1 Chapter 1: Academic Survival Skills

The purpose of this book is to introduce you to strategies and skills that you can use to be successful in college classes.

1. Reading College-level Materials. College level materials will include your textbooks, but also scholarly articles and books that are not textbooks. Different kinds of college level materials require different reading skills and approaches, and you will learn them in this book.

2.  Academic Writing Tasks:  Many of your college classes will require you to write academic essays. It is important to note that academic essays are different from other kinds of writing you may have done for high school. They are not the same as book reports, journals or creative writing because they have a structure unique to them. You will learn about that structure in this book.

3. Taking Notes on Lectures. Many of your professors of instructors will rely on lectures to give you the information you need to learn in the course. In many cases, your instructor will lecture over material that is not in the book, but will be on the test, so it is important to know how to listen to lectures and take notes on them you can use later when you study. This book will cover strategies for listening to and taking notes on lectures.

4. Participating in Discussions and Academic Speaking Tasks: Many of your classes will require you to participate in online or in-person discussions over the materials in the course. Sometimes, the purpose of a discussion is to argue your stand on an issue. Sometimes, it may be to achieve a specific goal—like summarizing the main ideas in a chapter or brainstorm ideas for an upcoming project. For you to be successful in class discussions, you need to understand your instructor’s purpose for having a discussion and then you need to know how to prepare for one.

If you have ever played a sport, sung in a choir, acted in a play or been a dancer, you know what it takes to be a successful student.

You probably noticed that practices and rehearsals follow a pattern—first you warm up. That might mean stretching, singing scales, or rehearsing lines.

Next, you work out. This is the longest part of a practice or a rehearsal and it involves actually doing the thing you will need to do in the concert, game or play. You run plays, say your lines or sing the songs you will perform during the concert.

Finally, you cool down—for many rehearsals or practices, a cool down has two parts. One is to get muscles to relax and get the heartrate back to normal, but there is a second purpose to a cool down. Your coach or director will often talk about what went well during that day’s practice, and then he or she will talk to you about what needs to happen to get ready for the performance or the game.

Guess what? Studying follows the same process practices and rehearsals do. The major differences are that you do not have a coach or a director that helps you decide how to study and the other difference is that studying is not public the way rehearsals and practices are. When you study, no one can look at you and know what you are thinking, if you understand the material or if you are making the best choices you can to prepare for the test. However, in sports and music, your choices are out in the open—everyone can hear it when you sing the song correctly, and everyone can tell if you make the basket or hit a home run. If you cannot do these things, you coach or director can hear or see what you are doing wrong and help you correct yourself.

Because studying is private, it is much harder to know if you are doing things correctly, and that is why this book is so important!

The chart below explains the purpose of an academic warm up, work out and cool down:

Academic Skill: Focus on Reading College-Level Materials

A good college reader warms up, works out, then cools down.

Here is how that process applies to reading college material:

In reading, we call the warm up “pre-reading,” the work out “during reading” and the cool-down “after reading.” Whenever you read college-level materials, you need to have strategies for pre-reading, during reading and after reading, just like a good coach will have specific strategies for warming up, working out and cooling down.

Your instructor or tutor will help you decide which strategies to use for what type of reading. However, there are three things to take into consideration about any textbook, article or essay you read that will help you select a good strategy.  They are:

1. Structure- The very first thing to consider about your reading is how it is structured. Does the author seem to be comparing and contrasting two or more people, ideas, places, processes or events? Does the author seem to be describing how a process such as passing a law, photosynthesis or the evaporation cycle happens? Does the author seem to be defining important terms or concepts? Your instructor will help you notice how your textbook chapters or other reading are organized, and once you have figured out the author’s goals, it is time to consider Purpose.

2. Purpose– the second thing to consider about anything you read is what is YOUR purpose for reading the material? Will you have to write a paper over it? Participate in a class discussion? Take a multiple choice test over it? Take an essay test over it? What you will have DO with the information you read should help you determine what strategies you should use to get the most out of your reading. Again, your instructor or tutor will help you think through what strategies will be the most effective ones to use to achieve your purpose.

