Category Archives: study tips

09/10/24

Quiz Writing [updated]

Here’s the deal -it takes work to answer a quiz or an exam.  However, it’s not simply how much time you put in, it’s really about learning how to study smart. Sometimes we can find ourselves spending lots and lots of time  preparing for something but not get anything accomplished.  To be able to manage a full load of university courses, a life beyond class, maybe a job, etc, means being able to studying effectively and not waste your time.

Smart Study means listening to what is said in class (remember the blog on ‘what’s the prof want anyway?).  The lecture gives you the ROAD MAP to a satisfactory grade (for the mark inclined -that’s a C+/B-).  Read more, participate in tutorial discussions, ask questions in lecture, talk to your prof and TAs (we can be found fairly easily), generate questions as you read.  If you engage in smart study you will do okay.

The Quiz. the quizzes will draw from lecture and readings.

Format: Each quiz will have two basic sections.  The first will involve short, fill in the blank and/or matching type questions.  The second will involve answering a number of paragraph type questions.  For this section there will typically be a set of three or four possible questions from which students will select two or three to answer in the space provided.

One of the hard things about a first time experience with university examination is it is unlike highschool exams.  The structure and content of the test isn’t laid out for you ; you won’t be told what exactly is on the quiz or exam.  You will have to work at it, but the signs are fairly clear.

  1. Course outlines have headings and assigned readings under those headings.  Read the heading. For our first unit the main heading is:  “What is Anthropology.”  This should give a student a really clear indicator of the primary learning goal of the unit -that is, you are learning about what makes something anthropology.  In class we have been talking  about how it is that anthropologists do what ever it is we do.  It would seem that this involves research (called fieldwork in anthropology), key concepts (i.e. conceptual tools used in doing anthropology), and some basic understanding that there are several types of anthropology.
  2. Lectures have structure -take notes following the lecture structure. Sometimes it might seem hard to figure out what to take notes on -everything?  or, just the important things?  (but then ‘what is important’?).  When a prof uses powerpoint or overheads it makes your job as a student a little bit easier.  Normally we (ie profs) select key words or phrases that highlight what we have decided are the most important of critical issues.  Thus, your job of figuring out what is ‘important’ is made easier.
  3. Now put readings and lectures together. Compare your notes of lecture with your notes from the readings.  If you are a habitual highlighter -consider locking your highlight pen away and opening up a notebook in which you write into it the key ideas from the things you read; don’t waste your time highlighting  everything in the assigned readings.  By the time you’ve finished highlighting your book will likely look like a rainbow.
  4. Finally, if you haven’t been reading along as per the course outline you will find it harder to speed read and catch the wave in time for your quiz.  Of course, there are those among us who can read the textbook the night before and do okay (or even great).  But for the majority of us doing well on a quiz, a term paper, or an exam is the product of smart study and hard work.

More info on exams and exam writing can be found under the ‘good question’ post.

Edited and updated. Originally published October, 2010.

09/9/24

Where is ‘The Field?’

Anthropologists do their research in ‘the field.’ This is to set it apart from where we write up our research results.  That is we make a distinction between where and when we conduct our research and the place and time within which we write up our findings.  In recent decades this fairly simplistic distinction between field and home has become complicated by critique (Geertz 1988), advances in information technology, and changes in research practices.  Nonetheless, practicing anthropologists still refer to their place of research as the ‘field’ and what we do in the field as ‘fieldwork.’

My impressions and observations of many years of research in the Bigoudennie (an area within Brittany, France) are recorded in notebooks, files and in the photos I took during my time in there.  Glancing through my family photo albums I see the passage of many years in Brittany recorded from the perspective of the everyday life of a family.  These photos mark the events, trips, birthdays, guests, anniversaries and other everyday moments of parenthood and family.  The place, that is to say the “field-site,” enters this record as glimpses of landscape and blurred backgrounds against which the normal life of a family progresses.  Later photos, taken on return visits, tend to capture reunions with friends in their homes.

My experience being in the Bigoudennie is overwritten by my experience as a father and as a partner to my spouse.  We attended the public-school festival like the other parents.  Some sunny afternoons we might pile into our car and take a picnic on the beach, along some nearby lakeshore or in a neighboring wood.  On my way home from the daily commercial fish auction I often stopped to pick up a few things at the supermarket or bakery.  These are not earth-shattering events.  They are part of a family life, which continues irrespective of whether or not one is in France, Canada, the United States, or elsewhere.

