Carolina Teaching & Learning Colloquium: Teaching Students to Teach Themselves

When children start school, it is completely up to the teacher to see to it that students learn. But as they grow older, they become increasingly responsible for their own learning. They must learn how to read complicated texts independently, and not just for comprehension, but to remember the contents. They must learn to avoid distraction, commit content to memory, take notes, judge when they have studied enough, avoid procrastination, and more. Studies show that most college students use very inefficient strategies for most of these tasks. In this talk I will summarize research from the last twenty years on a subset of these tasks, focusing on practical applications that can be communicated to students so that they can regulate their learning more efficiently.

By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Recognize efficient and inefficient study strategies
• Identify strategies to help students limit distractions, take good notes, commit content to memory, avoid procrastination, and regulate their learning
• Implement communication strategies that help students improve self-regulation of their learning

Limited to UNC-CH faculty, staff, and graduate students.