3. Preferences– The final thing to consider is your preferences. Once you have determined the structure of the reading and thought through the purpose, the last factor you can weigh in is how you would like to take notes—which strategies are the most effective for you? Which ones seem to fit your learning style the best? The more experience you have using strategies, the stronger your preferences will become.

Below are the pre, during and after reading strategies you will focus on in this class. All of the strategies can be adapted to work better for you and your instructor can help you figure out the best ways to do that. For now, you can skim the strategies so you are familiar with them and in class you can learn how to use them and which ones are appropriate for what kind of reading.

Warming up to Read

What do I already know about this topic?

What vocabulary am I going to need to know to understand this? You might find a list of vocabulary or you might skim it for the bold and/or italicized words.

What do the pictures, charts, and graphs tell me about this topic?

Turn the headings into questions. (You can answer these questions when you’re working out.)

Read the first paragraph and the last paragraph. What is the main idea?

Read the first paragraph of each section. Make a quick outline.

What will I need to do when I finish reading? (Take a quiz, write a summary, respond, etc)

You might also take note of when a quiz, summary, or test is due. How many pages will you have to read? How many sections will you have to read?

Working out while Reading

While you are reading, you can’t simply run your eyes over the words and expect to retain anything anymore than you can expect to sit quietly in the corner at a choir rehearsal and learn the songs. While you read, you need to have a way to interact with the material so you can remember it.

There are several strategies you can use to become better at working out while you’re reading. Primarily, you will be taking notes while you read which is often called annotating.

Video on Creating an Annotation System

You might read in order to answer the questions (from the headings) in your warm up.

You might stop after each section and make a few notes about how this section connects to the previous section. How does this support the main idea? Can you describe events in order?

You might make a timeline, a Venn diagram, a mind map, or a chart in order to take notes.

You can read about how to use visuals and graphic organizers to read actively online.

You might make connections to what you already know (from the warm up activity).

You can explore a variety of ways to take notes.  You can read an article about The Best Note-Taking Methods online. You can choose the outline method, the Cornell method, the Boxing method, the charting method, or the mapping method.

Cooling down after Reading

Many students make the mistake of completing the read they have to do for a particular day, closing the book and moving on to the next task. This is like the athlete who leaves practice before the cool down! In addition to risking injury to her muscles, this athlete also misses the end of practice conversations about what the team is doing well and what practices will emphasize in the future. Students need to have a cool down to make sure they understand what they read that day and to think about what some good ways are to study in the days to come.

Summarize what you’ve just read.

If you need to memorize vocabulary, create cards with the words. Check out the WikiHow online for ideas on How to Memorize Vocabulary.

Another great idea to cool down after reading is to tell or teach someone else what you’ve just learned!

One last strategy is to create your own test about the material. If you were an instructor, what would you include on a test.

Academic Skill: Focus on Writing Academic Essays

In college, you might have a variety of writing tasks.  You might write a discussion post, a journal entry, a summary with a response, or an academic essay.

You might use similar strategies for each one.

To Warm Up

You will want to check out some PreWriting Strategies online in order to warm up.

Read the assignment carefully. What are your instructions?

Consider your audience. Is this for another student to read? Is this a thoughtful summary of a topic with your own response? Is this an essay to compare two ideas, describe a sequence of events, or

Much of the writing you will do for college classes will be Academic Essays—and they can be very different from one another. The essay you write in Psychology class explaining which coping mechanisms you have used in the last week is very different from the Biology paper in which you need to explain how cells divide, but they are both academic essays. You might write summaries, discussion posts, journal entries, but they

Before you actually begin to write your paper, there are three things to consider that will help you decide how to approach your paper.

1. What were you told to do? Make sure to carefully read the prompt you were given. Does it give you information about what the instructor wants? Often, the prompt your instructor gave you will directly tell you what he or she is looking for. For example, if a prompt says, “In your introductory paragraph, summarize Smith’s theory of education . . . .” then you know that you will use summary in your introduction.

2. What are your goals? If your goal is to explain how an experience you had in high school caused you to realize you want to become a physical therapist, then you need to use narrative to explain what happened to you.

3. What are your preferences? If the prompt does not provide you with information about what strategy to use, and several strategies might help you achieve your goal, then you can choose the goal that work best for you.

