As you move into Marquette student housing, you’ll have many things on your mind — whether or not you’ll like your roommate, whether you’ll be able to divide your time between classwork and work at a job, whether you’ll still have time for going out and having fun, and whether your classes will require a lot of study time. Well-established research into how people learn suggests study habits that will help you make the most effective use of your study time and, as a bonus, let you socialize with others at the same time.
Adult Learning Techniques for Adult Learners
Research shows that at about the age of seventeen or eighteen life experience begins to influence not only how people learn but why people are interested in pursuing learning.
Adult learners, like you as a college student, choose to pursue learning because they see it as a necessary gateway to reach goals in their lives and careers.
Consequently, college students, and all adult learners, learn best and stay most engaged with learning when the course material relates to their lives and their goals and when they feel that they have some control over the learning process.
Adult Learning Methods Merge Life and Learning
College courses usually involve lectures, though, and tightly structured assignments. You also may have difficulty figuring out how some of the required courses apply to your life and career choice. Adult learning techniques can help you stay focused on how your coursework will merge with your life and your career in the future.
As you and your fellow adult learners begin to develop your independent lives, your experiences will diverge. Consequently, forming a diverse study or discussion group is an adult learning technique that offers insights from a variety of perspectives into how a class fits into your current and future interests and goals.
That discussion group also can form the basis for a social group and even possibly provide a network of career contacts for all of you in the future.
Your discussion group also can help suggest subjects for your class projects and papers that are as closely related to your career as possible. This adult learning technique not only ensures that you learn more career-related information, but it also ensures that you’re more likely to remember it long-term, instead of just short term until the next exam. In addition, you’ll be building a portfolio for when you apply for internships or jobs in your field.
To gain a sense of control over your learning, follow a process that you might use throughout your career and your life. Use your work schedule and the syllabus for each class to create a timeline. Then, schedule the time you need each day to complete your classwork on time along with the time when you are scheduled to work at a job, the time you’ll meet with your group, time to have some fun after you meet, and, of course, time to sleep.
Use this schedule as a commitment, as a learning contract, to yourself and with everyone in your group. Each member of the group can bring his or her schedule to meetings and give a progress report, just as if, in a work situation, you were all working on a group project with each one responsible for completing independent parts.
With our study lounges and apartments ranging from studios to four bedrooms, contact Lark on 14 about Marquette student housing to choose the arrangement that will best help you achieve your learning goals.
