Preface for Instructors
This book focuses on four important academic skills all college students must master:
- Taking notes on lectures
- Writing academic essays
- Reading college level texts
- Participating in discussion
This revised version
Our Approach
While many study skills, composition and reading skills texts separate these activities into discrete skills to be learned separately, this books recognizes that these skills are inter-connected. A student who struggles with the reading will have a hard time writing about it or discussing it. A student who with talking notes while listening to a lecture will struggle to see connections between the lecture and the reading.
Therefore, this book moves away from the “skills and drills” texts that are so common in reading and writing textbooks. Instead, this book features process and provides opportunities for students (and instructors) to think about the best ways to approach academic tasks.
Like most textbooks, this book recognizes that that successful discussion participation, college-level reading, academic writing and lecture note taking don’t just “happen.” However, this book uses an easy-to-remember analogy students can apply successfully to all four academic processes. That analogy is the “warm up,” “work out,” and “cool down” which helps students understand that each academic activity requires pre-planning, (warm up) that students must thoughtfully choose from a variety of strategies to accomplish the academic task at hand (work out) and they must deliberately consider their studying to determine what they did (or did not) accomplish (cool down.)
The book makes the point that there are many ways to “warm up,” “work out,” and “cool down,” and students need to consider their goals, the structure of the text they must read and their own preferences before choosing a study method. For example, if a student is taking a sociology class in which the main method of evaluation is multiple-choice exams and discussion participation, they should carefully select study activities that will prepare them for multiple choice exams and discussions. However, if the instructor changed their mind in the 8th week of the semester and began giving essay exams as opposed to multiple-choice ones, the student should realize that the way they study needs to change.
The Book’s Structure
This book follows this basic structure:
Chapter one provides information about strategies and introduces students and instructors to the “warm up, work out, cool down” concept. Each chapter after that features college-level reading—in some cases, we include a textbook chapter, in others, we have pulled essays from on-line sources. In most chapters, there are also links for TED Talks or other online lectures.
In each chapter, students will be asked to develop a study plan that involves selecting the best strategies for reading the materials, preparing for various types of exams, participating in discussion and listening to lecture.
Instructors will help students develop and then follow-through on their study plans.
We sincerely hope that this book will work for you and your students as you work together to develop academic literacy. However, the beauty of an Open Education Resource is that it is flexible—hopefully, it will enhance your own pedagogical creativity!
Kathryn Klopfleisch
English Instructor
Inver Hills Community College, Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota
Lori-Beth Larsen
English and Reading Instructor
Central Lakes College, Brainerd, Minnesota
