Study Activities in University In order to help college and university students in the process of learning, four key study ac

Study Activities in University
   Good morning. Today, we’ll look at some study activities used in university. As we know, students in colleges or universities are expected to master some academic materials that are fairly difficult to understand. However, some of them find it hard to learn some complex, abstract or unfamiliar subject matter. As a result, a central problem in higher education is how to internalize academic knowledge—that is, how to make knowledge our own. In order to do so, we must convert knowledge from being "other people’s knowledge" to being part of our own ways of thinking. Then, how are we going to do it? And what are the means available to help us in the process of learning? There are four key study activities currently used in higher education to encourage students to internalize knowledge. They are the ones we are familiar with: writing essays, going to classes and seminars, having individual tutorials, and listening to lectures. These four activities are long-established features of our higher education, and they are almost as important now as they were a hundred years ago. Now let’s look at the features of them one by one.
   First, essay writing. The central focus of university work, esp. in the humanities, for example in literature, history or politics, is on students’ producing regular essays or papers which summarize and express their personal understanding of a topic. Then, what is good about essay writing? Firstly, writing essays forces you to select what you find interesting in books and journals, and to express your understanding in a coherent form. Individual written work also provides teachers with the best available guide to how you are progressing in a subject, and allows them to give advice on how to develop your strengths or counteract your weaknesses. Lastly, of course, individual written work is still the basis of almost all assessment in higher education. Written assignments familiarize you with the form that your exams or coursework papers will take.
   The second key activity in colleges and universities is seminars and class discussions. Their role is to help you to internalize academic knowledge by providing specialized contexts, so that you can talk about such difficult problems as the trade-off between inflation and unemployment in economic policy, or the use of metaphors in Shakespeare’s plays.
   Talking is a more interactive activity than written work. In a conversation you know immediately how effectively you are expressing a viewpoint, and can modify what you are saying in response to people’s reactions. In addition, a normal programme of between ten and twenty-five classes will cover far more topics in one subject than you can hope to manage in your written work. Participating in flexible conversations across this range of issues also allows you to practise using the broader knowledge gained from other key activities such as lectures.
   Now, let’s take a look at another activity: individual tutorials. Discussions between a teacher and one or two students are used in many colleges as a substitute for, or a supplement to, group discussions in classes, like those mentioned before. Tutorials can range from direct explanations by the teacher in a subject, to flexible conversational sessions which at their best are very effective in stimulating students’ mastery of a body of knowledge. The one-to-one quality of the personal interaction is very important in stimulating acceptance of ideas and producing fruitful interaction. In order to make individual tutorials really work, students should make good preparation beforehand, and during the tutorial, they should also ask questions to keep the ball rolling rather, than, let teachers "talk in a Vacuum".
   The last activity is lectures. As we all know, lectures play a large part in most students’ timetables and occupy a considerable proportion of teachers’ efforts. However, the major difficulty with lectures is that they are not interactive like discussions or tutorials. The lecturer normally talks for the whole time with minimal feed-back from questions. Besides, making notes in lectures while concentrating on the argument being developed is often difficult to some students, esp. when the argument is very complicated.
   However, having said that, lectures are clearly valuable in several specific ways. They can provide a useful overview—an area map, as it were, to familiarize you with the main landscape features to be encountered during a course. Lecturers typically give much more accessible descriptions of theoretical perspectives in their oral presentations than can be found in the academic literature. Whenever there is a rapid pace of progress in theory or practice, lectures play an indispensable part in letting students know the development immediately, usually several years before the new material is included in textbooks. Lastly, lectures are often very useful in allowing you to see directly how exponents of different views build up their arguments. The cues provided by seeing someone talking in person may seem "irrelevant", but these cues are important aids to understanding the subject better later.
   So far, we’ve discussed four study activities and their respective features and roles in higher education. Of course, study activities are not limited to just these four types: there are other activities that are equally important, such as general reading, project learning, etc. We’ll cover them during our next lecture.