1. How to be a Successful Student
Fazal K. Aasi, MD.
Instructor: Basic Medical Sciences
Surgical Technology Program
Concorde Career College
North Hollywood, CA

4. Success You define Success:
Success depends on what you expect of yourself.
Confidence and Self-esteem:
Basic building blocks needed before you start each day’s journey.

5. You measure Success Vision and courage:
Are the beacons that illuminate the path of success.
Use vision to chart your direction, goals, and daily plans.
Use courage to take risks, and to change, each day becoming a better person.

6. Responsibility, commitment, and persistence:
Accept responsibility for all that you do and for staying committed to your vision.
Positive enthusiasm
Humorous and helpful

7. Questions Ask questions and listen to others:
Questions are the quickest, easiest and surest way to create success.
Use questions to validate your vision, to build confidence, to strengthen your commitment, and to create enthusiasm and friendship.
Learn how to learn:
Fine tune your ability to organize information, improve memory, read and take notes, concentrate while studying, solve problems and take exams.

8. Motivate Yourself Discover and use your Learning Style:
a. Your five senses
b. Your body’s reactions
c. Your preferred learning environment
d. Your level of motivation

9. Positive thinking • Become a positive thinker
• Take responsibility for motivating yourself
• Accept the fact that success results from effort
• Start listening to yourself talk

10. Develop Critical Thinking and Study Skills
• Making decisions
• Solving problems
• Reasoning
• Knowing how to learn
• Thinking creatively

11. Values that build Character
• Trustworthiness
• Respect
• Responsibility
• Fairness
• Caring
• Citizenship

12. COPE method to identify and solve problems
C Challenge
0 Options
P Plan
E Evaluation
Identify problem, cause, results
- Select the best option from possible solutions
-Make a plan to act on your option
-Check for progress; evaluate your plan and revise if necessary

13. Prepare for class:
• Attend regularly and be punctual
• Use your Syllabus
• Bring Textbooks and other supplies to do the assignments.
• Anticipate the next lesson
• Preview the next day’s assignment

14. • Focus your attention on the speaker
• Encourage the speaker
• Take notes
• Decide what is important to review and remember for class every day

15. Guidelines for Note Taking

17. • Keep track of your notes by heading your paper with the date, name of course, and lecture topic.
• Use standard sized paper (8 ½ x 11) that will fit into most notebooks or folders. Small sheets of paper won’t hold enough writing and may get lost or out of place.

18. • Keep the notes for one class separated from the notes for other classes.
Use separate notebooks for each class or use dividers to distinguish different sections in one notebook.
Use spiral notebooks or a loose-leaf binder so that lecture notes, textbook notes, and the instructor’s handouts may be organized for study purposes.

19. • Use a black or blue ballpoint pen for taking notes because it is easier on the eyes. This way the ink will not go through the paper as it does with ink pens. Pencil tends to smear and fade away.

20. • If you know your handwriting is poor, print for clarity or type your notes. This will save time when you review for tests.

21. • Use abbreviations so that you can be at the same speed as the instructor’s speed of talking.
It is easier to remember things if you write them in your own words, rather than write what the instructor says word for word. To save even more time omit periods from the abbreviations.

22. • Copy into your notes anything that is written on the board or on transparencies. Test questions may come from material that is presented these ways.
• Take organized notes.

23. •. Review your notes to fil1 in any gaps right after the class is over
• Review your notes to fil1 in any gaps right after the class is over. Review them frequently
If something is missing, compare notes with a classmate or the instructor.

24. 1. Divide the page into two columns, a smaller left column and a broader right column.
2. Record facts and ideas in the wide column. After the class, fill in any gaps and neaten your notes.
3. Question facts and ideas presented in the lecture that you do not understand or what you think the instructor might ask on a test.

25. 4. Recite the facts or ideas from memory and in your own words
4.Recite the facts or ideas from memory and in your own words. This will help you improve your retention, if you are an auditory learner.
Check yourself: Cover up the answer and question first, then try to recall, and see if you got the right answer.

26. 5.Reflect on what you have learned from lectures by applying the knowledge to real-life.
6.Review and read your notes daily. This is a good way of beginning a study session.
7.Recapitulate by writing a summary of your notes.

27. Scheduling Your Time

28. Making the Most of Your Time
How to GRAB Some Time.
1. Goal: Set a goal.
2. Responsibilities: Determine your responsibilities.
3. Analysis: Analyze where your time goes
4. Balance: Balance work, class, study and free time.

31. Make daily, weekly, monthly and semester schedules.
Schedules put you in control of your time and your life.
Use your Syllabus and a calendar to make schedules.

33. Time management and Learning Style
When you feel yourself getting drowsy, take a few deep breaths.
Change your position every few minutes: cross and uncross your legs, sit up straight, and make other adjustments in the way you are sitting.

34. Eat a snack, as a handful of raisins or a piece of fruit before you go to class. This will raise your blood-sugar level and your body temperature, making you feel more alert.
Take deep, rhythmic breaths to get more oxygen into your bloodstream.

