In order to be successful in college chemistry, you MUST be willing to put in extensive amounts of time outside of class. There is no way around this. You cannot simply read the book, to go class, and expect to do well. It takes a combination of reading before class, reading after class, being attentive during lecture, doing problems (and more problems!) outside of class, etc., to be successful in this course.

Since you will be spending so much time working for this course, it is also best that you learn to work efficiently. The links, tips, and videos below will help you to do so.

Study Tips: 

Here are some suggestions that might improve your study habits. You don’t have to incorporate them all - even adding one to your repertoire will help. After the bullet list, there’s a short section on how to read a text, and then a page on Power Tools.

General Tips

• Watch Saundra McGuire’s video. It’s the most productive 45 minutes you’ll spend this semester.

• Study early. Begin reading several days before a topic is covered. Leave yourself plenty of time to seek help.

• Study often: 30-40 minutes at a time, 3 to 4 times each day (WITHOUT your phone). You should average 2 hours per day, and that should include:

  • Watch any relevant course videos.

  • Read the assigned readings in the text (See below for suggestions on how to read effectively)

  • Do problems to test your understanding

  • Explain what you are studying to someone (your roommate, your cat, your grandmother).

• Review the material before class.

• Review your notes after class.

• Try some problems from the end of chapter

• Relate what you are studying to things you are familiar with. By making connections to existing knowledge, you make room for more stuff. For example, when you boil a pan of water, think about the physical changes going on. Draw a picture!

• Challenge yourself to describe familiar things on multiple levels - particulate, macroscopic and symbolic.

• Study the material as you would if you had to teach it to the class next week.

• Don’t cram for the exams! Not only does it not work as well as spaced out studying, in chemistry it’s actually detrimental. When your working memory is filled to overflowing with 1000 factoids you stuffed in there and are trying to keep from falling out before you need them, you have no working memory left to think about the problems on the exam. The exams are not about retrieval, they are new problems that require you to apply your knowledge. That takes thought.

How to read a textbook:

• Pre-read the assigned section to put things in context. In this phase, you’re just looking to get an overview of what the reading will be about and how it’s organized.

• Starting again at the beginning, read a short section of the text (a paragraph or two, a page, whatever seems manageable), without highlighting and without taking notes. Then, close the book and write a summary of what you just read. When you’re done, compare your notes to the text and make any corrections. Repeat for the next section...

• When you come to a worked example, cover up the solution and try the problem on your own. If you can’t do it, go back in the text and see if you can find what you’re missing. If not, uncover the first step and try again. Test yourself with these worked examples!

• If there is a similar problem following the example, do that and check your answer.

• Once you have worked your way through the assigned reading, do a bunch of related problems. Each section in the text has problems at the end of the chapter that are associated with it. Do as many of these as you can! At least read each one and think about how you’d solve it. Do NOT spend your time re-reading the text.

Power Tools

There’s a good body of scientific work about how people learn and what makes for effective learning. (I’m not talking about whether you’re a “visual” or a “kinesthetic” learner, I’m talking about how people learn.) It turns out that what feels like effective study habits usually aren’t very effective at all. Highlighting, re-reading the text, watching tons of videos on a subject, pounding away on one type of problem until you have mastered it… all lead to the illusion of knowledge, not true mastery.

One approach to effective learning is explained in the book “Powerful Teaching” by Agarwal and Bain. They focus on four “power tools” that, if built into your approach to studying, will help you learn faster and remember more. These tools are:

• Retrieval practice - pull information out of your head rather than cram it in

• Spacing - spread learning out over time. Try to retrieve stuff you learned yesterday, last week, last month...

• Interleaving - improve discrimination by mixing up closely related topics. It’s essential to know what approach to take for a particular problem. If you block study (all the same type of problem), you don’t practice discrimination.

• Feedback-driven metacognition - know what you do and don’t know. Test yourself, before I do.

Retrieval

• Allow yourself to forget a bit. Difficulty retrieving = better long term learning

• Retrieve rather than re-read
  When reading a text, retrieve rather than take notes:

  • Read a section of the text

  • Close the book and write down everything you can remember

  • Check your notes against the text

• Try the same strategy in class?

• Mix retrieval with encoding

• Quiz yourself

• Periodic Brain Dumps - spend 20 minutes writing down everything you know about a topic

Spacing

• Give yourself time to forget

• Quiz yourself / Brain Dump after 2 days, after a week, after 2 weeks, after a month…

Interleaving

• Mix up problems - don’t block study

• But also mix problems that are similar

Metacognition

• • Judgement of Learning

  • Before doing a problem, predict your success: give a * to problems you know how to do, and a ? to those you don’t.

  • Answer all the *, without book or notes

  • Look up all the ? and do them

  • Verify that the * are correct

  • Apply metacognition sheets to readings, lectures

  • On a scale of 1 (very unclear) to 4 (very clear), rate your overall understanding of the reading/lecture

  • What are Two Things you learned?

  • On a scale of 1 (not confident) to 4 (very confident), how confident are you that the Two Things are correct?

  • What concepts did you find difficult to understand?

  • What will you do to improve your understanding of the difficult concepts?