Study Skills

Below are some basic techniques that we recommend to help plan and manage your study:

Investigate your study habits
Identifying targets and action planning
Separating fact from opinion
The Morphological Matrix- Creative Problem Solving

1) Investigate your study habits.

Have a go at these quick questionnaires and recognise where you need to improve.

Time Management Questionnaire

How often is this statement true about you?

	Never	Sometimes	Always
I don't think I work as hard as I could
I couldn't tell you how many hours I put in last week
I often seem to leave everything until the last minute
I find it hard to get started on my work
I can't seem to stick to a single task for very long
I think that others do more than me
I don't find it easy to talk openly to others about how much work I am doing
I'm never quite sure what I've got to do next
I sometimes take ages to 'get going'
I'm not sure if I'm doing enough or not
I tend to flit from one task to another
I seem to work better in some places than others
I work better at some times of the day than others
Some weeks I do lots, some weeks practically nothing
I'm generally behind, sometimes several units behind
There is no way I can do all the work I am expected to do
I'm not sure I do the most important things first
I don't have any sort of plan for my work

Consider whether you would answer yes or no to the following questions :

	Yes	No
1) Are your notes organised in piles on the floor?
2) Are your notes organised on the floor not in piles?
3) Are your notes organised in a file (systematically)?
4) Could you find notes for a piece of work you did two months a ago?
5) Can you find equipment quickly, e.g. pens, calculators?
6) Have you got a workspace/ desk?
7) Is there any space on your desk, or is it cluttered?
8) Do you have a reminder system for what you need to do?

2) Identifying Targets and action planning

When trying to organise how to complete a piece of work and how long it will take you, and ultimately when you will do it, it can be useful to split the task into sub tasks. See below.

Piece of Work	Deadline	Estimated Time Needed to Complete
Write an essay	2 months	11 hours
Sub Tasks
Gather info for essay	1 month	6 x 1 hour sessions
Write the first draft	6 weeks away	2 x 2 hour sessions
Final editing and draft	2 months away	3 hours

Now complete the chart below for a realistic piece of current work.

Piece of Work	Deadline	Estimated Time Needed to Complete

Sub Tasks

3) Separating fact from opinion

In many subjects you are expected to be able to separate fact from opinion when constructing an argument. Read the extract below and test how easily you can identify the difference.

Universities face wake-up call from new student ratings system
Polly Curtis, education correspondent
Thursday September 22, 2005

A new university ratings system based on students' experiences will force unpopular courses to improve or close, the higher education minister, Bill Rammell, said today. The ratings system is based on a survey of more than 170,000 students who completed their degrees last term and gave their opinion on everything from their learning resources to how much help they got from their tutors. The results are published today, along with data on employment rates and average A-level point scores for every course in the country, on the Teaching Quality Information website www.tqi.ac.uk, which is designed to give prospective students more detailed information about every university course in the country. Some 80% of students are satisfied with their standard of degree, the figures show. Universities were today warning against competing in a "popularity contest" for students, but Mr Rammell insisted students would vote with their feet, identifying unpopular courses and forcing them to improve or "cease to function". The data is available to students on the website and allows them to compare how much final-year students liked different courses. EducationGuardian.co.uk today publishes that data in the form of a table, which reveals that the most popular institution is the Open University, where mostly mature students do part-time distance-learning degrees, followed by several specialist colleges.

The differences are demonstrated below:

RED = FACT
BLUE = OPINION

Universities face wake-up call from new student ratings system
Polly Curtis, education correspondent
Thursday September 22, 2005

4) The Morphological Matrix- Creative Problem Solving

The following grid is used by many major creative companies to increase their creative problem solving output. The BBC have used it along with Disney and many others.

It enables you to create many different solutions quickly.

Example

Let's imagine we want to create some packaging for a new Chocolate bar. (For our Graphics AS Level Coursework). First you decide on the three main areas of the problem eg. Who is it For?, What Type of Style? and Where Will it be Sold?

Who is it For?	What Type of Style?	Where Will it be Sold?
Children	Western	Railway Stations
OAP's	Oriental	Art Galleries
Skaters	Gothic	Internet
Celebrities	Funky	Magazines
Working Mums	Utilitarian	Shops

We can now combine those ideas up in any different combination. We may design a 'Funky styled Chocolate bar for Skaters which will be sold over the internet'. This allows us to access solutions which would not otherwise come up using normal brainstorming techniques.