35. Time Management and Reading
You may be frustrated by the number of pages per week that each instructor assigns. The reading has to be done.
Are there any short cuts? No.
Reading takes time. The more difficult the reading, the more time it takes.

36. To read more efficiently:
Determine the time you will need for reading.
Schedule your reading time.
Develop active reading habits and study skills so that you do not waste time.

37. Procrastination

38. How to Beat Procrastination?
1. Break a large assignment or project into smaller units of work that you can complete in one sitting.
2. Plan rewards for yourself for completing each part of the assignment. Take a break or do something you enjoy.

39. 3. Schedule enough time for completing a long assignment
3. Schedule enough time for completing a long assignment. Set a goal to spend a certain amount of time working each day until the assignment is finished.
4. Get organized. Your attitude toward studying will improve if you have an orderly work area with everything you need at your fingertips—books, pens and pencils, paper—so that you will be ready to begin the moment you sit down.

40. 5.If you put off assignments because you don’t know where to begin or aren’t sure how to do the work, find out what you need to know.
6.Assume an attitude of confidence.

41. Your Study Place
Choose a quiet place to study. You probably have to fight distractions, so schedule your study time when and where you are least likely to be disturbed.

42. Creating Your Study System
If you see yourself as a visual learner, your study system may include making diagrams or charts of information you want to remember.
Study when you are most alert.

43. Identify and use the common parts of textbooks and chapters as convenient study aids.
Devise your own system to meet course requirements or specific learning tasks.

44. SQ3R: The Basic System
There is a big difference between reading and studying.
You can’t merely read a chapter from the first word to the last and expect to retain the information.
You must read actively by underlining, making notes, asking questions mentally, and looking for the answers.

45. Survey
A survey is a quick review or brief overview of an entire textbook or a single chapter. You can survey a textbook in about ten minutes, and you need to do it only once to determine what it covers and what helpful aids it contains.

46. How to Survey a Textbook Chapter.
Survey a chapter before you read it for the first time. Then resurvey chapters that you are reviewing for a major exam.
Surveying helps you make assumptions about what a chapter covers. It is a pre-reading activity that focuses your attention on a topic.

47. Question As you read each heading, turn it into a question.
The “what” question asks you to read for a definition.
The “how” and “why” questions stimulate you to think critically about the value of concentration and how to improve it.

48. Read
Read slowly and carefully, concentrating on one section at a time. It takes time to absorb new ideas.
Do not skip unfamiliar words or technical terms. If you can’t infer their meanings from context, look them up in the books’ glossary or in a dictionary.
Reread the sentence in which each new word appears to make sure that you understand it.

49. Carefully examine each diagram, chart, illustration, table or other visual aid. Ideas that are hard to understand when you first read about them are easier to comprehend in a diagram or other graphic.
Try to determine the main idea of the section. Summarize this idea in a marginal note that will aid your recall when you review.
Read through the section again and underline the main idea and key details or examples.

50. Making notes, underlining or highlighting, and constructing study guides are essential steps of active reading.

51. Recite
After reading a section, try to state—aloud or silently—the important ideas covered in that section. If the important ideas stand out, then you are probably comprehending what you read.

52. Review Review each chapter immediately after reading it.
One quick way to review it is by re-surveying the chapter. Go over any notes you made in the margins. Reread any underlined or highlighted passages.
Review a chapter before you take a test. It is a good idea to review a chapter at least once between your first reading and your last pre-test review. With practice, you will discover how often you must review a chapter.

54. Make your own diagrams of processes and concepts
Draw organisms and label their parts. You’ll find it easier to retrieve your own words from memory during an exam than to recall someone else’s words that you have memorized.
Make flash cards of specialized terms to recite from and review.

55. Organizing Information for Study
Concept or Information Maps: If your learning style is visual, you may prefer information maps to outlines. Identify the topic and write it in a box. Identify the ideas that relate to the topic and write them connecting boxes to show their relationship to the topic.

56. Attitudes for Study
Commitment: means a willingness to pledge your time and effort to reach your goals.
Persistence: is the willingness to sustain effort over time, even in the face of difficulty.

57. Controlling Your Concentration
To concentrate means to pay attention by focusing your thinking on what you are doing.
Know what causes you to lose concentration. Identify your distractions and eliminate them.
Find or create your best study environment.
Study with a system that helps you concentrate.

58. Eliminate Distractions
Identify what is distracting you so that you can eliminate its source.
You can eliminate some internal distractions if you anticipate your needs. Study when you are fresh and rested.
Study in a comfortable place.
Make sure you understand how to do an assignment before you begin.

59. Find Your Best Study Environment
Visual learners. Make your place visually appealing. Display calendars, lists, and study aids where you can see and use them.
Auditory learners. Keep a cassette recorder in your study place.
Tactile learners. If you have a personal computer, use a word-processing program, make your own study guides.

60. Tips for Memorization 1) Get rid of distractions:
TV, radio, phone, your boyfriend or girlfriend, or whatever tends to draw your attention away.
2) Break the material you are studying into logical parts:
Our minds remember information in categories and hierarchies.

