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Monday, June 30, 2008
Effective study methods for economics students Working with your class notes Rewrite your class notes. Do this on a regular basis, for instance, once per week or better yet, within eight hours following each lecture. While recopying, fill in any parts that may be incomplete. Also, if you have the time, it is VERY useful to cross-reference your text while recopying the notes: for each topic in your class notes, see what the text has to say about it. If the text adds anything useful, make a note of it in your new, recopied notes. Recopying your notes will give leave you with a very readable and complete set of notes to review when you are getting ready for the exams. But more importantly, studies on learning behavior show that the process of recopying your notes helps cement the material into your long-term memory, so you will benefit even if you never look at your recopied notes again. If you simply don't have time to recopy your class notes on a regular basis, then try this: Within 8 hours of the lecture, spend 15 minutes going over your notes. Studies on learning behavior show that most students' retention of lecture material is high for eight hours, then rapidly falls off. If you go over your notes during the first 8 hours, it will help reinforce the material. Also, if your notes are incomplete in some way (maybe the professor was going too fast, or maybe you were not able to simultaneously write down what he was saying AND what he was writing on the board), then it will be easiest to "fill in the blanks" during these first 8 hours. Instead, if you never look at your class notes until you are ready to begin reviewing for the exam, then it is much more likely that you won't understand them. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to read your textbook Read actively, not passively. "Passive" means you're just a spectator, an onlooker, a bystander. Passive reading is how you would read a popular novel: you just read page after page to find out what happens next. If you read textbooks this way, your rate of retention will be very low, according to studies on learning behavior. "Active" means getting involved with the material, processing it in some way. You are a participant, not a spectator. Below you will find several ideas on how to read actively. If you force yourself to develop the habit of active reading now, while you are in college, it will profit you throughout the rest of your life. Before reading a chapter. First, read the chapter's introduction. Many texts list the chapter's learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter -- read them. Then, read the heading or title of each section and subsection in the chapter; this will take only about two to five minutes (unless the chapter is horribly long!). Then read the chapter's conclusion or summary. Doing all of this takes maybe 10 minutes, or even less. If you do this first, then read the chapter from start to finish, you will derive several benefits: you'll know what the chapter is about, what are the main issues it addresses, and you'll know in advance where the chapter is going. As you're reading the chapter from start to finish, you'll understand the details better since you'll have a sense of how and where they fit in. This technique also makes it easier to read the chapter, and often makes the reading go a little more quickly. And it alerts you in advance to the important things that you need to get out of the chapter. If something comes up and you just don't have time to read the whole chapter when it is assigned, it is far better than nothing to take 10 minutes to do what I just described: read the intro, read the chapter's section headings, then read the summary and conclusion. This is a very efficient way of getting a quick feel for the material, or at least an outline of it. Also, doing this (rather than not reading the chapter at all) makes you much less likely to feel lost in class when your professor covers this material or subsequent material that builds on it. Write in the margins. Most introductory econ texts (and many other texts) have nice wide margins. Use them. Write notes in the margins. For instance, when you really start to understand the logic behind something and can explain it in your own words, write down your explanation in the margin. (If you want to sell your book back at the semester's end, the book buy-back people probably won't notice your marginal notes, and the student who buys your book next year will benefit!) Read with pencil and paper. As you read through the chapter, every time a new term or concept or definition is introduced, copy down the term and its definition. Then leave some space in your notes. Then as you read more about this term later in the chapter, you can add a few sentences about the importance or relevance of this term, or other related concepts. Economics uses lots of models, which are usually represented with a graph. Every time your text introduces you to a new model, write in your notes the following things: The name of the model. The purpose of the model (for example, the supply and demand model shows us how the market price and quantity are determined). Draw a copy of the graph or diagram that goes with the model. Carefully label the axes and the curve(s). For each of the curves, write down what that curve shows and explain why it has a positive, negative, horizontal, or vertical slope. For example, the demand curve shows the relationship between consumer demand for an item and the price of that item. It has a negative slope because, other things being equal, an increase in the price of an item makes that item less attractive or affordable to consumers, causing a decrease in the quantity that consumers demand. For each curve, write down a list of things that will shift the curve, and briefly explain how each of these things shifts the curve. For instance, the demand curve for most goods will shift to the right in response to an increase in consumer income. Reason: at any given price, consumers are willing and able to buy more of the item. It's also a good idea to go through these steps when models are introduced in your lecture notes. It's a thorough system for studying models, and will prepare you for a variety of test questions on the model. Throw your highlighter away. Believe it or not, highlighting the important parts in your book is a passive activity: all you are doing is pushing a marker over the page. If you think something in your book is important, then write it down in your notes! If you just highlight it, then you'll forget what it means or why it is important five weeks later when you are reviewing for the exam. Also, if many different things are important, you'll soon find that the color of the page has changed from white to yellow, and how does that help you? Not much. And finally, studies show that for many students, highlighting is actually worse than doing nothing: it gives a false sense of security