College Studying Course characteristics

College Studying
    Good morning. Today’s lecture is about college studying. It is well accepted both in theory and in practice that academically successful college students know how to study. Research suggests, however, that many students enter postsecondary institutions unprepared to meet the studying demands placed on them. This lack of preparation can be traced, in part, to the "hidden curriculum" at the secondary level. That is, study strategies are "hidden" because teachers at all levels assume that their students already have a repertoire (全部技能) of studying behavior when they enter the classroom.
    We will mainly talk about the two factors related to effective studying and active learning. They are as follows:
    First, course characteristics. The first factor that influences studying at college level is a student’s ability to understand the situation or context. Many people describe contexts as the characteristics of a course, or the external factors that influence reading and studying. These external factors include the texts that are assigned and the academic tasks that are either tacitly (心照不宣地，默认地) or explicitly (清楚明确地) communicated by the professor. First, we will discuss the role of texts. Early research examining texts was mainly concerned with text structure. Currently, text research, as it is related to college studying, seems to be heading in two directions.
    First, there has been a recent emphasis on how students approach texts in a variety of domains (领域，范畴), particularly in history and science, as well as on students’ beliefs about these texts. A second direction that currently is drawing interest examines lecture notes as texts, particularly how students attempt to organize and study these texts as part of Test preparation. The results from these studies, which are helping to create a theory of note-taking beyond the encoding-storage perspective, strongly support the notion that college students should use generative strategies to interact with lecture notes.
    The second course-specific characteristic is academic tasks, the products students are asked to formulate and the operations or thinking processes they should use to do so. To be successful in their studying, students must understand the characteristics and nuances (细微差别) of academic tasks and then adjust their strategies accordingly.
    Current research on academic tasks has focused on two areas. Some researchers have investigated how tasks vary across domains. Other studies have investigated academic tasks using case study methodology to describe the patterns of students’ interpretation of academic tasks, their choice of strategies, and their subsequent academic performance. The second factor is characteristics of the learner. The important things to active learning are students’ prior knowledge, metacognitive (元认知的) abilities, motivational levels, and interest in what they are reading or studying. Research has examined the role of prior knowledge in comprehension and learning in two periods: first generation of knowledge which lays the groundwork, and second generation of knowledge which examines knowledge as it relates to social and cultural contexts. Moreover, interest is key in determining how students process information, and that interesting information seems to be processed differently from uninteresting information.
    To sum up, we mainly discussed the research factors related to studying at college level: course characteristics and learner characteristics. Thanks for your attention.