Think About How Much Time You Give to Tasks at the Moment

STUDY SKILLS

Time Management

As a student whether full time or part time you are likely to have a lot of constraints on your time. You may be fitting your study around work, or vice versa, you may have family responsibilities. What ever the constraints are you need to decide how much time you can devote to study.

Balancing Tasks

Think about how much time you give to tasks at the moment

Figure 1: Balancing tasks

Urgent and Important: 50% / Not urgent but important: 30%
Urgent but not important: 15% / Not urgent and not important: 5%

How can you rebalance tasks to change priorities?

Figure 2: Re-balancing tasks

Urgent and Important: 30% / Not urgent but important: 60%
Urgent but not important: 5% / Not urgent and not important: 5%

Developing an Action Plan

Figure 3: Personal Action Plan: taking charge of your learning

Useful Links

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_HTE.htm

http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art2.html?http://oldeee.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art2.html

http://content.monster.co.uk/career_development/articles2/time_mag/

http://www.support4learning.org.uk/health/stress.htm

Doing Research

Whether you are just beginning your studies or in your final year working on a dissertation, you will be expected to research information from a variety of sources. There is plenty of information available to help make the most of resources available. Follow the links below for a few of them.

Research Effectively

At higher levels of education, you need to develop autonomy in your research. Tutorials and lectures can’t cover the syllabus in sufﬁcient depth. Because the research you do is likely to be undirected, try to work out a game plan before you start.

Use books selﬁshly

At school, your textbooks were specially devised to follow the course curriculum. This isn’t like school: for goodness sake, don’t read source material from cover to cover, as it’s highly unlikely to match your exact requirements. You will have enormous booklists to wade through, but very few listed titles will contain much more than a chapter’s worth that’s relevant to you.

When you read a book to gain information for your coursework or exam preparation, think as speciﬁcally as you can about what you’re looking for. Here’s a procedure to help you get to the jugular without wasting time:

1. Decide what information gaps you need to ﬁll and set yourself a time limit.

2. Start with the index and contents pages.

3. Look for possible chapter summaries. The last chapter may summarise the book.

4. Browse through a book as if you were in a bookshop, to glean contents information from the most relevant chapters.

5. Skim read, by glancing at headings and the ﬁrst lines of paragraphs, until you ﬁnd what you want.

6. Use the note-taking technique. If you can’t mark your texts, look away and write what you reading recall in your own shorthand, using keywords and phrases rather than full sentences. Alternatively, you could sketch a mindmap.

When you copy extracts from your sources that you wish to quote in your coursework, note the page number and mark the extract in inverted commas so that you distinguish it from your own notes. This will help you avoid plagiarising by mistake. It’s also worth noting the following references:

· Author’s initial and surname. If there is no author, write the notes (e.g. editor’s name in brackets: (ed.)

· Date of publication

· Book title and subtitle

· Publisher

· Publisher’s town

This saves you the tedium of having to seek out these references when you compile your bibliography. (You can use the bibliography at the back of this book as a template for your own.)

Useful Links

http://www.questia.com/Index.jsp?CRID=research&OFFID=se1

http://www.esrc.ac.uk/

http://www.bath.ac.uk/dacs/gold/glossary.html

http://www.ejbrm.com/

http://openup.co.uk

Academic writing

As part of your study you will be expected to engage in a variety of academic writing tasks including essays, reports, projects, case studies and examinations.

Before you start make sure you know what is required. Are you writing an academic paper, essay or report? Look for key words in the question. Highlight them to make sure you understand what is required. Plan your outline with an introduction which should include an outline of what you are doing and how you are going to do it. The main body sets out your arguments, ideas and evidence and a conclusion to summarise your main points. Make sure you refer back to the main question to ensure that you have answered it. You will also need to include references and a bibliography.

Understanding Assignments

As a student you have to learn how to unpack what may be required in each new assignment. It is unlikely that the requirements of any piece of writing will be clearly spelt out to you; in fact a major part of learning to study at university is finding ways of understanding how to write your knowledge within a particular ‘field of study’ for a particular audience – in most cases the tutor who is going to mark your work. Each time you come across a new way of writing your knowledge in a particular ‘field of study’ it can seem strangely unfamiliar and very difficult to work out. Part of learning about that ‘field of study’ is learning to write it in your assignments. That is why it is very important that you try to work out what is involved in writing any particular piece of work. One way of doing this is to ask your tutor or the person who set your assignment. Most tutors will themselves be trained in a particular discipline and they are often expecting and looking for particular ways of writing that disciplinary knowledge within the ‘field of study’.

© Open University Press 2000. From P. Crème and M.R. Lea, Writing at University: a guide for students, Open University Press. Reproduced by permission of Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Publishing Company.

