones with higher IQs. They are the students who have mastered the art of studying efficiently.

6.  The students with learning difficulties, particularly those with LD and ADHD, students need to be explicitly taught how to strategically approach academic tasks in order to gain and use information effectively. In other words, they need to be taught effective study strategies, often referred to as study skills.

7. The table below lists several study skills strategies that can help students address their executive function challenges and tackle academic demands in a more effective, plan full manner.

Processing Information	Retaining and Recalling Information	Organizing Materials and Managing Time	Selecting, Monitoring, and Using Strategies
Graphic organizers Comprehension strategies	Mnemonic strategies Note-taking	Time management Materials organization	Self-regulation strategies

Although effective study skills strategies are critical for academic success, for many reasons students are seldom taught them. Perhaps chief among these reasons is simply that teachers assume students already possess such skills, having picked them up in the earlier grades. For this reason, study skills instruction improves the academic outcomes of all students, especially those with LD and ADHD

2. CATEGORIZATION OF STUDY SKILLS:

MICRO OR PRIMARY STUDIES SKILL

The study skill which are imparted to students up to matriculation level or known as micro or primary study skill they can further be divided into two stages.

1:         Controlled stage: It is the stage at which a child acquires the basic study skills under the control of his teacher or instructor. This stage is normally until primary level.

2:         Guided Stage: It is the stage where a child guided in acquiring the basic study skills. This stage is after the primary level up to matriculation.

MACRO OR ADVANCED STUDY SKILLS

The study skills which a student acquires after the matriculation level are generally called advanced study skills.

There can be classified as follows:

1:         ADVANCE STAGE: The stage where a student is required to adopt and acquired study skills of higher level then controlled or guided stage is called advance sage. It normally includes the intermediate level.

2:         INDEPENDENT STAGE: This is the stage where a student is free to exercise his mind in acquisition of the skills, and is not controlled, guided or restricted by graduation and can last as long as one aspires to study.

3. LOCATING INFORMATION AND USE OF REFERENCE BOOKS: By their very name, reference materials are obviously those items most likely to be useful in answering reference questions. For this reason, they are often held by libraries as resources which are either non-circulating or circulated under strict limitations. In the case of some very useful or popular titles, the patron is best served when the library can own at least two copies to allow for a "reference" and a circulating copy. A brief outline of the most common types of reference materials is presented below.

Almanacs

Contain specific facts, statistical data, tables of comparative information, and organized lists of basis reference information related to people, places, events, etc. Usually cover broad periods of time, whereas Yearbooks will have the same time of information for a single year.
Example -- World Almanac and Book of Facts 

Atlases

Contain an organized group of physical, political, road, and/or thematic maps. Symbols, scales, and terms used in the atlas should be explained in an easy to understand and complete manner.
Example -- Atlas of American History 

Bibliographies

Contain one or more lists of resources and materials sharing some common attribute such as location, publishing date, subject, etc. A good bibliography should include all pertinent bibliographical data. Some will include descriptive or critical annotations.
Example -- Guide to Reference Books for School Media Centers

Biographical Resources

Contain information about individual people or locate (index) other works which provide this type of information. Collected biographies can cover a given subject, a stated time period, or other special groups of individuals.
Example -- Current Biography Yearbook

Dictionaries

Contain words of a given language and other information such as their origins, pronunciations, and definitions. Unabridged dictionaries contain 250,000 words or more. Special dictionaries include picture dictionaries, foreign language dictionaries, synonym dictionaries, thesauri, etc.
Example -- Webster's School Dictionary

Directories

Contain an organized list of people and/or organizations of some type. Other information such as addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. are included for each entry.
Example -- Special Collections in Children's Literature

Encyclopedias, General

Contain an alphabetically organized listing of a broad range of subjects with basic information for each entry. General encyclopedias provide a good basis for the beginning stages of research. They are also helpful resources for ready reference questions.
Example -- World Book Encyclopedia

Encyclopedias, Subject

Contain the same type of information and organized like a general encyclopedia. The entries are limited to those that fall within the subject encyclopedia's scope of the coverage.
Example -- The Grolier Encyclopedia of Science and Technology

Handbooks

Contain an abundance of information related to one subject. This is one type of reference material which needs to be circulating in order to serve the patron well.
Example -- Famous First Facts

Indexes

Contain information necessary for locating information in a given specific item or a type of resource. They help to locate information in periodicals, anthologies, newspapers, etc. Concordances and quotation dictionaries are specific types of indexes.
Example -- National Geographic Index

5. STORING INFORMATION:

For information (including the higher quality information we call knowledge) to be of any use for future generations to enjoy or perhaps be weary of, it must be stored on some kind of physical media. In the modern technological world, information is stored in a variety of ways, the most common of which are:

· The human brain

· Paper

· Floppy disk

· CD-ROM

· The Internet.

