Struggling With Science Courses - Need Advice

mikemac
Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:09:11 +0000

That’s the thing though, at this point in time I put multiple of hours into chemistry per day. That’s what frustrates me. I mean if I were just showing up for class and then not acing the tests that’d be one thing, but I study loads for every Chemistry class

1) Read/Highlight chapter
2) Convert highlighted chapter into handwritten notes
3) Using notes and the chapter as reference, work through the recommended problems at the end of the chapter (if no problems are recommended by the prof I’ll do random ones in each section within the chapter).

Part of what I see you doing, and its hard to explain exactly how its wrong but I sense it somehow, is that you’re trying to read the chapter the way you’d read a history book. In a history text you read and highlight key sentences, then might even summarize those in your own words. You can boil a 20-page section on the American Civil war down to a page or two of notes that will remind you of everything else. In Chem that won’t work. Just about every sentence matters, but you don’t learn it by memorizing. The sentences are about describing transformations and relations of compounds, and somehow you’ve got to see the bigger picture and realize the dense text is the particulars.

Learning Chemistry or Physics is more like learning to speak another language than it is learning something like History. Languages (and sciences) take hours of steady practice to learn. While you’re spending hours of time, it isn’t time spent effectively or efficiently. If you look on the web (search for “how to study chemistry”) you can find pages with tips. You might also talk to the prof and your TA about what she/he has found good students do, see if there is a study skills center at your school for help, etc.

The quickest way to improve is to get one of the problem solving books, such as “The Chemistry Problem Solver”. These have thousands of worked examples; you find the chapter related to what you’re studying, start with the 1st problem and cover up the answer, check your work, and it has the steps explained if you’ve got it wrong.

I think the difficulty you have with word problems shows that you’re not really attaching much meaning to the concepts; given an equation you can flip thru the chapter and find one that looks similar and manipulate it to get the answer, but when put into words you draw a blank. Given a chapter section that says “something floats in water if its density is less than 1g/ml” and a problem that says an object is X by Y mm and weighs Z, you’d be able to compute the density and answer if it floats. But the bigger concept hasn’t really sunk in. To go back to the example you gave earlier about the chair and will it float, the 1st question to ask is “how do I know if something will float?” That should clue you in to density. Then the next question you’d ask yourself is “what is the density of a wooden chair?”