It might help you write academic essays once you know that all academic essays have qualities in common. Once you understand that, it is much easier to decide how to approach a paper assignment. Think of the graphic below as a “paper map.” The boxes represent paragraphs and the descriptions will tell you what the general goals are for each paragraph. Dotted lines represent the different parts of a paragraph. The “paper map” shows you the parts of an academic essay in the order they should appear in your paper. In other words, the thesis statement should be at the end of the introductory paragraph. When you write an academic essay, you need to follow the “rules” of academic essay writing just like, when you play a sport, you need to follow the rules of the game.

You can read about how to organize your writing online.

Working Out while Writing a Paper

The charts below describe the strategies you might use in three parts of your paper—the establishing authority part of the introduction, the evidence part of the body paragraph and the evaluation part of the body paragraph. Your job will be to select the strategies that are most likely to help you achieve your goal.

The chart below lists different strategies you can choose from when you present evidence in your body paragraphs. Notice that many of the strategies are the same ones you can use to establish authority.

The chart below lists the strategies you can use when you evaluate your body paragraph. Remember, EACH body paragraph needs it’s own evaluation. The strategies below are possible ways you can evaluate your paragraph.

Cooling down After Writing a Paper

After you write your paper, re-read it carefully. To do this, go back to the “Structure of an Academic Essay” graphic and go through your paper section by section. Do you establish authority? Do you have a thesis statement where it belongs? Do you have a topic sentence for each body paragraph? Do you present evidence and write an evaluation for each paragraph?

Finally, re-read the prompt. Make sure your paper meets the instructor’s expectations.

Eventually, your instructor will read your rough draft and provide comments for you. You will then have to revise. It is not uncommon for students to re-write papers five or six times before “getting it right.” Be patient with the revision process!

You can read about great strategies for Revising Drafts online.

Academic Skill: Focus on Lecture

You will spend a great deal of time as a college student listening to lectures. Many instructors rely on lecture to give you information that is not in the book, while others will lecture right out of the book. To be a successful student, you need to have a system for taking notes on lectures and figuring out what your instructors goals are for his or her lectures.

Most lectures fall into one of three categories and it is good for you to think about what category the lectures from you courses fit:

Hand-in-Hand lectures: These lectures are right over the material in the books. They are called hand-in-hand since they “walk” side by side with the book—what you read about in the books for the courses is the same material you are hearing about in lecture. Usually, your instructor will give “hand in hand” lectures because he or she believes the material in the book is either difficult and needs further explanation or because the information is REALLY important for you to learn and your instructor wants to do everything possible to make sure it makes sense to you.

Jumping off Point lectures: these lectures “jump off” from the book material. They bring in materials you cannot read about in the book—they may expand on ideas in the book or provide examples of concepts in the book. Usually, instructors who give “jumping off point” lectures believe that students can be responsible for reading the book and learning from it. Instead, they feel it is their job to use their expertise to provide you with information that you cannot learn from the book. They believe the information in the book is a foundation that their lectures will build from. They also believe you are responsible for the material they provide you in lecture and may well choose to test you on it.

Combination lectures: Some instructors will combine both Hand-in-hand and Jumping off point lectures. Others will use one type of lecture for some chapters in a semester and another type for other chapters.

A successful student warms up before a lecture, works out during a lecture and then cools down afterwards. Here is how this process applies to listening to lectures:

Set Yourself Up for Success in Notetaking

In order to take effective notes, you have to understand the process of notetaking and then strategize to make it work for you.

• After effective listening, good note taking is the most important skill for academic success.
• Choose among effective note-taking styles for what works best for you and modify it to meet the needs of a specific class or instructor.
• Outlines work well for taking notes on a laptop when the instructor is well organized.
• Concept map notes are good for showing the relationships among ideas.
• The Cornell method is effective for calling out key concepts and organizing notes for review.
• Instructor handouts and PowerPoint presentations help with, but do not replace, personal note taking.
• Keep your notes organized in a way that makes it easy to study for tests and other uses in the future.

Understanding the Process

Students are expected to take notes because it is impossible for the human brain to remember all of the important facts from a 50 – 80 minute lecture. Some students say “I get more out of lecture if I just sit and listen” but that is biologically impossible. The human brain is not wired to remember that much information at a sitting.