STORAGE MEDIUM	ADVANTAGES	DISADVANTAGES
HUMAN BRAIN	Information can be recalled almost immediately.	The brain has a habit of selecting information it wants due to the presence of other information in memory called beliefs
	It often takes a simple "memory key" to unlock a wealth of information	Effort must be made to make the information interesting as possible for effective memory and recall.
	Information in the brain can be put into action fairly quickly	Information stored in the brain can change over time due to our creative side of the brain constantly adapting and searching for solutions.
PAPER	No special tools are required to read information on paper other than using one's eyes and brain to observe and decode the information.	Audio and moving pictures cannot be stored on paper unless the imagination of the human brain can bring the work to life.
	Information is easily accessible	Costly to produce in great quantities given the limited supply of the raw materials to create paper.
	Information can be preserved on paper for a long time (about 100 years).	Updating information on paper is usually a laborious and expensive process. It can take nearly 12 months to update, print and distribute information on paper to the global market.
FLOPPY DISK	Relatively cheap to buy in bulk.	Requires additional tools (i.e. a computer, floppy drive and software) to read information on a floppy disk
	Convenient size for carrying around by hand and in holding a reasonable amount of information	Insufficient storage capacity for large books and multimedia applications containing high-quality movies and sounds.
	Easy to read, write and update with the help of a machine called a computer.	Information on a floppy disk is susceptible to damage from outside magnetic fluctuations (e.g. a power cable).
CD-ROM	For a slightly higher cost, a CD-ROM can store about 440 floppy disks (or between 650MB and 700MB) worth of information, making it suitable for multimedia applications	Requires additional tools (i.e. a computer, CD drive and software) to read information on a CD-ROM.
	Normal everyday magnetic fluctuations will not affect the media or the information stored on CD-ROM.	Only the most intense magnetic fluctuations in certain laboratories could cause the reflective media (if made of aluminium) to heat up and melt.
	Information can be accessed with great speed.	The construction of early CD-ROMs had poor quality plastics that can chemically react with the reflective (aluminium) media, and thereby reducing its lifespan for storing information. Nowadays, the plastics have been improved with built-in chemical dyes to prevent this problem. However, the plastics still have one other problem: they are too soft and can scratch easily and this can affect the quality of the information getting through the plastic when it is read by a laser disc player.
	If high quality materials and special dyes are used, CD-ROMs can last for 200 years or more.
THE INTERNET	Information can reach an extremely wide audience quickly and easily with minimal cost.	The content and presentation of many Internet sites is often of a low quality.
	The number of computers connected to the Internet is already a massive storehouse of information, far greater than can be stored on a single CD-ROM or book.	It can be difficult to find specific information you want quickly and easily.
	Information on the Internet can be modified in a matter of minutes at little or no cost, allowing people to access the very latest information.	Additional tools are required to access the Internet (i.e. a computer, a modem, a telephone network and software).
	The type of media used to store information on the Internet is not important.	Accessing multimedia-rich information on the Internet tends to be slow due to limited bandwidth in the network.

6. RETRIVIEVING AND INTERPRETING INFORMATION:

Recall or retrieval of memory refers to the subsequent re-accessing of events or information from the past, which have been previously encoded and stored in the brain. In common parlance, it is known as remembering. During recall, the brain "replays" a pattern of neural activity that was originally generated in response to a particular event, echoing the brain's perception of the real event. In fact, there is no real solid distinction between the act of remembering and the act of thinking.

There are two main methods of accessing memory: recognition and recall.

Recognition is the association of an event or physical object with one previously experienced or encountered, and involves a process of comparison of information with memory, e.g. recognizing a known face, true/false or multiple choice questions, etc. Recognition is a largely unconscious process, and the brain even has a dedicated face-recognition area, which passes information directly through the limbic areas to generate a sense of familiarity, before linking up with the cortical path, where data about the person's movements and intentions are processed. Recall involves remembering a fact, event or object that is not currently physically present (in the sense of retrieving a representation, mental image or concept), and requires the direct uncovering of information from memory, e.g. remembering the name of a recognized person, fill-in the blank questions, etc.

Recognition is usually considered to be “superior” to recall (in the sense of being more effective), in that it requires just a single process rather than two processes. Recognition requires only a simple familiarity decision, whereas a full recall of an item from memory requires a two-stage process (indeed, this is often referred to as the two-stage theory of memory) in which the search and retrieval of candidate items from memory is followed by a familiarity decision where the correct information is chosen from the candidates retrieved.

Interpretation is the act of explaining, reframing, or otherwise showing your own understanding of something. A person who translates one language into another is called an interpreter because they are explaining what a person is saying to someone who doesn't understand. Interpretation requires you to first understand the piece of music, text, language, or idea, and then give your explanation of it. A computer may produce masses of data, but it will require your interpretation of the data for people to understand it.

Basic analysis of "qualitative" information

(respondents' verbal answers in interviews, focus groups, or written commentary on questionnaires):

1. Read through all the data.
2. Organize comments into similar categories, e.g., concerns, suggestions, strengths, weaknesses, similar experiences, program inputs, recommendations, outputs, outcome indicators, etc.
3. Label the categories or themes, e.g., concerns, suggestions, etc.
4. Attempt to identify patterns, or associations and causal relationships in the themes, e.g., all people who attended programs in the evening had similar concerns, most people came from the same geographic area, most people were in the same salary range, what processes or events respondents experience during the program, etc.
5. Keep all commentary for several years after completion in case needed for future reference.

Interpreting information

1. Attempt to put the information in perspective, e.g., compare results to what you expected, promised results; management or program staff; any common standards for your products or services; original goals (especially if you're conducting a program evaluation); indications or measures of accomplishing outcomes or results (especially if you're conducting an outcomes or performance evaluation); description of the program's experiences, strengths, weaknesses, etc. (especially if you're conducting a process evaluation).
2. Consider recommendations to help employees improve the program, product or service; conclusions about program operations or meeting goals, etc.
3. Record conclusions and recommendations in a report, and associate interpretations to justify your conclusions or recommendations.