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Faculty member offers study tips
Parents looking for a meaningful gift to give their high school senior should check out an online study guide by a UB faculty member who first created it as a going-away-to-college guide for his stepdaughter.
The 10th anniversary edition of “How To Study: A Brief Guide” by William J. Rapaport, professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, has helped students around the world improve their grades.
Rapaport, who is affiliated with the departments of Philosophy and Linguistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Center for Cognitive Science, created the study guide in 1999 for college freshmen based on techniques that he found successful and on sources from the cognitive science literature.
Since then, students from throughout the U.S. and numerous foreign countries, including India, Spain, China, Sweden and Australia, have reported seeing their grades improve since applying the techniques he suggests.
Using short, easy-to-read tips accompanied by numerous clever cartoons, the guide covers topics ranging from how students should manage their time, to why they should rewrite at home the notes they took in class and why studying the hard subject first is always better.
Rapaport says he developed the tips from his own experience when he switched disciplines, having majored in mathematics as an undergraduate and then studying philosophy in graduate school.
“As a math major, I always read things slowly and carefully,” he says. “Because of the cumulative nature of math, I made sure I understood everything before going on to a new topic. When I started to study philosophy, I just applied the same techniques and they worked.”
From that experience, he realized that study techniques that worked in one discipline could be equally successful in another.
Although Rapaport geared the study guide toward college freshmen, he has heard from online users that the techniques also work for high school and middle school students. He has even heard from teachers and parents who say it is helping their elementary-school-aged children succeed.
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