Guidelines for Doing Well
in Principles of Microeconomics

1. My lecture notes are posted at my website: www.muse.widener.edu/~kleppel/index.html. To perform activities, bring the notes to class in printed form (six-slides to a page is recommended) or in digital form on an electronic device. Also bring to class pencils, eraser, and calculator.

2. Review the notes between classes and determine anything you do not understand. Resolve those problems promptly, by speaking to other students in the class (such as teammates), a tutor, or me.

3. Do assigned reading in the textbook, which is very readable and helps to reinforce lecture notes.

4. Summarize the lecture notes and keep your summaries for study purposes. Summarizing is extremely important because of the elements of process and product.

The process of summarizing the notes helps you to (a) remember the content and (b) identify areas of difficulty, so you can ask about them before they become significant problems.

Summarizing also results in products, the summary documents themselves, which you can use to study for both the regular exams and the cumulative final exam.

5. Flash cards can be helpful for practicing concepts and formulae.

6. Complete homework exercises. While these homework exercises do not enter directly into your course grade, they are expected to influence your grade indirectly by providing additional practice with the material.

7. Complete in-class practice problems. If you miss class, be sure to do the work and check your answers with your group members.

8. A good study strategy is to write your own questions on the material and then get together with other students to try to answer each others' questions. Possible types of questions include computational problems, graphs, multiple choice, and short-answer/fill-in-the-blank.

9. "Spaced studying" is strongly recommended. Cramming is discouraged. Research has found that retention is improved if students study a little at a time, rather than doing all their studying at one time. I recommend that you start studying about a week before an exam. By the night before the exam, all you should need is a brief review and a good night's sleep.

10. You might be thinking that all this work is going to take a lot of time and you’re right. The common rule is that college students should spend 2 to 3 hours studying outside of class for each hour in class. So for a typical course that meets 3 hours per week, you should do 6 to 9 hours of work outside of class. Considering the items mentioned above, if the assigned reading takes 2 to 3 hours per week, problems and exercises another 2 to 3 hours, and summarizing and going over your notes another 2 to 3 hours, you’ve got your recommended total of 6 to 9 hours per week. So clearly you need to manage your time well, especially if you have an off-campus job. If you think you could use some assistance with time management, the Academic Support office (www.widener.edu/academics/support/) can be helpful.

Professor K. Leppel