Chapter 9. Module 4

Though I feel I can go on about this entire chapter I will say that reading up on Learning Strategies seemed to catch me off guard. It caught my interest and pulled me in. It made me feel old (in the ways I was taught) as they talked about learning strategies. Learning strategies are a special kind of procedural knowledge-knowing how to do something. There are thousands of strategies(p. 331). Absolutely, there must be endless strategies. As I paused: I thought! What are my strategies. Well, I catch myself always having limitless highlighters and always when will make flash cards. Not because I came up with that technique but sometime in my schooling I was always taught to study that way to memorize things. I mean, I might not be the smartest person who passed grades with straight A’s but I did okay. The techniques worked for me so I thought. Then to continue to read and sure enough how wrong I was. Do you underline or highlight key phrases in textbooks? Underlining and note taking are probably two of the most frequent but ineffectively used strategies among college students. One common problem is that students underline or highlight too much. It is far better to be selective (pp. 333). Okay! So let me start the chapter over. I started to re-read the chapter and retired the highlighters. There it is right in the beginning. You can see from the first entry in Table.9.1 that learning begins with focusing attention-deciding what is important. But distinguishing the main idea from less important information is not always easy (pp. 332). So in chapter 9 in did not really think from the start about my future as an educator, or even the students that I help at work, or even for that matter my own children. I thought about all the ways I can take this chapter in for myself. I found this chapter very rewarding in a lot of ways.