Study Skills for Higher Education: Challenges and Strategies

This report discusses the challenges faced by students during lectures, specifically related to listening skills, and provides strategies for teachers to improve these skills. The challenges include predicting content, listening for gist, detecting signposts, listening for details, and content of lecture. The strategies include getting to know students, giving students a voice, cold calling, listening to parents, and talking less. The report emphasizes the importance of paying attention and listening to things during the session as it is linked with success and promotion.

STUDY SKILLS FOR HIGHER
EDUCATION

Contents
INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY.......................................................................................................................................3
Listening challenges..........................................................................................................................3
Strategies through which teachers can improve the listening skills of students.................................4
CONCLUSION....................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES....................................................................................................................................7

INTRODUCTION
This report focuses on the challenges faced by students during lectures in session
which are specific to listening. It pertains every challenge in detail with the right strategy to
improve for them. It highlights the factors that are responsible for these challenges too which
needs to be changed if they need to overcome those and make way for success and follow the
path to excellence.
MAIN BODY
Listening challenges
Predicting Content-
Many of the times it happens that people sees a situation and when they don’t
understand what the other person is talking about then they start on to predicting content
depending on the content they hear. It all depends on the words used by speaker and style of
language used by it. Knowledge of the world possessed by individual helps them to predict
the form of information they want to listen to. This knowledge can be pertained from
anywhere such as from a lecture or a news channel etc. during the lecture that knowledge is
activated and act as a channel for that person to focus and understand things. This prediction
leads to difficulties in areas such as grammatical errors or poor of language due to which one
cannot communicate with effective use of decent language and create an impression that will
last long. Even if the thing is small as understanding or learning the abbreviations they will
do it in wrong manner. There are a lot of technical terms that are involved in literature which
creates confusion if not seen only listened such as thrombolysis etc.
Listening for gist-
Listening is a challenge when compared with seeing and observing things. As many
people get the whole picture but even one misconception can make a huge difference to the
information worked and build up in sequence. Even after that there is another challenge that
is content words such as verbs, adjectives and nouns which must also be good to understand
it. This is known as listening for gist. For instance words such as food, fun, park have their
stands but when they are used together it creates problem as they can change the whole
concept in the mind of individual. This all happens because many words are dependent on
prepositions and they portray meanings that are specific and relational this leads to confusion
and challenge in the area of listening and understanding things (Hyseni Duraku and Hoxha,
2018).

Detecting Signposts-
Listening has different challenges such as detecting signposts between the path that
helps them to keep listening to things with follow ups. Challenge is that many of the people
miss these signposts during the lecture which links ideas ahead and helps to understand the
way or path lecturer is trying to show off. It is considered mostly at the time of presentation
and lectures. For instance people only listen to phrases such as first of all or moving on to as
their functioning is similar to each other. Sometimes the structure used by lecturer is complex
which creates difficulties and build listening a challenge for students. There are sequences
which sometimes tend to be long as it include various things with rules involved. Due to such
long list of information which is not possible for all to understand it creates difficulties to
detect signals and that leads to missing of path on which lecturer wants them (Rodriguez and
Armellini, 2017).
Listening for details-
Students who are attending the lecture will only listens to things if it matches their
level of interest. All this leads to create a barrier among them as they do not pay attention to
other things and miss out all the details that are important. This challenge is difficult to
overcome as they can consider anything unnecessary that is used by the lecturer in their
session. This is necessary for them as if they miss out on these skills it will create difficulties
for life because it is linked with getting focus to work and enhancing their own knowledge
(Hedin and Kann, 2019).
Content of lecture-
This challenge relies upon the things that are included and used as a content in their
lecture. It is necessary that content or use of power point slides helps them to understand
things in a better way. If the content of lecture is hard and filled up with technical terms then
it is not possible that students will be able to understand it just by listening to it. It would
require a whole lot of effort to make them understand through listening as things that people
hear out for the first time creates confusion (Sera and McPherson, 2019).
Strategies through which teachers can improve the listening skills of students
Get to know their students-
In order to improve their skills of listening they need to make sure that they
understand the perception and thought process of their students so that they can build

strategies that helps them to keep their focus on their work. More importantly it is necessary
to understand their interest and preferences and build their content on the basis of that so that
they can keep them focused on the lecture they are going to use. This way they can build up
and enhance their knowledge which can help the students in both ways. In order to make
them improve it is important to understand their behaviour against the content.
Give student voice-
In order to improve their skills of listening it is important for them to allow their voice
and share their opinion to them so that they can understand the difficulties they are facing and
help them to solve it. It is important for them that they provide opportunities to them so that
they can present themselves in a better way. By doing this they will observe better change in
their performance of listening (Göğüş and Ertek, 2020).
Cold calling-
In order to check their attentiveness, it is important for them that they call their
students in a different and unique manner which is different than following routine. This will
help them to know that who are the ones that couldn’t answer their questions and that will tell
them who does not listen to their content and speeches. After recognizing that they can give
more attention to those group of people than the normal ones so that they can improve it. This
will help them to keep build pressure.
Listen to parents-
Parents are children’s first teachers which is why it is important for teachers to keep
on interacting with parents in set timely intervals such as parents teachers meeting. In these
meetings they can assess and be prepared with the questions to determine their position. This
will be a challenge for teachers but if done rightly it can turn out to be the most effective
strategy to improve the listening skills of students.
Talk less-
In order to improve their listening skills it is important that teachers talk less and use
only those words which are important as everyone has a span of attention and tolerance level
on which they can keep on listening to things. They can also add up different varieties in their
content to keep it more interesting for them. It can be done by mixing different set of
activities which will keep things moving for students (Drew and Bingham, 2017).

Students have to listen to things so that they can understand it and increase their
knowledge which is necessary to pass their tests and that cannot be skipped. This is because
on the basis of knowledge possessed by them they are promoted. Apart from that it is
important for them that they record the content as not everything they listen to will be
remembered by them but by recording it they can revise it whenever they want.
CONCLUSION
From the above studies it can be concluded that it is important for teachers to use only
necessary contents so that they can keep the attention of students to what they are referring to
and make their effort successful. There are a lot of challenges faced by them which can be
easily improved by the right strategies and support provided by teachers. It is important for
them to make them understand the importance of paying attention and listening to things
during the session as it is linked with their success and promotion. Apart from that they need
to make sure that the strategies used by them are right and effective so that they can improve
their skills and make better path for them.

REFERENCES
Books and Journal
Drew, S. and Bingham, R., 2017. The guide to learning and study skills: For higher education
and at work. Routledge.
Göğüş, A. and Ertek, G., 2020. A Scoring Approach for the Assessment of Study Skills and
Learning Styles. Int. J. Inf. Educ. Technol, 10, pp.715-722.
Hedin, B. and Kann, V., 2019. Improving study skills by combining a study skill module and
repeated reflection seminars. Education Research International, 2019.
Hyseni Duraku, Z. and Hoxha, L., 2018. Self-esteem, study skills, self-concept, social
support, psychological distress, and coping mechanism effects on test anxiety and academic
performance. Health psychology open, 5(2), p.2055102918799963.
Rodriguez, B.C.P. and Armellini, A., 2017. Developing self-efficacy through a massive open
online course on study skills. Open Praxis, 9(3), pp.335-343.
Sera, L. and McPherson, M.L., 2019. Effect of a study skills course on student self-
assessment of learning skills and strategies. Currents in Pharmacy Teaching and Learning,
11(7), pp.664-668.