Strategies for Effective Learning - Essay Example

The Effectiveness of Presenting Information This work is devoted to the summation of the knowledge acquired by the techniques, technologies, and strategies for effective learning. Effective learning is the process of acquiring new knowledge at the highest quality. In other words, it is the highest degree of assimilation of the knowledge gained. Presenting and reproducing information play a huge role in the process. Those people, who want to reach great heights in life, must clearly realize that without constant self-education and self-improvement they cannot achieve anything, and at the same time, the completely different use may be obtained with studying of certain information. Everyone is on the stage of continuous learning throughout their lives. It not concerns so much about studying in school, college, university, special courses, and so on, but the endless stream of information that each of us receives and processes daily. However, for clarity, I will return to the classical learning process. Time! To improve the efficiency it is extremely important to spend this precious resource wisely. Now many students interested in developing of their careers, increasingly start to work while studying. It should be said that this is the right decision, because it is important to gain experience, obtain specific knowledge and skills that will be useful in the future. It is no secret that many employers do not even look in the diploma. They are wondering what experience the one has, what would allow him to solve the arising tasks. Therefore, in many areas it is very important to have a certain baggage of experience graduating from the university or college. However, if the evening department students combine work and study relatively easy, then, for full-time students often presents great difficulties because in many universities professors openly against the work during the training period. There are a number of principles aimed at solving the problem of “alignment”, for example, study and work. The principle of timeliness allows us to competently organize an exam preparation. The main thing is to plan ahead for events related to school, work or leisure. What effects do the state of “deadline working” brings? First, the person gets growing emotional stress. Secondly, haste leads to an increase in the number of errors, and thirdly, a large amount of information that you are trying to “pack” in your brain for a short time, is quickly forgotten. Try to pre-plan your month: describe what day and at what time some events would happen; check the timing and the “window” in the notebook. Principle of recording events is not to keep it all in head, but fixed somewhere. Such a carrier can be a conventional notebook, diary, organizer on a mobile phone or a special program on the computer. Keeping a scheduler allows you to visualize your workload with events and tasks. Determine how long it will take to complete a particular task, in what period of time is better to insert a task and when to complete it. The principle of affair parallelism is common to the technique of “sandwich”. The essence of this technique is that when you are engaged in some business that does not require you to be actively involved and a strong focus in parallel you are doing some other things that can be done here and now. For example, on the way from the university you can read a book, transcribe lectures, homework, and learn foreign words with the player. It is very important to be sensitive to situations where time simultaneously can be filled with several cases. You need to be flexible and respond to changes in your daily routine. If the planned meeting with friends is transferred, use the released time for self-development. The main thing is to appreciate your time and fill it with useful things. The process of learning has a set of strategies and tricks. Thus, a person learns information, provided affordable and easy, and even with an interesting visualization better than in other ways. Particularly noteworthy the method of Cornell is which essence is in the division of information: abstract, main text, and the general conclusion. This method is especially helpful when you need to break one big task into smaller ones, to sum up each of them and reconnect all in the big picture. Sometimes, to find a solution, you need to understand the details, and sometimes the opposite way is true - it is necessary to combine these little things and look at it globally. Speaking of visualization, I would like you to pay attention on the video by Hans Rosling about worlds deadliest diseases HIV. In fact, this little video does not carry information other than statistical data for some period. If these data were published as “dry” data, it would have attracted very little attention. Depicting statistics in color and movement, lecturer instantly arouses interest. We pay attention that his slides are not overloaded with any text or numbers, however, the information is fed precisely, clearly and pleasant - even on such an unpleasant topic, such as HIV. Moreover, the lecturer found time to tell about the reasons for such a scenario, eventually attracting the most attention of the audience. The emergence of interest brings us to the next, perhaps the most important point of working and studying - motivation. Without proper motivation and interest, even that you have unlimited time allowance, you will not achieve good results. The second video – “The surprising truth about what motivates us” - tells more about motivation, citing, in fact, the law of direct proportional dependence to growth. It is no secret that the majority chooses he work according the material principles – “money is motivator: don`t pay people enough they won`t be motivated”. Author of the video explains why the principle of “I will work harder and harder - and will get more money”, stops working at some point. The more work will require no mechanical or physical efforts the more critical thinking is required from the performer. Nevertheless, some of the things people are doing just for fun and fulfillment. As the author of the video says, “challenge and mastery make a contribution”. By nature human is set out to fulfill his potential, to be able to do something better than others. If he can do something better than others, it means this activity is not a problem for him and does not require effort. And here is the paradox to money motivation, the very understanding of the fact that his job - even volunteer one - is in demand, a man would be driven on the path of development. So, you have decided with the purpose: information that you receive is necessary for your work or study, and perhaps brings you satisfaction. However, it is impossible to become a good specialist only because of abstracts of lectures of professor. A huge amount of information will be left for self-study. The person, who is not motivated and not tuned to the result, would see thousands pages of text. The man, who sees the goal, would unconsciously use advantages of effective strategies for text processing. Flexible reading can be also thought a kind of note taking as from the large amount of information the good reader chooses only the necessary points. I would like to remind that there are three the most global reading styles: Study Reading, Skimming, and Scanning. Study Reading should be used for complex difficult material to achieve the high level of comprehension of the issue. The person, applying this style, is reading slower than normally. He should be sure that he totally understands what is written, even if it requires not one attempt to overcome it. For preparing to exams the skimming reading style is more useful. In fact the student already has a baggage of information which should be raised in his memory in short time. For this purpose the aim is to obtain a general idea. If you have marked somehow you notes, you can ignore the details and take only main ideas of each paragraph, as if you listened to information it is already in your memory, you need only to refresh it. If you don`t, in would give you an impression of what was talked about enough to not to fail the first questions and then this information would go to the long-term memory. One can get a specific piece of information using scanning the reading style, by fixing numbers, titles, words in a paragraph. Your eyes would just “catch” the necessary information from the text (Becoming a Flexible Reader). It should be noted that every student or employee finds its own appropriate strategy of learning, planning, research and so on. It does not matter whether he will outline, visualize, conduct an association to handle the flow of information in any other convenient and suitable manner. The essence is that the earlier an individual would found motivation satisfying certain conditions, he will find the time and energy to achieve the goal. Another thing is that instead the forced boring process, a person, changing the attitude to the question, will be able to get more effective and exciting pastime. Works Cited Becoming a Flexible Reader, http://www.how-to-study.com/study-skills-articles/becoming-a-flexible-reader.asp. Web. Dan Pink, RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc. Web. Hans Rosling, Insights on HIV, in stunnung data visuals http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_truth_about_hiv. Web. Read More