By Sheldon H. Horowitz, Ed.D.
Published: February 01 2006
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Without a strategic approach to learning, students often just "spray and pray" - they try hard to study everything, see what happens, and hope for the best. However, good effort is often not enough to promote efficient learning, and while explicit, well-focused teaching coupled with opportunities for practice and lots of feedback makes a huge difference, even this may not be enough to achieve success.
Thinking about Thinking
According to a National Research Council report titled "How People Learn," students must not only develop a firm foundation of factual knowledge, but must also have some way of organizing this knowledge in ways that help them retrieve and apply it to new situations. Being aware of the processes they use to learn, store and retrieve information can help students take control of their own learning.
A Closer Look at Strategies
I recommend a wonderful book titled "Academic Success Strategies for Adolescents with Learning Disabilities and ADHD" by Esther Minskoff and David Allsopp, which offers useful tools and detailed descriptions of learning strategies. For example, to help students remember information for tests it recommends that they:
- break up study time; try not to memorize too much information at one time; don't cram at the last minute,
- recite aloud what they are studying,
- establish a helpful mnemonic; for example, to remember the names of the Great Lakes: - take the first letter of each of the Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario): S,M,H,E,O, and move them around to create a simple word such as HOMES - which will serve as a quick and easy reminder during the test.
Sheldon H. Horowitz, Ed.D. is the Director of Professional Services at the National Center for Learning Disabilities. This article first appeared as a Research Roundup column in LD News.
Read all Research Roundup columns by Dr. Horowitz in the Research Roundup Archive.
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