Study Skills for Higher Education: Strategies and Recommendations

This report delves into the essential study skills required for success in higher education, particularly within the context of virtual learning environments. It examines various strategies students can employ to enhance their listening abilities, crucial for effective information retention and comprehension. These strategies include maintaining eye contact, avoiding multitasking, preparing for lectures, and allowing speakers to finish their thoughts without interruption. Furthermore, the report provides recommendations for teachers to improve student understanding, such as incorporating visual aids, providing personalized education, making lectures engaging, and reviewing past material. The report concludes that students must develop strong study skills to thrive in higher education and emphasizes the importance of both student and teacher roles in fostering a successful learning experience.

Study Skills for
Higher Education –
Report

Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................3
MAIN BODY..................................................................................................................................3
Strategies That Students Can Make Use of Towards Improving Their Listening Ability..........3
Recommendations for Teachers To Help Their Students Better Understand Lectures...............5
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................6
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................8

INTRODUCTION
A student is required to possess numerous different learning skills, competencies and
traits that can enable them to effectively engage in the learning process allowing for them to
memorise, retain and learn greater amount of information than would be possible by a student
when they do not possess the various learning skills and competencies (Nemec, Spagnolo and
Soydan, 2017). As during the current pandemic, with students having to engage in the learning
process through virtual means, such learning skills have become increasingly important and
essential in order to ensure that students are able to effectively gain knowledge through their
virtual learning operations. This report evaluates how students can improve their learning ability
and makes recommendations on how teachers can better help their students understand their
lectures.
MAIN BODY
Strategies That Students Can Make Use of Towards Improving Their Listening Ability
As increasing number of students are required to engage in their learning operations
virtually through the use of third party applications such as Zoom or Skype etc., as a direct result
of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic across the world, it has become increasingly
important and essential for the students to develop and enhance their overall listening abilities so
that they can better learn and retain greater amount of information, for their virtual learning
operations to be successful. In the current environment, it has become extremely important for
students to place importance and emphasis on developing and improving their listening skills and
abilities because this has a direct and proportional impact on the overall success of their learning
operations (Tanaka and et.al., 2018). Attentive and active listeners do not only pay increased
attention to words being spoken, instead they are also highly focused on assess the inherent
intent of each spoken word that is being communicated. There exist various strategies that
students can make use of with the intention towards enhancing their listening skills. The most
important and effective of such strategies that students can make use of with the intention of
improving and enhancing their overall listening skills are as follows:

 In order for students to improve their overall listening abilities, they are recommended to
maintain eye contact with the speaking party. This can help to improve their overall
listening skills because individuals who are able to maintain direct eye contact when
communicating are seen as warm, reliable, sociable, confident, honest and active. When
students maintain direct eye contact with the speakers, they are able to gain increased
information than what is being spoken through other means of communications such as
the body language of the speaker. Maintaining eye contact also helps the students
maintain concentration on what is being spoken to them, allowing for them to improve
their listening skills.
 In order to improve their listening skills, students are also recommended to only pay
increased focus on listening activities when communicating with others and not try to
engage in multitasking operations, as this can have a drastically negative impact on the
overall listening capability of the student. For example, when a student engages in multi
tasking operations and takes notes at the same time that a teacher is communicating
vitally important information to them, then this act of multi tasking decreases the overall
listening capability of the students, with the students being able to parse and retain
decreased amounts of knowledge and information (Ciğerci and Gultekin, 2017). Students
are recommended to focus and concentrate only on listening operations during their
learning activities as multi tasking can hamper their overall concentration and adversely
impact on their learning and listening capabilities.
 Another major strategy through which students can improve their overall listening
capabilities is by preparing for the future lecture by reviewing the past material and notes
or classes. This is immensely important because one of the most prevalent reasons that a
student’s mind drifts from the learning activity between them and the teacher is due to the
topic being discussed being too difficult or alien to the students, making their mind
wander, adversely affecting their listening abilities (Williams, 2018). Students being
communicated topics that are hard or uninteresting to them has a direct impact on their
learning and listening abilities, as the student is not able to retain the new information
because they are not prepared for it, on the other hand, when a student prepares for their
future lectures by reviewing their past notes, lectures or classes, it allows for them to

