While doing your assignment or writing examinations at Unisa, you have probably found that you are expected to do several things with your academic texts. Often you will need to argue a point of view, form an opinion or critically analyse academic texts. But before you do these difficult things you need to have some basic study skills. You will often need to memorise basic facts, ideas and keywords. Thereafter, you will be able to develop and implement reasoning skills based on your sound foundation of facts.
In this section, we will concentrate on a few learning skills you can try in your studies. However, to generalise across all learners and all learning contexts without regard for how you, the individual learner would like to go about it, would be like trying to force you into a mould. So, in doing this we are not trying to force you into a mould, or insisting that all students should go about learning in the same way. What we are trying to achieve, however, is that you choose the way you would like to learn; and adopt and use learning methods that you find useful to achieve your particular study goals.
It is difficult, because:
You are probably able to add a few of your reasons why you may find it difficult to change old habits.
The answer is a definite YES. Often, you will first be expected to memorise basic facts, ideas and keywords before being able to reason a point of view or to think critically about certain points. And this all starts with reading for meaning.
The purpose of reading something is not to be able to store the whole text in your mind. Even the author of your prescribed books will not be in a position to recall in detail all that is written in the chapter you are reading. What is important is that you can 'think’ with the ideas the author has presented. Write down the main ideas and keywords that you would like to retain. Remember that it’s what you understand that counts.
Memory strategies (mnemonics) can often be used to help us remember basic information from our academic texts. We will briefly describe a few memory strategies that you might consider using in your studies. Classifying information is where one usually begins to get some order in one’s studies.
Printed material often needs to be restructured and reorganised if we are to understand it better. Classification means that information on the same topic is grouped. An appropriate word which best defines or explains the information is used as a heading to summarise the information. Once one has found an overall heading, the items can be further subdivided based on shared characteristics.
Acronyms are widely used to represent organisations and corporations. "Unisa" stands for the University of South Africa; "WHO" stands for the World Health Organisation and you can probably think of a few of your own. The reason why an acronym is used is that it helps people remember an organisation or idea.
You can use the same principle in your studies. Identify the keywords in your passage, take the first letter of each keyword and form a new word. This is a very widely-used memory strategy and it works very well to help you remember basic facts.
Instead of rehearsing the basic information in your academic text over and over again, you could consider implementing visual images. Imagery involves consciously creating visual images in your mind concerning the information you would like to remember.
To make visual associations effective, try to make your images
Try these techniques in your studies, especially with keywords you have difficulty remembering, and see how your memory starts working for you.
Last modified: 2023/08/07