This set of tips is based on three sources. I went to the people at the Academic Services Center, who have had extensive experience working with students, and asked them what to put in a page like this. I read the research literature on studying - or at least some of it. I also have been giving these tips to students for a number of years and decided to list two tips which work, and one widely used technique that doesn't work. These tips are useful for students of all ability levels. In particular, students who have done well in high school often have not learned how to study, especially for a course that requires you to think.
WHAT NOT TO DO: Memorize and highlight. Highlighting is not particularly useful, especially if you highlight a lot of the book. If you take notes on the reading, the ideas which are in your notes will actually be processed through your brain. It is quite easy to highlight text and not even read it.
TWO THINGS TO DO:
1. ORGANIZE THE COURSE MATERIAL USING A SCHEME. Any course like this has a lot of material that you need to tie together in your mind. A scheme is some way that you use for organizing the course material and tying the reading, lab activities, discussion sessions, and big classes together. Over the years many students have told me about lots of different schemes they use. If you have a scheme which works for you, fine. But if you don't use such a scheme, or if the scheme you use isn't working for you, here are two suggestions:
Outlining: This is what I did as a student. For each exam, prepare 2-3 sheets of paper which summarize the main ideas in the class and how they relate to each other. The important part of the exercise is the mental activity which you go through in preparing the outline. Borrowing and looking at someone else's outline will not do the job. One student who outlined -- and did nothing else, as far as I knew, raised her exam grade from a D to a C. A concept map is a more visual version of an outline.
Structured Notetaking: This is what is recommended by the Academic Services Center. You can use it together with outlining or concept mapping. What you do is to take notes from the big class on the left hand side of your notebook page. Use the right side of the notebook page to relate the material from other parts of the course to the big class, or to highlight big and really important concepts.
When you get your first exam back, the usual reaction of most students is to look at the grade, feel happy or sad or somewhere in between, and toss the exam into a pile... or even into the trash. But that exam contains a lot of information which you can use to do better on the next one.
Take a look at the exam and, first, see if you can figure out where you went wrong. Is it that you didn't understand some concept? Or is it that you simply couldn't recall something on a particular exam situation? Most importantly, is there any TYPE of question which you had particular difficulty with? Some of my exam questions are simple recall. Some of them ask you to recall some of the connective logic which was used in the course. Some ask you how we know that something is true. And some... usually the most thought-provoking... ask you to do higher-order thinking, to answer a complex question which you haven't seen before.
If you can identify a type of question that you have a lot of trouble with, you can do two things so you can improve next time:
(i) Practice with similar questions (this is where studying in a group really helps; you can make up exam questions for each other)
(ii) look at the old questions in the reader
One student who changed his study practice to include taking old exams raised his grade from a C to an A.
One way to look at questions you make up, if you don't work in a group, was suggested by David Johns of the Academic Services Center. Write your question on one side of a card or a sheet of paper, and put the answer on the other side. That way, when you come back to the question later, you won't see the answer sitting right in front of you, and you will go through the same mental process that you need to go through in taking an exam.
And lastly, whatever study technique you use, keep in mind that my exams include approximately:
1/3 "recall" questions which you can answer from memory
1/3 "reasoning" questions where you are asked to re-create some logical thinking that we went through in class or that was explained in the book
1/3 "higher order thinking" questions where you are asked to create some new connections between concepts, state what will happen in a hypothetical situation.
For those of you who know about Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives, the recall questions are at the bottom level (level 1), the reasoning questions are a little bit above the bottom level, and the higher order thinking questions are generally drawn from levels 3-6.