One of our early arrivals in Brittany is captured in a series of pictures of my sons, playing on a beach near our first temporary lodgings.  It is late in the afternoon and the setting sun colors the landscape.  In one picture, the boys are standing behind an inscription etched in the sand: “Jarek and Tristan, Oct. 16, 1994, Brittany.”   This photo masks the anxiety of navigating along highways and county lanes, searching out what is for us, strangers here, difficult and incomprehensible.  Now, having finished with the necessities of shopping, signing leases, and cleaning up, we have retreated to this beach to relax and take stock of the place we shall call home for the next year or more.

In one of the few photos of which I am in the picture I am standing on the edge of a quay in the Port of Lesconil.  One boy is perched near the edge of the dock.  I am holding the other on the seat of an adult’s bike.  Off to the side, an old-style dragger is coming alongside the dock.  The white-washed sides of stone houses are just visible across the harbor. While my presence is clearly expressed, the skipper of the dragger is barely a silhouette framed in the window of his wheelhouse.  The clues to his identity are locked within the silhouette of the boat and in its registration number. Much can be learned from a reading of the boat: age, rigging, gear-type, crew size, port of registry, etc….  However, these faceless and objective data push the skipper and his crew even further into the shadows.

My field work experience in Brittany mirrors the classic demarcation between away and home, the field and the place where one writes up one’s work.  Before and along side my Breton research I did work in my home community on the north coast of BC. My master’s degree focussed on industrial fisherfolk I grew up among. This work continued to work with family and community from my home First Nation, Gitxaała (see People of the Saltwater).

‘The field’ of my north coast research intersects with my family, friend, and life networks. Here, even when I stop writing I remain enmeshed in ways that I am not in my Breton work. For many decades the discipline of anthropology down-ranked research at home. I ended up doing my doctoral research in Brittany, not BC, based on the strong advice of my mentors (and they were right for a doctoral student at that moment of time). My professional research since being hired at UBC has, however, mainly focussed on work about my home (First Nation and non-Indigenous), the intersection between First Nations and the nation state, and on the people who study First Nations. So my field has become the university itself, not simply a place some distance away.

05/27/20

A Good Question

The idea here is that if one can generate a ‘good question’ from ones readings, listening to lecture or podcast, or watching video, one is well on the way toward effective learning.  If one is able to pose a question, a question that engages with the material at hand, that integrates it across domains of thought, then one is really moving forward with understanding and being able to use the knowledge one gains.

 

The good question exercise is one I often use in teaching. But more than that, it is an approach to learning and research that I use myself.

I try first to understand a piece of writing, say on a subject that is new to me or one that I might have a divergent perspective from the author. I am a strong believer in the efficacy of comprehension before critique.   It is so easy to create a shopping list of all the things wrong with something I disagree with.  It is more intellectually challenging to try and understand the logic, perspective, data, and argument of an author first. It will ultimately make any critique (positive or negative) more effective and nuanced in the long run. In my blog post ‘What does the prof want?‘ I discuss this approach in a bit more detail with an eye toward effective study technique.

Here is a standard set of instructions that I often use as the basis of a group activity in a class.

  • Each group is to generate two or three ‘good’ questions based on the reading assignments. Take a few minutes -no more than five- to brainstorm ideas within the group. Write them down so that you can consider them. These ideas should not be fully formed questions.
  • Next, review the ideas and begin to design questions from them. Ask yourself if the questions challenge you to think through the issues of fieldwork or do they help you understand the context of the two research sites. Be mindful that the answers must be in the readings and/or film. Also, the questions should not be designed to elicit opinion; they should require reference to information from the readings listed above.
  • After everyone in the group has asked and discussed the questions revise and winnow the questions to two or three that you would be interested in presenting to the class.
  • As part of this process you should also sketch out a brief answer to each of the questions.
  • After finalizing the questions each group will present one question to the discussion group. At the end of this session hand in the questions and answers.

Whether used as a group activity, or an individual learning technique, the idea behind the good question draws upon a variation of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This is a kind of hierarchy of learning and knowledge. Imagine that the first step is simple memory and recall. Then we start to build comprehension. We apply our knowledge in some way. From there we start to analysis novel situations with our knowledge, link it together synthetically with other types of knowledge and then finally are able to evaluate (or critique our knowledge).

The good question approach is based on an idea of active learning – go beyond memory work- integrate the knowledge into one’s one understanding and make use of it. Doing it this way is one effective way to become a more proficient learner and ultimately a better researcher.