How to Improve Your Learning Efficiency
continued....Fast Track Learning Results by Joseph Sgro
Good Results with Adults I find that adults who want to return to education courses profit from the exercises. It gradually brings them up to speed.
Here are some of the different people who have used the guide: 13-16 year old students; I've used it with one adult who was a remedial masseuse; adults studying at TAFE - one step below university level and a sixty year old lady who was studying history at university. These people have all achieved and managed to pass their courses. The only students that have not benefitted are the ones who don't make the effort.
What the Teacher Expects In class students are expected to "understand the question", "know how to research", "collect information", "sift through the data" and come up with a "logical way of presenting the information".
Those requirements presume that students already have those skills and are motivated. Do your children demonstrate a lack of goals and purpose? How is their life at school? Does student behaviour produce a poor class environment and sloppy results?
Would you like your children to be more motivated to succeed and would you be eager to see them develop a new sense of purpose, with goals that will promote learning, more enthusiasm and acceptable class behaviour?
The success of our children is VERY important - isn't it? I would do anything to make sure my two boys, Frank and Michael, have a GREAT educational adventure. It is possible, but parents have to help their students create the "right" learning environment.
Your children can be encouraged and guided in class to establish more powerful goals to create "purpose" in what they do - aren't powerful goals what work best for adults?
They need to be shown how to find the resources, how to decide which information is relevant, how to make notes and how to organize and present that information. The guide focuses firstly on developing the right attitude and sense of purpose. Spending time on these essential aspects will virtually guarantee better results from your students.
What Happens in School? What really happens? Most of the time is spent on disruptive students and not on developing skills and learning content.
What can we do? How many students today walk into class feeling apprehensive and wonder whether this will be just another opportunity to fail? They do not see that there is anything to learn from failure other than that they are not worthy of success.
How do we help them through a difficult growing period in their lives? How do we turn our words into actions?
This is why the study skills guide was developed. It was a way of offering a friendly hand and guidance, while students tackle those dreaded assignments and devour the endless content.
Each page attempts to make a contribution by providing exercises to reinforce and explain essential skills and understandings. Some points merely need revising to refresh what we already know, while other sections set the scene for important learning.
Fine tuning our approach to learning... The skills section is the last section in the guide because the text is more than just exercises - it is a short personal development course.
The most important section is the first section which covers "attitude" and how this will influence the results we want. Without some attention to the student as a person, with feelings and a personal agenda, we may gloss over what education is really about.
Of the five sections, attitude is the most important element in life, because it is our personal response to life that really matters and is the making of our success or failure.
You may notice something special in the title: "Study Skills - for students who will only settle for success". The title is an expression of our journey and how we must "expect" and "work towards our own success". It would be great if we were just handed our success and told we could go and enjoy it - unfortunately it will never happen!
Students look for guidance and because they want our attention, parent's time is stretched to the limit - especially when you are a single parent.
The study skills guide will not solve all educational problems. Its major benefit is that it becomes a useful resource for any student to discover ways of learning essential skills and thus improving their learning.
The guide provides examples of how to improve the effectiveness of learning strategies and it will be available when you are not around to answer the question of "how?" or "what?" do I do.
I have set out some important areas to concentrate on if you want to improve your study habits, in my book: "Study Skills - For students who will settle only for success.
Keep reading.. ...continued
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