Tips for Taking College Biology Courses
Some guidance from Mr. Crockett.
This page is still a work in progress as I "brain dump" my usual advise and find extra resources for support.
This page is still a work in progress as I "brain dump" my usual advise and find extra resources for support.
If you continue your formal education long enough, you will inevitably reach a point where you begin to struggle academically. This is natural, and it happens to every student. Some students might reach this point very early in their education, and others might not reach it until they are a Ph.D. student. When you reach the point where school is "not as easy as it used to be," it can be stressful, and it can make you question yourself (your readiness, your abilities, your goals, your identity, etc.). This might happen when you earn your first B as a straight-A student, when you make your first C or D on a test, or when you receive your first failing grade. A lot of students reach this point when they first take AP classes in high school or when they take their first classes in college. One of the reasons we offer AP classes is to provide a supportive environment where you can start to feel a little more challenged than you are used to feeling while still having the guidance and safety net of your high school classmates and teachers. If this is something you are experiencing as one of my students, as your teacher/instructor/professor, I want you know that you are smart, you are capable, you are successful, and you can and will learn Biology, do well in the course, and be academically stronger than you were at the beginning of the semester! These tips might help you along the way:
1) How to take notes during "lecture"
In class: If your class includes a traditional lecture component (whether it is a live lecture or a pre-recorded video), you should take notes. How much you should write down is a Goldilocks problem. If you try to write down everything, you will miss details (or worse, the larger narrative thread of the lecture), and your notes will be less useful because they are too long and/or incomplete. On the other hand, if you write down nothing, it might all make sense in the moment, but whatever you thought you learned is now lost and irretrievable days, weeks, or months later. So, you want to write down key points, new terms, and (if your instructor provides copies of their slides/lecture notes for you) anything interesting or important that your instructor talks about that might not be written in their notes. If your instructor does not provide copies of their slides, you could consider recording the audio of the lecture (with your instructor's explicit permission), or use a dictation app on your phone or computer that records text from speech. However, even if you use a recording or one of these apps, you should STILL hand-write notes during class.
After class: If you have a transcript of the lecture, or if the lecture is recorded, you probably do not want to sit through it in its entirety. That is probably going to be wasted time for you and won't really improve your understanding of the material. What you want to do is distill, expand, and reorganize the information. When I take notes, the first draft of my notes usually look like a long list of bullet points of words, phrases, short sentences, (relevant) doodles, arrows, underlines, and side-notes. If I don't rework these notes soon, I will forget what I meant in my writing, and the notes become useless. Sometime after the initial lecture and before the next lecture, I have to type these notes while expanding on the notes I have written down, adding information that I remember (but didn't write down), adding definitions and diagrams that I look up from the notes, and reorganize it with headings, key terms highlighted, and more readable sentences so I can understand the notes later once I have forgotten what happened during lecture. This new version of the notes becomes the bulk of what I study for the exam.
After class: If you have a transcript of the lecture, or if the lecture is recorded, you probably do not want to sit through it in its entirety. That is probably going to be wasted time for you and won't really improve your understanding of the material. What you want to do is distill, expand, and reorganize the information. When I take notes, the first draft of my notes usually look like a long list of bullet points of words, phrases, short sentences, (relevant) doodles, arrows, underlines, and side-notes. If I don't rework these notes soon, I will forget what I meant in my writing, and the notes become useless. Sometime after the initial lecture and before the next lecture, I have to type these notes while expanding on the notes I have written down, adding information that I remember (but didn't write down), adding definitions and diagrams that I look up from the notes, and reorganize it with headings, key terms highlighted, and more readable sentences so I can understand the notes later once I have forgotten what happened during lecture. This new version of the notes becomes the bulk of what I study for the exam.
2) How to use your textbook
It's probably big, heavy, hard to read, and more expensive than it needs to be, but you should actually read it. However, don't sit down to read it from beginning to end like a novel unless you want to fall asleep and likely forget everything you read.
3) I understood everything in class, but the exam felt different.
Yep! Students (myself included) can often sit through a lecture or read through a book chapter and think, "oh this makes sense! I understand this." But there is a huge difference between "this makes sense" in the moment and being able to recall, apply, or analyze the information later for an exam. The "this makes sense" sensation is like feeling the water of a gentle creek flow over your as you stand on its banks, but soon after the water passes, it is out of reach. When taking a course, you need that water (the knowledge) to stick around long enough to put it to use; you need to construct a dam to hold back that water to power your intellectual turbine. Thus, you have to *do* something with that information to get it to stick long-term.
4) When, how, and why to study
There is a Goldilocks approach to this. Your life should not be Biology 24/7, so there is an upper limit to how much you should spend working with the material.
Thomas Frank has over 100 videos on YouTube that explain different habits and techniques that can improve your studying and performance in school. Here are two examples of his videos that I recommend.
Thomas Frank has over 100 videos on YouTube that explain different habits and techniques that can improve your studying and performance in school. Here are two examples of his videos that I recommend.
|
|
This article "What Works, What Doesn't" published in Scientific American highlights and explains proven methods to help retain information.
5) Figure out what you don't understand
This is a tricky talent that takes time to master. My best advice is to imagine you have to stand up and present the material to someone else; when you think about how you would teach the material, your brain starts to rework how it understands the material and how it can be related most easily to others. This does take a lot of time, and it can feel awkward, but this is the easiest way to realize what you don't actually understand as well as you thought you did. This is the best way you can realize what misunderstandings or knowledge gaps you have about the material, and this is where you can come up with questions to ask your teacher/instructor/professor. If you have a study group (which I highly recommend, if it is used constructively and with integrity), you can assign each other topics to present to the study group. You can then either take your questions to your study group, to class, to office hours, or email your questions to your instructor. I personally prefer emailed questions so I can think about how to reply and also decide if I should bring some additional resources to the next class meeting to help others who may have the same questions.
6) Develop and maintain a growth mindset