 Students often ask me, what's the right way to study? The truth is, there is no right way. Every student is unique in a unique program and with a unique way of doing things. What students do need, though, is some way to tell a good strategy from a not-so-good strategy. For many students, study skills are simply tips and a study strategy is just a collection of those tips. Let me tell you a bit about what I mean by a tip. For example, many students have heard that a yellow highlighter, when reading, will help them focus and concentrate better than other colors. Other students have heard that C is most commonly the correct answer on a multiple-choice exam, so if they don't know the answer, they pick C. When these tips don't have a dramatic impact on the student's grades, they often feel frustrated and maybe even a little stupid. But the truth is, it's the tip that is stupid, not the student. What matters in learning is the degree to which your frontal lobes, your brain, is directly engaged in struggling to understand the course material. The more you struggle to understand the material, the deeper that engagement and the better your understanding of it. Good study strategies target your frontal lobes and not just your notepad. First, a good strategy involves your full brain. If a strategy allows you to tune out or not pay attention, it's actually a bad strategy. For example, many students who use a highlighter discover that they can drift off into a reading coma and experience highlighter hypnosis. For them, it's not a good strategy. Second, a good strategy allows a student to organize, interpret, summarize, paraphrase information at a level that's a little more complex than just getting the gist. Third, a good strategy is actually a skill and not a tip. A skill is learned and developed over time. For example, you cannot learn to ride a bike simply by watching a video on it. You have to get on the bike and actually ride. Finally, a good strategy has some way of capturing in your notes your brain's activity. Those notes should be helpful to you as you approach the exam. When looking for strategies, keep in mind that strategies have a range of utility. They're going to be good for certain things and maybe not so good for other things. So tailor the strategies that you choose to use to the situations that you find yourself in. Another common question that students ask is what's going to be on the exam? This is actually not a very useful question. It might be better to ask what kinds of things are going to be on the exam. And there are basically three kinds of levels of things that might appear on the exam. At level one are facts and data. These are things that you either know or you don't know. You can either regurgitate from memory or you can't. The second level are concepts and theories. These are ideas and how ideas fit together or don't fit together within the course. A third thing might be methodologies or modes of analysis. This is the way that your field views, interprets, questions and studies the world around it. For example, in a sociology course, you might be asked to develop the sociological imagination. If you don't know what that is, that's a big part of the course and you need to find out. Keep in mind that you can't just pick any old strategy in order to hit all of these different levels. Different levels require different kinds of strategies. Simply trying to rote, memorize definitions will not get at the concept level and won't certainly not tell you about modes or methodologies of analysis. I also want you to keep in mind that what may work for you may not work for other students. So when other students give you suggestions, always filter them through your personal experience and decide, is that going to work for me? Because only you know. I hope this introduction was helpful to you. As you watch the other videos in this series, please keep these things in mind.