61. 3)Pause from time to time to allow your brain to store the information
4) Make sure you understand the main idea well before attempting to memorize details. It is far easier to remember something that you understand.
5) Explain these ideas out loud in your own words

62. 6) Try to find patterns or connections in the material you are memorizing, especially cause and effect patterns. Ask yourself how details or facts logically relate to one another.
7) Make associations in your mind to remember key ideas or facts. Think of something easy to remember, such as funny, odd, or familiar things.
8) Quiz yourself or have friends ask you questions to reinforce what you are memorizing.

63. 9). Don’t panic if you can’t recall something immediately
9) Don’t panic if you can’t recall something immediately. Just come back to the question later; straining your mind doesn’t work. If it’s in your memory bank, it will come out eventually if you can just relax.
10)Above all, don’t cram! Straining to memorize material the night before doesn’t allow enough time for your brain to store it, and you’ll lose 80-90% of it. The next day you’ll only find you’re very tired and frustrated.

64. The 7 most common mistakes the students make
Lack of motivation and commitment.
Mistake #2
Expressing negative comments about school, classes or a teacher.

65. Mistake #3
Chronically behind, lack of time and procrastination.
Mistake #4
Poor concentration and boredom.
Mistake #5
Too much memorization and
compartmentalization of ideas

66. Mistake #6
Coupling of grades, confidence and self-esteem.
Mistake #7
Don’t go to class.

67. Getting ready to take Quiz / Exam

68. 1) Come prepared. Bring at least two #2 pencils, a good eraser, and a sharpener. If you arrive a little early and feel rested, you will probably remember the material better.

69. 2) Read the instructions and questions very carefully
2) Read the instructions and questions very carefully. Note how many questions there are, the value of each, and how long you have to complete the test. A good strategy will help you gain the most points possible.

70. 3) Try answering the question in your mind before reading all the possible answers. This can focus your thinking and help you avoid confusion later on.

71. 4) Read all the choices, and eliminate the obviously incorrect ones first.
This will help you verify whether your answer is truly the best one.

72. 5) Do the easy questions first This will build your confidence and help you budget your time to use up on the harder questions.

73. How to Answer Multiple-Choice Questions
1. Anticipate the answer to a question and look for it among the choices by eliminating the distracters.
2. Answer all questions for which you know the correct answer.

74. 3. When you are uncertain of a correct answer, look for clues to correct answers:
• “All of the above”
• one of two similar-looking answers
• the most inclusive answer

75. 4. When you cannot find a clue to a correct answer, look for clues to incorrect answers:
• an extreme modifier (such as always)
• an unfamiliar term
• a joke or insult
• the highest and lowest number in a set

76. 5. Underline key words. Watch out for words like “always,” “never,” “all,” “every,” and “none.” Extreme statements may be false. Exaggerations are false.
(if any part of a statement is false, the whole can be considered so.)

77. 6.Fill in everything. Rarely is there ever any penalty for a wrong answer, and you may be fortunate enough to guess right on some of them.

78. 7.Never change an answer unless you are completely sure of your reason for changing it. Most of the time, our first answer is the correct one. Learn to trust your intuition. Never change answers at the last minute simply out of fear!!! That’s a habit that can lose you a lot of points.

79. 8. Use the whole class period to complete the exam
8. Use the whole class period to complete the exam. Many instructors will provide clues or explanations that are very helpful, especially toward the end of the exam period.

80. 9. Budget your time, and always leave time to review your answers
9.Budget your time, and always leave time to review your answers. You may catch a mistake or remember something important as you read over your answers.

81. The Rusher
Hurries through the entire process of taking an examination in a desperate rush to complete the test before essential facts that have been studied are forgotten.
Is at high risk for misreading, misinterpreting, and mistaking
Should practice relaxation exercises
Develop a plan of studies and review before exams
Practice test –taking strategies at home and attempting to slow down his/her pace of reading and answering.

82. The Second Guesser
Believes that a second look at each answered question will allow to “catch” any possible error, and so proceeds with reviewing the entire completed examination, changing initial responses.
The examinee is far more likely to respond correctly to a question with a first answer than if she/he repeats the item and alters the initial response.
Reread only the few items you are very unsure of and avoiding erasing or changing any initial response unless absolutely necessary.

83. Taking an Examination

84. Before you begin answering Questions!!!
• Preview the test to learn what types of questions you must answer, whether questions are printed on both sides of each page, and where you must write your answers.

85. • Read the directions carefully and follow them exactly.
Listen attentively to everything the teacher says before and during the test.

86. • Plan your test taking time so you will answer all the questions you know in case time runs out.
• Answer the easiest questions first.

87. • Answer all the questions unless you are instructed not to.
• Check your answers, but be careful not to change correct answers to incorrect answers.

88. • Don’t let other students see your answers
• Don’t let other students see your answers. (You may be accused of cheating.)
• When a test is returned, study your incorrect answers to learn how you might do better on the next test the teacher gives.

89. The End
Thanks for Listening