Study Tips for the Easter Break

Today sees the start of the Easter vacation period for students here at Keele. Of course it might not feel that way if you're facing a plethora of assessments to plough through and you have a series of deadlines to match them. Fitting then, I thought, to offer a few words of encouragement by listing a few things that might help you reach the golden standard of a 'self-regulated independent learner', or errr, going it alone. So let's see, just exactly what is it to be ... self-regulated?

Well, to heavily generalise, we can think about working independently as three-tiered process. We must first be equipped with the ability to explicitly set out our objectives. This handy diagram shows this as planning (online source available at http://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/tech/lict/resources/epearl/support.html, accessed 4th April 2011). This bit can be in as much detail as you like - so long as it is useful to you. Start off by expressing what you need to achieve and provide yourself with a realistic time frame in which to do it.

The second stage is all about the doing. Obviously, this is the bit that requires the most amount of motivation and you have to be self-disciplined and self-directed to actually get producing something. This then leads you to the often overlooked third and final stage of reflecting. This tends to get overlooked (or at least lessened in importance) because we often see the 'producing' stage as the leg work and quite frankly, once its done, we're also done! But actually this stage is quite critical and being able to self-evaluate your work gives you the chance to really fine tune it and make those all important amendments. I always encourage students to see the editing processes as just as significant as the writing ones because what happens here really counts. So know your weaknesses and iron them out. Check the readability - yes grammar, spelling and punctuation - but not forgetting flow, structure, logic and order. This is also a great time to look for over-descriptive paragraphs or the inclusion of irrelevant information. And just as some things might need to go, also spy the things that still need inclusion - is this point fully developed? am I missing a reference? and am I answering the question? So in a nutshell, it's all about the P's: plan, produce and proofread.