SOME STUDENT DIFFICULTIES AND HOW TO RECOGNISE THEM
(A) Reading
Students may of course present their difficulties directly, especially complaining of
the time it takes them to cover particular pieces of work. This may be apparent in
tutorial activities which involve group work based on reading even short passages of
material. What is more likely, and more problematic, is that students do not perceive
themselves as having any difficulties with reading, but they are not reading as
effectively as they might. This might be manifest in their failure to grasp conceptual
material, as presented in assignments, or in the organisation of their written work.
Students may not identify the different kinds of reading skills required for particular
tasks; for example, they may try applying those of detailed, close reading to all texts.
(B) Note Taking
Many students feel they ought to be taking copious notes but find that lack of time
makes this impossible. They then feel guilty or spend time which could be more useful
spent on other activities, taking laborious notes from the units. They may resort to
highlighting pens for making the text and produce gleaming pages of highlighted text from
which it is difficult to abstract what is most important. This is probably because they do
not realize that notes have to be taken for a purpose. It may be to capture the key points
but it may be simply because it is relevant to the specific TMA question. This is why
highlighting is not to be recommended. The important points for a TMA question may not be
the same key points you should note when revising. It is difficult to ignore sections once
they have been highlighted.
Other students may never make notes at all, which may create problems when revising for
examinations and mean that they lack the means of interpreting difficult material by:
- Putting it into their own words
- Abstracting the key points and sorting out the wood from the trees.
Conversely they may rely on the unit summaries and fail to see the complexity of
arguments or the relevance of illustrations (the trees from the wood!). Students may make
notes at the wrong time, for example, when first reading the text, or directly from the
text. If students copy out sections of the text, you may discover these reappearing
verbatim, in essays, as plagiarism, but not perceived as such by the student who has 'only
copied their own notes'.
Key Points
Reading:
- acknowledged difficulties; student may want to read faster
- problem may not be perceived, but shows in poor grasp of material and structure of
essays
- there are different kinds of reading according to one's aims, of which students need to
be aware.
Note Taking:
- some students take too many, too detailed notes
- highlighting may not pick out just the key features, but may pick them all out
- students may be disadvantaged by failing to take any notes
- students need to use their own words
- students should pick out only the key, relevant points.
IDEAS FOR TUTORIALS
(A) Reading
Tutors can introduce, or develop particular approaches to reading, through tutorial
activities using different strategies, as well as in correspondence tuition or in response
to students' requests, by indicating the range of possible approaches. For OU students,
effective reading is likely to involve the use of existing sources, rather than finding
books and gathering their own material. Most study skills books for students (see reading
list) have a section on obtaining and selecting relevant material. Methods suggested in
this pack concentrate on promoting active reading of sources the student already has.
Existing study skills books offer a variety of methods whereby active, critical reading
skills can be developed. Some of these are outlined here.
In tutorials, in particular, it is possible to focus on certain aspects or stages of
reading and note taking in order to develop these skills.
1. Preset Questions
Aims:
- to develop skimming and scanning reading skills
- to facilitate reading for information and to distinguish it from critical reading
- to enable students to pick out key points and record them.
Methods
- At a tutorial, at the start of a block or particular section of work, before students
are likely to have embarked upon it, select an OU unit or Reader article. You can use the
existing questions in the course material or construct a set of your own, aimed at
extracting particular items of information from the text. Allow students five or ten
minutes, as appropriate, to survey the text individually, before attempting to
answer the set questions in pairs.
Comment
- Student can compare their findings in groups or a plenary and discuss any problems they
may have encountered, as well as what they found easy in the exercise. Using the Active
Reading Handout (Handout A1) you could ask students how they first approached this text in
terms of relating it to what they knew already and how it fitted in with what had been
covered in previous blocks/units. The main concern of the exercise is to encourage
students to survey the text and to consider the advantages when reading of having specific
questions in mind when approaching the text.
- The same exercise can be carried out with a selected article outside the course, using a
list of questions set by the tutor. This may involve students in having to make conscious
links with previous course material, since connections will clearly not be made for them
as they often are in OU material.
- The tutor selects an article or passage which is not actually part of the course and
asks students to scan the article individually and then as a group (e.g. of about four
students) to construct their own questions (as in the SQ3R, 'Q' stage—see Handout
A2).
Groups then exchange their sets of questions and attempt to answer each other's
questions in a similar exercise to (a) above.
Answers can be seen as providing the core of notes on the passage.
An extension of this activity could involve each group using their set of answers to
produce notes in whatever form seems most appropriate, using the Note. |
