Becoming a Better

Student
Intended Learning Outcomes
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
1. Define learning and explain the characteristics of learning;
2. Identify the changes that happen during learnings; and
3. Develop ways to become an effective learner.
Activity:
• Recall the time when you were still a student. What study
skills/strategies have you practiced.
Learning Defined
• The acquisition of knowledge and skills through experience
study, or by being taught. (Oxford languages)
• Learning is the lifelong process of transforming information
and experience into knowledge, skills, behaviors, and
attitudes. (missiontolearn.com)
Characteristics of Learning (UTS, Corpuz et al, 2019)
1. Learning is Purposeful
2. Learning is a Result of Experience
3. Learning is Multifaceted
4. Learning is an Active Process
What happens during Learning? Brain and
Behavior Changes
Learning takes place mainly at synapses, the junctions between
neurons.
The Science of Study
• As you learn something new, the performance of the involved synapses change.
• For instance, when you meet a new person, your brain needs to associate an
image with a name.
• Storage of such information takes place in different parts of your brain, but as
you see the new person more and more, the synapses related to the name and
image begin firing simultaneously.
• It’s through this simultaneous firing that you truly learn the new information.
• Synchronizing synapses isn’t the only biological effect of learning: When you take
on a new, difficult skill or learn a piece of brand-new information, the brain
actually becomes larger in size.
• Such changes are not noticeable on a day-to-day basis, but they can be seen
over time.
 Improving Students’
With Effective Learning
Techniques
Mind Your Method
Does the way in which we go about studying really make a
difference?
• STAYING UP LATE
Multiple experiments have shown that staying up late can
often be counterproductive. In fact, a Harvard study found
fatigue negatively affects the cortex, which stores information
in the brain.
• A Hendrix College study broke students into three groups
(night owls, morning larks and regular robins) and tracked
their study/sleep habits for their freshmen years.
FINDINGS:
• Grade Point Average (GPA) (average value of accumulated
final grades earned ) by GROUP at the end of year: Night Owl
2.84; Morning Larks 3.18; Regular Robins 3.18
The Relationship of Sleepiness to Academic
Performance
• The objective of the project is to determine if certain types of
people have more or less difficulty adjusting to college life. A
number of years ago, I started a longitudinal study tracking some
of the students in our incoming freshman class at Hendrix. I
followed them from high school throughout their college careers
and found that students that we would consider "owls" (they like
to go to bed late and sleep late) had a greater drop in their GPA
from high school to college than students that are considered "
larks" (they like to go to bed early and get up early) or "regular
robins". We recently presented this work at a conference.
https://aasm.org/bad-sleep-habits-are-associated-with-lower-grades-
from-high-school-through-college/
• Bad sleep habits are associated with lower grades from high school through college
• DARIEN, IL – Declines in sleep hygiene across the college years are associated with declines in grade-point average.  Although
students who are “evening types” initially experience the greatest decline in GPA from high school to college, their grades improve
as they shift toward a morning chronotype, suggests a research abstract that will be presented Wednesday, June 15, in
Minneapolis, Minn., at SLEEP 2011, the 25th Anniversary Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC (APSS).
• Results show that poor sleep hygiene was associated with a lower grade-point average in high school.  Sleep hygiene worsened
upon entering college, and poor sleep hygiene tended to persist through the senior year. Students whose sleep hygiene
worsened dur ing college also showed a greater decline in their GPA during college.
• According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, sleep hygiene involves habits and behaviors that promote healthy sleep. 
Common examples include establishing a relaxing bedtime routine, and avoiding caffeine in the afternoon and at night.
• “Sleep hygiene is a set of voluntary behaviors that you can change,” said principal investigator and lead author Jennifer Peszka,
PhD, associate professor of psychology at Hendrix College in Conway, Ark.  “If they are related to college performance, then
students could make small changes that help them do better.  It makes sense and we can tell students they need good sleep to
help them do well in college, but I think being able to point to empirical data is more convincing.”
• The study also found differences according to “chronotype,” which reflects the time of day when a person prefers to be awake. 
Students who are “evening types,” meaning that they have a natural preference to stay up later at night, showed greater declines
in GPA tran sitioning from high school to college and had a lower freshman GPA (2.84) compared with morning and intermediate
types combined (3.18).  These night owls shifted significantly more toward a morning chronotype by the senior year of college,
when there were no longer significant GPA differences between chronotypes.
• “We found that these owls were shifting their clocks during their time in college to be more like morning larks and regular robins,”
said Peszka.  “Perhaps that shift helped their academic performance improve.”
• CRAMMING
Cramming often proves effective in the very short term, but
those gains tend to vanish as time passes. We perform better
when study sessions are spaced out over longer periods of
the time rather than packed into one setting.
• TESTING YOURSELF
Frequent testing of material you’ve just recently been exposed
to can also be effective.
In a University of Louisville study, a professor tested one class
at the end of each lecture with quizzes on what they’d just heard.
Another class of the professor’s used the same syllabus but did
not do the daily quizzes.

RESULTS:
*Students in the quizzed class significantly outscored those in the
other class on midterm exams.
Research in Brain Function and Learning
• Myth: You are born with certain abilities and these do not
change over time.
• Fact: at one time, people believed that the brain developed
into its full form by the age of three, and that what developed
afterwards was just a matter of refinement. In fact, we know
that the brain is plastic—it changes with experience and
development. Evidence shows that rather than ending
development at the age of 5, or even 12, brain development
continues into one’s twenties.
 • For some adolescents, the maturation of the frontal lobes may
not end until age 25. For others, frontal lobe maturity may be
reached by the age of 18 or 19. For this reason, some
adolescents may require additional time before they are ready
for college, while others are ready at an earlier age. (
Margaret
Semrud-Clikeman, University of Minnesota Medical School )
Metacognition and Study Strategies
What is metacognition?
• Awareness and understanding of one’s own thought
processes.
• Is “knowledge of one’s knowledge, processes, and cognitive
and affective states; and the ability to consciously and
deliberately monitor and regulate one’s knowledge,
processes, and cognitive and affective states”
• In more general terms, metacognition is the awareness of the
acquisition of mental organization skills, and the ability to
apply these organization and recognition skills.
Metacognition is essential in teaching study
skills
• “Theoreticians seem unanimous – the most effective learners are self-
regulating.”Students must be able to accurately reflect on what they do
and don’t know, and how they would approach solving new organization
problems.
• Studies have shown that once a child is able to come up with his own way
of organizing items for study, he will achieve far greater results on tests in
(
reading, writing, math, science, bilingual education, test prediction, etc .)
• It is therefore imperative that effective study skills, with metacognition as
the goal, be taught and monitored to children so that they may become
more facile with finding unique problem-solving strategies in the future.
Good Study Habits (UTS, Corpuz et al. 2019)
• Get organized
• Prepare your review materials
• Ask Help
• Test yourself or ask someone to test you
• Allot time to take a break and eliminate stress
• Create or join study group
• Teach what you have learned
• Study to understand, not to remember
Homework:
• Demonstrate a new skills, knowledge or learning that you
acquired from the lesson.
• Write an essay or a reflective journal of what you have learned.