Think of lecture notes like a second (or third) “book” for the class. You are writing it based on your understanding of your instructor’s lecture. You need to study it and use it just like you do your textbook and any other materials your instructor has assigned you to read. Many students take notes and don’t’ bother to review them until the day before a test— if you do this, you will likely not understand much of what you wrote. Notes need to be studied several times a week, just like you would with your book.

Warming up for Notetaking

To warm up your brain before a lecture, look over the notes you took in class the last time the class met. See if there are any clues about what today’s lecture might be about. If not, make a guess based on what you are reading in class and previous lectures. Pay attention to whether previous lectures have been hand-in-hand, jumping-off-point or a combination of the two. Ask yourself why your instructor is choosing this type of lecture.

In order to be a good notetaker, you need to have the right materials ready on the first day of class, and you need to have a way to organize and keep your notes.

• Get the right equipment: Notetaking is very low-tech. All you need is a notebook and a pen. Pencils tend to smear and fade so it is best not to use them. Have a separate notebook for each class. Do not take all your notes in one notebook—if you do, your math notes are jumbled up with your history notes and your English notes. Here are options for notetaking equipment:

• Dating your notes will make it much easier to find information when you need it later.

Working out During Notetaking

There are many ways to take effective notes. Some students love the Cornell method, other like to take simple narrative notes. Others like to use outlines or mind maps. Whatever method you choose, your notetaking system must have three features:

• It must allow you to clearly record main ideas from a lecture
• It must be “sustainable.” It is impossible to write down every word your instructor says. Therefore, you need to develop a method of taking notes that allows you to record a great deal of information quickly—this may involve developing a series of abbreviations,

using symbols or creating an outline. Note taking strategies that require you to write out full sentences, spell all words correctly and record every idea are not sustainable because you will quickly fall behind.

• It must produce reviewable notes. The notes you take during a lecture are supposed to be like a second text book for your class. They are useless if you cannot use them to study for exams or do other assignments for the class. Your notes need to be legible, and have enough information that, when you go back, you can make sense of what you wrote.

You can find excellent information on How to Take Better Notes: The 6 Best Note-Taking Systems online.

Here are some general tips:

• Stay organized: Keep your notes and handouts separate for each class. For example, you might have a different notebook and folder for each class or a large notebook with a different tab for each class. This will save you the time of trying to organize and locate your notes when studying for an exam.
• Use your paper: Many students try to fit all of a day’s class notes onto one page and are often left with many extra blank pages in their notebooks. Instead, every time your instructor changes topics, flip to a new page. This allows you to find the material easily and makes your notes much cleaner.
• Use visual cues: Try highlighting, underlining, or drawing arrows or exclamation points next to any main or difficult concepts. This will call attention to these sections and remind you to spend more time reviewing them.
• Group together similar concepts: Grouping or “chunking” material is a good way to make studying and memorization easier. You can try drawing the main concept and connecting it to smaller, related concepts or making an outline of the information. Either one can serve as an effective study guide.
• Make notes legible: Some people have messy handwriting. However, writing as clearly as possible when you take notes will make it easier to review them later. It’s also helpful if you’re asked to share your notes with another student who missed class. If laptop use is permitted during class, you can also type your notes.

Abbreviate

Most classes have jargon you can abbreviate. In an American Government class, for example, the word “Government” will be used a great deal. In an Earth Science class, long words like “environment” or “Photosynthesis” might be used regularly. Abbreviate them—“gov,” “env” and “PhSyn” will be much easier for you to write quickly. If you are worried, you will forget what your abbreviations mean, make a glossary at the top of your page.

Abbreviate common concepts. For examples, instructor may say that something has increased or decreased, improved, or gotten worse etc. Use an arrow up or an arrow down to represent that idea. You can the arrow up or down in any class.

Use mathematical symbols to represent ideas like “added,” or “lost,” “divided” or “multiplied.” For example the concept:

“The Governor needed five more Congress members’ votes in order to pass the bill” might show up like this in your notes:

“Gov need 5 + cong member to pass bill.”

Pay Attention to Numbers

Listen for Phrases that Help You Set Goals

Most instructors provide some direction for students about what they will cover in a lecture. Often this happens at the beginning of class (So make sure you arrive at class on time, notebook and pen ready!)