actively realise and retain greater information about what is being taught to them in their
current lecture, enhancing their overall concentration and listening abilities.
 In order for the students to further improve their listening abilities, the students are
further recommended to pay increased attention to the speaker, while not interrupting
their communication operations for doubts or inconsistencies while the teacher is still
speaking. This improves the listening abilities of the students because making frequent
interruptions to the communication operations can never result in the listener being able
to learn and retain increased amounts of new information or knowledge, instead the
listening and retaining ability of the students is enhanced only when the teacher is
allowed to complete their communication operations, ensuring that the students do not
guess or make unverified assumptions due to their listening operations in the
communication process (Caruso, Gadd Colombi and Tebbit, 2017). Allowing for the
teachers to complete their communication message without interruptions allows for the
students to listen and come to desired conclusions based on the communications, while
frequent interruptions can make the student guess or make assumptions which can make
them not come to the relevant and desired conclusions of the communication process.
Recommendations for Teachers To Help Their Students Better Understand Lectures
There are also present various recommendations through which the teachers can help
their students come to a better understanding of what is being taught to them in their lectures.
The most effective and important of such recommendations for teachers are as follows:
 The teachers are recommended to make use of visual forms of teaching through
presentations and actual physical experiments in addition to the traditional classroom
based approaches of teaching as the traditional teaching approaches can become tiring
and boring for the students of current digital times. As the students also are now directly
interfacing with new technology on a consistent daily basis, using such technologies in
the classroom is a highly effective and important strategy that teachers can make use of in
order to ensure the interest and concentration of their students during learning lectures
(Kennedy, 2016). Making use of visual tools such as presentations, experiments and
videos, also allows for the students to gain practical knowledge of what is being

theoretically taught to them, which is also immensely important and allows for the
students to gain and retain greater amount of information.
 Additionally, the teachers are recommended to place increased focus on providing
personalised education to all students, as it is common knowledge that not all students
possess the same learning and retention rates, with some students being able to learn
foreign and new concepts in days, while other students take weeks towards learning new
and foreign concepts (Putman and Rock, 2016). Though it is obviously not possible for
the teacher to oversee the retention ability of all their students, personalising their
education operations to incorporate students with slow learning or retention rates will
also allow for the teachers to ensure that their students are able to gain better
understanding of the lectures being taught to them with some time and effort.
 The teachers are also recommended to keep their lectures and educational efforts to be
increasingly interesting to the students, showcasing to them all the various operational
areas, where their newly learned skills can be made of use, allowing for the teachers to
engage and interact with their students in order to generate the student’s interest and
fascination towards the subjects being taught in the lectures, which allows for their
students to be part of the lectures with increased concentration and interest, allowing for
them to learn, absorb and retain greater amounts of knowledge and information as
opposed to what would be possible had the students not been made interested towards the
lectures and their minds having wandered during the lecture (Boysen, 2016).
 The teachers are also recommended to review and revise their past and previous lectures
in order for their students to get acclimated to the new information and knowledge that is
about to be presented to them through the lectures. This would allow for the students to
remember their past lectures and make connections between the information of the past
and current lectures, allowing for them to gain better understanding overall.
CONCLUSION
Through the findings of this report, to can effectively be concluded that students are
required to possess some highly valuable and important study and learning skills in order for
them to be able to gain and retain increasing amounts of knowledge through their learning
operations especially in the current virtual teaching and learning paradigm. This report evaluates

strategies that students can make use of with the intention to improving their overall listening
skills. The report also makes recommendations on how teachers can help their students towards
better understanding their lectures in order to improve their learning capabilities.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Nemec, P.B., Spagnolo, A.C. and Soydan, A.S., 2017. Can you hear me now? Teaching listening
skills. Psychiatric rehabilitation journal. 40(4). p.415.
Ciğerci, F.M. and Gultekin, M., 2017. Use of digital stories to develop listening comprehension
skills. Issues in Educational Research. 27(2). pp.252-268.
Williams, D., 2018. Early listening skills. Routledge.
Caruso, M., Gadd Colombi, A. and Tebbit, S., 2017. Teaching how to listen. Blended learning
for the development and assessment of listening skills in a second language. Journal of
University Teaching & Learning Practice. 14(1). p.14.
Kennedy, M.M., 2016. How does professional development improve teaching?. Review of
educational research. 86(4). pp.945-980.
Putman, S.M. and Rock, T., 2016. Action research: Using strategic inquiry to improve teaching
and learning. Sage Publications.
Boysen, G.A., 2016. Using student evaluations to improve teaching: Evidence-based
recommendations. Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. 2(4). p.273.
Tanaka, H. and et.al., 2018, October. Listening skills assessment through computer agents. In
Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (pp.
492-496).