Study Skills in the Adult Student
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With many older people returning to school to continue their education, the question has arisen as to whether they possess deficient study skills and whether study skills training is essential for older students to succeed in college. According to the College Board, 45 percent of all college students are 25 years of age or older, and only about 20 percent of college students are full-time and under 22 years of age (Culross, 1996). Adult students are represented in all sectors of higher education from the community college to the research university, says Culross. Many adult students completed high school at a time before universities instituted admission requirements. Also, Culross points out, women were often discouraged from taking math and other @hard@ courses in high school and from attending college. In today=s job market, workers are often required to have a college degree, and also often need to be computer literate, and possess advanced math skills and competency in oral and written communications. Some adult students lack the required reading, writing, and math skills required for enrollment in some college-level courses, either because they failed to take them in high-school, or because the courses they took are no longer sufficient and they need to take Amake up@ courses to prepare them for today=s college curriculums (Culross, 1996). It is not so much that the adult students do not have adequate study skills, but that they have not taken the prerequisite co
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academic performance, and the idea that there is one specific set of skills that constitutes effective studying and therefore guarantees better outcomes has largely been discredited (p. 69). They add that Aformal study-skills courses that are organized apart from the general teaching program will probably be ineffective or even counterproductive, even if they are taught by teachers of the relevant academic discipline.@
The researchers quote a study by Conway and Ross (1984) who compared students who had undertaken a study-skills program with others who had been assigned to a waiting list. They found that the main reason students who had taken the course reported an improvement in their study skills was that they underrated their previous study skills. Their subsequent academic performance was no better than the group on the waiting list, and even when they were told at a debriefing that the course had no effect, they still insisted that the course had been beneficial.
The area where some adult students might be expected to have a problem, admit Richardson and King, is in time management, however this is not a problem with most adult students (p. 70). They quote a study which showed that students over the age of 25 at the ti
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Approximate Word count = 2730
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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