Listen for phrases like:

• “Today we are going to talk about . . . “
• “We are going to discuss the reasons why _____________ happened.”
• “There are five kind of . . . .”
• “It is important for you to understand . . . “
• “___________ is significant because . . . .”

Listen for Transitions

Most instructors give you some warning when they are about to move on to another topic. Learn to pay attention to how your instructors transition. Here are some clues:

Some will stop a lecture and ask if there are questions about what he/she just said. Often, that is a cue that he/she is moving on to another topic.

Others will cue the class by saying something like “The second important point . . . .” This tells you that the instructor is moving on. In your notes, write “2nd important point . .  .”

Sometimes instructors will “change gears” by warming you that something is different than something else. For example, is a Biology teacher is talking about deciduous trees and wants to shift to talking about evergreen trees, she might say something like, “Evergreen trees are different from deciduous trees in several important ways . . . .” In your notes, write something like “Evergreen diff from decid trees ‘cuz .. . .”

Instructors will sometimes write lecture outlines on the board—make sure to use them! However, many students make the mistake of writing down only what the instructor puts on the board. Usually, this simply isn’t enough. Taking more through notes is necessary.

Cooling Down After the Lecture

The notes you take are like another book for your class. You need to use them like you would a book to study for your class, which mean that your notes have to have some of the same qualities a book does. Here are some ways to organize your notes:

• Create an “index.” After the lecture is over, jot down a few words about the subject of that day’s notes. Put it under the date that you put across the top of the page. Something like “Reasons the Civil War Started” will be fine. When you review notes later, you can scan the subjects to find the notes you need.

• As you know, textbooks often have important terms bolded. You can do the same thing. Use a highlighter to mark important terms. Make sure your notes have a definition of the term that makes sense to you. If they don’t add to the definition by drawing an arrow and writing in the margin.

• As you also know, textbooks often use bullet lists, headings and subheadings. Use a different colored pen and/or highlighters to go back to your notes and make your own headings and subheadings. For example, if you instructor is lecturing over the five major outcomes of the Civil Rights movement, go back to your notes and write (in the margins if you have to) “Five major outcomes of Civil Rights Movement.” Next, number each reason so you can clearly see them. If you seem to be short a reason or two, visit your instructor or talk to classmate to see what you missed.

• Tab your notes. As you get closer to a big exam or paper, make tabs for your notes. You can buy tabs at office supply stores or make your own out of tape and colored paper. The tabs will run alongside the edge of the notes and will divide your notes up by subject. If you are taking an American History class, one tab might say “Revolutionary War.” Another might say “Civil War” etc.

Having well-organized notes is a great start, but it isn’t quite enough. After you organize your notes, you need to review them. Here are some ways to review your notes:

• Ask yourself why your instructor decided to lecture over this material in the way that he or she chose to do. What type of lecture is it? Hand-in-Hand or Jumping-off-point? Why do you suppose he or she chose to deliver that type of lecture to the class today? How does the lecture relate to other course materials you have to read for the course?

• Make sure you understood the lecture itself. When you review, pretend you need to tell a classmate who missed the lecture what the main ideas were. Actually explain the notes—either out loud or silently.

• Add additional notes of explanation you didn’t get a chance to add in class. Make sure you understand any abbreviations you might have used.

• Identify concepts that were not clear to you. Mark confusing parts up with questions marks and find a classmate, a tutor, or your instructor to get the concepts clarified.

• Share notes with a classmate. What did he or she write down? How is it different from what you wrote down? What can you add to one another’s notes?

Academic Skill: Focus on Discussions

Discussion is a big part of college instruction. Most instructors use discussion in their class at least a few times during the semester, so it is important to understand the purpose of college discussions. Many students have a negative opinion about discussion because they believe important information and learning can only come from the instructor, so what students have to say isn’t really that important. Some students even get mad when their class has discussions—they believe that instructors have discussions when they want a “day off” and make the students do the work. Since an instructor’s attention cannot be everywhere, some students use discussion time as an opportunity to text their friends and family, have side conversations or do homework for another class. They also believe that, since their classmates are not experts, what difference does it make what they have to say? However, your instructor has discussions for specific purposes. There are three types of discussions. They are:

Concept Check Discussion– The purpose of concept check discussions is to give students opportunities to practice discussing challenging concepts. The act of putting unfamiliar terms and concepts into your own words causes you to clarify your thinking and deepen your understanding. Listening to someone else describe a concept is less likely to lead to deep understanding than having to talk about it yourself. Think about it like this— If you want to learn to swim, you must actually swim. You can learn a little bit by listening to someone talk about swimming, or watching other people swim, but you really cannot learn to swim until you put on a bathing suit and jump in the water.

