How Students Learn - Enhancing Your Academic Experience

1. THE TAO OF LEARNING Robert Love, Venkat Jayaraman June 24, 2008 SSTP Seminar – Lecture 2b

2. How Students Learn • What type of information do you preferentially perceive: sensory(external)—sights, sounds, physical sensations, or intuitive(internal)—possibilities, insights, hunches? • Through which sensory channel is external information most effectively perceived: visual—pictures, diagrams, graphs, demonstrations, or auditory—words, sounds? • With which organization of information are you most comfortable: inductive—factsand observations are given, underlying principles are inferred, or deductive—principles are given, consequences and applications are deduced? • How do you prefer to process information: actively— through engagement in physical activity or discussion, or reflectively— through introspection? • How does the student progress toward understanding: sequentially—in continual steps, or globally—in large jumps, holistically? UF Flight Controls Lab

3. You ~= Your Professor Undergrads Faculty Sensing 59% 36% Intuitive 39% 61% Visual 73% 73% Verbal 25% 26% Inductive 37% 58% Deductive 63% 40% Active 50% 38% Reflective 47% 60% Sequential 75% 70% Global 24% 27% Knowing how you and others work can help you relate with them and learn better! How Students Learn (Elliot Douglas) UF Flight Controls Lab

4. Doing Research • 1. Define: Define your topic. • 2. Background: Use reference sources to get background information of your topic. • 3. Search: Plan and do your search. • 4. Evaluate: Evaluate the results of your search. Identify synonyms to expand your search. • 5. Get: Get the items identified in your search. • 6. Write & Cite: Write your paper and prepare your bibliography. http://www.library.mun.ca/instruction/doingresearch/ UF Flight Controls Lab

5. Specific Questions • Prediction – What is the likely result of X? • Historical – How have we got from A to B? • Intervention – Is doing Y better than doing Z? • Exploration – What are the possible explanations for A? • Attitudes – How do people feel about B? • Causation – What are the likely causes of C? • Measurement: What is the size of X, how often does it occur etc? • Characterisation: how can we understand and specify W? How to do a literature search, Andrew Booth UF Flight Controls Lab

6. A lot of options! How to do a literature search, Andrew Booth UF Flight Controls Lab

7. Resources • For a Crash Course • Wikipedia, MIT Open Course Ware, NetLibrary, Project Gutenberg, Freebase • Engineering Specific Search Tools • ISI Web of Knowledge, EI Village, CSA Illumina, Science Direct, Free Patents Online • Professional Engineering Societies • AIAA, ASME, IEEE, associated journals and conference proceedings • Keeping track and sharing with others • Zotero , Del.icio.us, Twine, Endnote Web,Box, Xdrive, My Office (Facebook) • News at your fingertips (RSS feeds and alerts) • Google Reader, Google Alerts, niche Blogs (like mine!) • Finding Stuff • Global Spec, Matweb UF Flight Controls Lab

8. Refining Results • Boolean Searches at a Glance • AND searchessports AND baseball • The Boolean operator AND tells a search engine to search for all documents that contain both words in your query. • OR searches sports OR baseball • The Boolean operator OR broadens or widens a search to include all documents that contain either keyword. • NOT searches sports NOT baseball • The Boolean operator NOT excludes unwanted terms from your search. • Tips for Reading Research Papers • Download the PDF’s, if you can’t, copy and paste into Word, then use PrimoPDF to print it as a PDF • Annotate with Foxit Reader (most papers are pdf’s) UF Flight Controls Lab

9. Non-Electronic Sources • Libraries and Books • Yes they do exist! • Interlibrary loans • UF Research Advice • Library Catalogue • Other People • Friends • Librarians • Professors http://anke.edoras-art.de/cgi-bin/lotr1.pl?file=gandalf_archives_colour_72.jpg UF Flight Controls Lab