Students on Study period, can sometimes have no new work to do, or assignments to complete. To make good use of this time, refine your personal tool kit of skills.
Practice your Pre-Reading Skills, Effective Reading or Information skills. Find new tools to use. JCU have a variety of Learning Skills booklets to help you to develop your ability to locate information, scan and skim large quantities of information or comprehend and organize new information from a variety of sources.
Work through the plethora of tools offered by our local James Cook University. Click here.
Try this Pre-Reading Strategy for scanning Journal Articles. This allows you to assess quickly whether an article will be useful for your assignment, without having to read every word.
1. Read title, authors and affiliations.
2. Read the first paragraph or abstract in full.
3. Read the topic sentence of every paragraph in the body of the article.
4. Read the last paragraph or conclusions in full.
5. If the article suits your thesis/purpose, go back and read the article carefully.
While there are always explicit strategies and tools you can use to improve your skills and set you up for success, did you know that wide reading is still the best preparation for any unseen test AND without even trying, a love of literature will extend your neural networks in a way that watching television does not. Reading will improve your literacy levels, general knowledge, AND make you the person, your dog thinks you are.