and accomplishment, but all students have really done is pushed a colored marker across the page. Make bulleted lists. Most textbooks, especially principles books, give you various clues that something is important. For instance, they typically put important terms in boldface or color, put definitions or key ideas in the margin, and highlight the importance of an equation by centering it on its own line, with space above and below the equation. What happens when you come to a section in your text that has none of these features, just paragraph after paragraph of plain old words? Does this mean the section is unimportant? Probably not. It means that you have to find the clues yourself: you have to figure out what's important. This is not hard to learn to do, and it is an incredibly valuable skill. Here's a good way to do it: Read the section. Figure out what is the section's main point, and write it down in your notes. Then write a bulleted list of the supporting points or related informational points. Here's an example from Principles of Macroeconomics, a textbook by N. Gregory Mankiw that's widely used at UNLV and elsewhere. If you happen to have this book, take a look at the section of chapter 10 entitled "GDP and Economic Well-Being", which starts at the bottom of p.210. If you don't have the book, all you need to know is that chapter 10 is about the definition and meaning of GDP; you'll pick up the rest from the following discussion. This section of chapter 10 has no bells or whistles, no terms in boldface, no definitions in the margin, etc. It just has two and a half pages of words and words and words. One of my students read this section and came up with the following bulleted list of the section's important points: GDP AND ECONOMIC WELL-BEING (pp210-212) This section discusses whether GDP is a good measure of a nation's well-being. eloquent Kennedy quote criticizes GDP for not directly measuring quality of life, non-material well-being, etc GDP excludes the value of leisure: if people take more time off work to spend with family, GDP goes down but well-being may go up GDP excludes the quality of the environment: w/o regulations, firms might be able to produce more (which raises GDP) while worsening the environment. GDP excludes the value of non-market activities, even though these activities are productive and important. Examples: child-rearing, volunteer work. However, bigger GDP makes it easier to afford the kinds of things (education, good health care) that improve non-material well-being Case study (p212) shows that countries with higher GDP per person tend to have higher life expectancy and literacy rates (which are two non-material indicators of well-being) bottom line: GDP is not a perfect or comprehensive measure of a nation's well-being, but it's still pretty good. When studying for your exam, which you do think would be easier to remember: a bulleted list such as the above, or the textbook's two and a half pages of paragraph after paragraph of plain old words? I rest my case. As you continue through college, and on into your professional career, there will be countless occasions on which you must read various materials and determine the most important points. For example, in your junior and senior years in college, you will probably have to write research papers using newspaper articles as sources. The last time I checked, the Wall Street Journal did not put important items in boldface or provide any of the other clues that are often found in textbooks. So what do you do? Make a bulleted list about each article. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Practice with end-of-chapter problems In my years of teaching economics, I've made an important observation. Students enjoy the class more, learn more, and get better grades when they are required to do weekly homeworks. Maybe you think this sounds insane--why would anyone be happier when they are forced to do more work? Well, it's not that students are particularly thrilled about having to do homework all the time. But these homework assignments force them to keep up, to practice, to work actively with the material. As a result, they come to class with a deeper understanding of the material, which makes class more interesting and makes it easier to understand new material as it's introduced. After the semester is over, student feedback is always more favorable if I required homeworks than if I didn't. Here's why homeworks are so beneficial: The homework problems actively engage you with the material. Virtually every expert on teaching and learning techniques will shout at the top of his or her lungs that the best way to learn is to actively engage yourself with the material. (See the section how to read your textbook effectively for more on active learning.) If your instructor is already assigning regular homeworks, great! But if regular homework assignments are not part of your course grade, then try to carve out two hours a week (or however much time you can afford) to work on the questions and exercises at the end of each chapter as it's covered in your course. I know it's not easy to find the time to do this, especially when you have tons of other work and important non-school demands on your time. But if you really want to get more out of the class (and improve your grades), you have to be willing to make a commitment to work toward this goal. Practicing with those end-of-chapter problems will be time well spent. (Besides, some professors use those end-of-chapter problems to get ideas for exam questions.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Studying with classmates Consider forming a study group with one or a couple of your classmates. Depending on the difficulty and workload of your class, your group might meet regularly or maybe just once before each of the exams. In any case, there are great benefits from studying with others. Most students don't understand everything perfectly. But chances are, someone in your group will understand some of the things you don't, and vice versa, giving rise to "gains from trade." When a study partner makes you understand something that you previously just couldn't get, then the benefit to you is obvious. But you benefit even if you are the one doing the explaining: In order for you to explain a concept to a classmate, you have to first process the material in your mind and formulate a coherent verbal explanation. Studies show that this helps lock the material in to your memory. There are other benefits from studying in small groups, which you can probably imagine. It imposes discipline (it's harder to allow yourself to be distracted by the television or telephone when you're studying with others). And it is a social activity (I don't mean a party, I mean an activity involving other humans): it's good to see that you are not the only student that finds the material difficult. And it's a great feeling when you can help someone understand something. |
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