Task Focused Discussion—The purpose of a task focused discussion is to complete a task—usually one that will help you with an upcoming test or assignment. Sometimes, task focused discussion are with the whole class, but sometimes the instructor will break the class up into small groups. An instructor might ask you to brainstorm topics for an upcoming paper, or think up examples to illustrate an important concept. He or she might ask you to summarize a reading, pick out main ideas or develop a time-line that will help you understand an important process or a significant series of events. In a math or science class, you might be asked to solve a mathematical problem.

Evaluation Discussion– An evaluation discussion focuses on evaluating another student’s work. Students are often particularly hostile to evaluation discussion because they feel they are grading one another’s work—which is the instructor’s job, not theirs. They may think, “I barely understand this myself, why should I have to comment on someone else’s work?” They may say “Only the instructor’s opinion matters since that is where my grade comes from. Who cares what my classmates, who are as clueless as me, think?” However, your instructor sees evaluation discussions very differently. You may be asked to read and comment on one another’s essays, or you may be asked to compare and contrast how you approached a specific problem or question. Usually, the purpose of an evaluation discussion is to help students develop judgment about what is and is not effective work. Usually, this mean applying ideas you have learned in the class about effective writing, problem solving, etc. to that students works. For example, if you are learning about effective thesis statements, your instructor may want to see if you can read other students’ papers and recognize when a thesis statement is effective and when it needs more work. The idea behind an evaluation discussion is that, if you can recognize what is good and what needs word about a classmate’s thesis, you will leave class better able to write a good thesis statement of your own. Also, when you leave the class, you will have to actually use whatever you learned in the class on your own—for example, when you complete your composition class, you are expected to write an academic essay on your own. Evaluation discussion provide you will practice being independent and using your new skills while your instructor is still nearby to help you if you get confused.

Set Yourself Up for Success in Discussion

You have probably heard the saying “You get out of it what you put into it.” This is true to discussions. You need to participate in discussions to get anything out of them. Discussions take the same kind of preparation that lectures do.

Warming Up for Discussion

In order to get the most out of a discussion make sure you read all materials and do all assignments ahead of time.

Sometimes, there is miscommunication between instructors and students that leads students the come to class unprepared. For example, your instructor might say something like, “On Friday, we will discuss chapter five.” In most cases, your instructor assumes you will have read chapter five by the time you come to class. As a matter of fact, they will usually base their discussion on the assumption that everyone has read the chapter, so they will assume you are familiar with the terms and ideas introduced in the reading. Students sometimes assume that they will be told what they need to know about chapter five during class on Friday, so reading the chapter ahead of time isn’t necessary. When students come to class without having read, they get confused quickly since the other students and the instructor are discussing terms and ideas they have not heard.

Similarly, an instructor might say something like “On Monday, we will have a workshop over your papers” or “We will go over the problems at the end of chapter three.” Most instructors expect you to come to class with your papers written and your problems completed to the best of your ability. What they hope to accomplish during class time is to have you ask questions about what you did not understand or to review other students’ work so you can comment on what they did well and what they need to work on. These activities are impossible if you haven’t done your homework ahead of time. However, sometimes students expect the class will be like a study hall where they can begin an assignment, or simply work on it on their own. In college study-hall like classes are fairly rare—since classes only meet two or three times a week, instructors generally expect you to actually do your homework outside class, while class time is usually spent either getting you ready to do homework and papers, getting you ready for exams or helping you evaluate work you have already done.

When the instructor expects students to peer review a paper they have not written or to discuss a chapter they have not read, this leads students to believe that these class days are simply a waste of time and that their instructor is boring. The truth is that the activity is a waste of time because the student is not prepared for the discussion. If a hockey player showed up for practice with no skates or pads, he or she would have to sit on the bench and watch everyone else practice. Practice will go on without him or her with the players that did show up prepared. This doesn’t mean the practice itself is a waste of time or ineffective. It means that it was a waste of time for the player who did not show up prepared.  The same is true for your classes—if you show up prepared, you will get more out of class.