The Essay

The traditional essay format approach to writing

If you look back over this chapter you will see that we have made reference to the idea of a traditional essay, although, as we have said, in practice you are likely to come across many different ways of writing during your studies. The more traditional academic essay will have an introduction, which sets the scene; a main body, in which you outline and develop your argument; and a conclusion, in which you bring everything together. Advice about essay writing usually gives instructions as to how to go about and successfully complete this type of writing at university in the way laid out below:

· Introduction: What is this essay going to be about?

· Main body: What are the themes that I am developing to support my argument?

· Conclusion: What are the consequences of what I have written?

In our experience many students find it very easy to identify this kind of format and know that they have to start with an introduction, develop their ideas in the main body and then bring everything to a neat and satisfactory conclusion. In practice, of course, following this kind of format is much more complicated than it seems; many students struggle with getting their ideas down on paper despite knowing in theory what the finished product should look like. Although this framework may be useful as a general rule of thumb for some of your writing, you are likely to find that many of your assignments do not fit neatly into it. You may find it more useful to think of this idea of breaking down the essay into three parts as just one approach to assignment writing. Another approach which we develop below is the ‘building blocks’ approach, which can give you a general feel for the structure of the assignment that you are writing. The chapters that follow develop the notion that you are creating and building your own structure in your writing as you work through the process of writing a particular assignment. In essence, you are moulding your knowledge – through your writing – to the task, the written assignment.

Reading as Part of Writing

Approaching Reading

With academic reading it is necessary to maintain a constant grip on what the author is saying. Yet, many academic texts are densely written in unfamiliar ways which make them much more difficult to manage than, for example, a novel or a magazine article. Although sometimes there may be reasons why you need to skim-read an article or book, this is likely to be only to get the general gist of what is being said, as a strategy for deciding whether it is appropriate reading material or not. In general, skim-reading is not a useful strategy for reading as a student, but you may well be used to doing this in other contexts, for example, skimming through a newspaper article, or skipping through a novel, not bothering much about learning or pronouncing the names of characters or places, and paying little attention to some of the more complicated parts of the plot. You may also be used to skim-reading when you’re surfing the web. So now, instead of skim-reading you will be developing ways of concentrating on large chunks of quite dense text and making sense of them. Even though you may only be concentrating for short bursts of time, it is likely that you will find it necessary to concentrate more intensely than you usually do when you are reading. This is why creating the right environment is an important part of approaching your reading. No student can make much sense of her reading unless she can create conditions where she can concentrate effectively on the task in hand. You will need to find the reading environment that suits you best. The list below gives you a few ideas about what may be important, but you will probably want to add to it or modify it to decide what would be best for you.

Create the right reading environment

· Try to set aside reading time when you will not be interrupted.

· Try to find a physical environment that is conducive to reading: perhaps at home or maybe in the university library.

· Make sure, before you start reading, that you have all the things you might want to use for taking notes and highlighting: A4 paper; index cards; different coloured pens; highlighters; sticky notes or even a laptop computer.

· Make sure that you are comfortable and can write notes from your reading without feeling cramped.

· Take frequent short breaks and during this time try to digest what you have read.

· Don’t expect to be able to make any useful sense of your reading if you are tired, stressed or constantly interrupted.

· If you have family commitments you may have to readjust your time priorities and think through how you will fit in your reading time.

Analytic Reading

This is less concerned with reading to fit together with what you know already than with analysing what you are reading as you go along. Again, this is an integral part of the strategy that you will need to adopt to read successfully for your writing. To make the most of analytic reading, these are the sorts of question that you will need to be asking:

· How does the author introduce the text?

· Does she spell out what she is going to talk about?

· What do you think that this author is saying?

· Is the author assuming that you have a particular background knowledge?

· Can you pick out the central thesis or idea of the chapter, book or article?

· Can you understand the different parts of the text and how they all fit together?

· What sort of evidence does the author use to support her argument?

· Does her argument seem biased or one-sided in any way?

· Does her argument seem logical?

· Can you pick out the themes that she uses to support her argument?

· Does her conclusion follow from what she has said or are there some new ideas here?

Useful Links

http://www.uefap.co.uk/writing/writfram.htm

http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/study/Gloess.htm

http://www3.open.ac.uk/learners-guide/learning-skills/english/sect2/

http://openup.co.uk

Sources/referencing

Whenever you are required to write a piece of coursework - either as an essay or academic paper, you will be expected to make references (also known as citations or a bibliography) to the books and articles that you have drawn on to produce your coursework.

Referencing is important as it helps to trace the history of an idea and identifies where the work came from, it provides evidence that you have knowledge of the subject you are discussing, it identifies perspectives and research of different writers, it provides evidence to support your argument and it will show that you are able to produce work of acceptable academic practice.