Do you help your students learn to study?

[Caracal]

I increasingly think that "grading" note-taking (having them send in notes from lectures, readings, etc.) and building in class time for study practice and instruction is essential. My university has a huge number of 1st gen college students so they may need it more than the average student, but, I am committed to the idea that you can't expect them to understand and practice something you don't teach them. And, as an earlier poster noted, these techniques and approaches will often differ by discipline though some approaches remain consistent.

Sounds like a great idea. But (1) how much extra time does that take you? (2) how much less of the course material do you not cover because you are teaching students learning techniques? (3) are there objective measures of what difference doing this makes?

I also think its really important that you don't alienate better students by making a class too remedial. There's a balance here. I agree we have to teach the students we have and that we have to remember we aren't teaching ourselves. But, you just shouldn't be doing stuff that is going to feel like pointless busy work to lots of students. I think grading notes goes over that line. I also wonder about our competency to really do this kind of stuff. People learn differently, and I don't know how appropriate it is to be grading student note taking.

[xerprofrn]

I don't teach them to study, per se, but I create tools/techniques/assignments that will help them learn and study more efficiently.

For example, I implemented skeletal note outlines in one of my classes to help them focus on the important concepts.  I brought in hard copies of my outlines and handed them out.  It increased hand-writing of notes, which research shows is better than typing notes, and now nearly all students do hand-writing during lecture portions.  Because I work at a small, upper-division health sciences school, I often see the same students from lower level classes in the higher level classes that I also teach.  I had a group of students I taught at the lower level in my upper level class.  They actually asked me to make the skeletal note outlines again for them in that class because it gave them a study tool.  I didn't have time to do that for that particular class, but I will do it when I teach it again in Fall.

I also create low-stakes class-prep assignments for my higher level class that requires them to refresh their memory on basic concepts they learned in lower level classes.  My higher level class requires them to bring previous knowledge to the table.  This technique has worked well so that they come into class with those concepts top-of-mind, and I can apply them in lecture and activities to address the new concepts they are learning.

Another thing is reading assignments.  The person in charge of the higher level course I teach has previously resisted giving page numbers instead of entire chapters because, according to her argument, students throw a fit if the exam questions were not part of the readings.  I have had a long conversation with her that we don't create questions for large portions of the chapters, so why do we tell them to read an entire chapter we aren't covering topic-wise?  If we assigned 200 pages for each class session, they aren't reading anyway!  After illustrating that one topic was only 4 pages in a 60 page chapter, I finally convinced her to reduce to page numbers.  Why that conversation was a semester-long fight, I will never know...

In my specialty, there are a TON of youtube videos available for students to watch/listen to.  These videos are high-level reviews of the concepts we cover in class.  I provide those as a supplementary option, but most students watch them.  Then, we do a deep dive into the concept in class.  It's a combo of repetition and class preparation, plus it reduces the class time required to cover the basics.  Love it.

Those are only a few ideas.  But, the key here is making it easier for students to learn.

[octoprof]

I increasingly think that "grading" note-taking (having them send in notes from lectures, readings, etc.) and building in class time for study practice and instruction is essential. My university has a huge number of 1st gen college students so they may need it more than the average student, but, I am committed to the idea that you can't expect them to understand and practice something you don't teach them. And, as an earlier poster noted, these techniques and approaches will often differ by discipline though some approaches remain consistent.

Sounds like a great idea. But (1) how much extra time does that take you? (2) how much less of the course material do you not cover because you are teaching students learning techniques? (3) are there objective measures of what difference doing this makes?

I require students to turn in (PDF copies of) their handwritten notes one time per chapter. I tell them what good notes might look like, and what bad notes certainly look like, and encourage them to take and then rewrite/reorganized good notes to help them study for the exams. The Notes are due in between the two homework exercise assignments each chapter/week. Some students appreciate this and learn to take better notes and thereby increase their learning and their time on the material. Some students hate it, but they don't take notes no matter what is required.  The points assigned are minimal and the grading is simply whether they did it or not (simple and quick) and early on I give them one line or two of feedback on how to take better notes.