Working Out During a Discussion

At the beginning of a discussion, see if you can figure out if the discussion is concept check discussion, a task focused discussion or an evaluation discussion.  How you “work out” during each one will differ.

Working out for a Concept Check Discussion

Your instructor has concept check discussion because he or she wants to give you practice talking about important ideas. That means one of two things:

1. Your instructor believes the material you are covering is essential to the class and you will benefit from an opportunity to ask questions and discuss ideas with others. His or her goal is that you will leave class with a good understanding of whatever was the subject of the discussion. He or she wants you to have this solid understanding because he or she knows it will be important later—the concepts you cover in that discussion will be essential to understanding the rest of the class.
2. Your instructor wants you to be able to discuss certain ideas in your own words, or develop your own opinion about some part of the subject matter. Your instructor rarely does this randomly—he or she wants you to be able to discuss certain ideas in your own words or develop your own opinion about certain ideas in order to prepare you for something you will do down the road such as write a paper, take an essay test or give a speech.

To get the most out of a Concept Check discussion, ask yourself:  “What concepts and ideas seem to be really important to my instructor in this discussion? How confident am I that I understand these concepts? Do I understand this concept well enough to discuss it in my own words? Have I developed my own opinions about this concept?”

Finally, find out what you have to do with the information you are learning. Will you have to write a paper? Take an essay test? Give a speech? You can often look at a course schedule or the syllabus to find out. If you can’t find anything there, ask your instructor directly what assignments are coming up and how the discussion you are currently doing relates to that assignment.

Working Out for a Task Focused Discussion

Your instructor has Task focused discussions when he or she wants to give you an opportunity to master a skill you will need to be successful in the class or give you an opportunity to accomplish a task that will have a direct influence on an assignment you will need to do later. Often task focused discussion happen in small groups of 3 to 5.

To work out during a task focused discussion, ask yourself, “Why is this skill important to master?” or “How will this task we are working on help me with the assignment, tests, etc we will have down the road?”

Also, actually participate during the discussion. It is tempting to allow the other students to do the work, particular if it seems they know more than you do. However, if it matters to your success in the class that you master particular skills, ask yourself, “Do I really understand this?” Make every effort to truly understand the task you are being asked to do. Make every effort to understand why your instructor would like you to do that task and how it relates to upcoming assignments, papers or tests.

Working Out During an Evaluation Discussion

Your instructor has an evaluation discussion when he or she wants you to provide feedback to other students in the class on something they have done—like a paper or an art project. Of course, you should also receive feedback from other students. Your instructor has these kinds of discussions because he or she wants to give you opportunities to practice skills you have learned in the class so you will slowly but surely be able to do these things on your own. The question to ask yourself during an Evaluation discussion is, “Have a mastered these skills I am learning well enough to be able to apply them to my own work and the work of other students?”

Cooling Down After a Discussion

A cool down for a discussion is fairly straightforward. When you are doing your homework for the class later on, ask yourself these questions:

“What did my instructor want us to get out of today’s discussion?” Jot down all the answers you could think of. You might say “My instructor wants us to learn how supply-demand graphs work” or “My instructor wanted to know how well we understood cell division.”

Next ask yourself, “How will the concepts I learned in this discussion help me achieve future goals in the class?” Again, jot down your answers. You might say “My instructor wants us to learn how supply-demand graphs work because we will have to do them on the exam in two weeks.”

Finally, ask yourself how confident you are that you understand not only why you had this sort of discussion, but if you mastered the skills or concepts you were working with.

Think about It

You arrive at class one day and your instructor wants the class to debate whether presidential elections should be determine by the popular vote or the electoral college. What type of discussion is this? What sorts of assignments would an assignment like this prepare you to do?

Your math instructor tells you that, the next time the class meets, you will work in groups to solve a series of problems. You have to write out each step your group took to solve the problem on a sheet of poster paper and then explain to the rest of the class why you chose to solve the problem like you did. What kind of lecture is this? What does a discussion like this prepare you to do?

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