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.
From Nancy V. Wood, College Reading
and Study Skills, 5th ed. Harcourt Brace, 1996.
