Some Suggestions on How toDo Well on Midterm Exams
The following are some suggestionsthat will help you do your best in ZOO 138.
1. Attend lecture and take good notes.You may record my lectures if you wish. There is no substitutefor attending all of my lectures and taking complete, clear notes. I do recommend that you purchase the lecture transcripts thatare available from the Bronco Bookstore or use the ones availablethrough the ZOO 138 Home Page. You should also take the timeto read them carefully. I also recommend that you use a loose-leafnotebook so you can insert any handouts, including the IllustratedNotes, that I give you. Finally, it will be helpful if you haveeither a set of colored pencils or pens, that you can use to copysome of my colored diagrams. The colors I will use are red, blue,green, and white (black if there are "white-boards"in the lecture room).
2. You must invest a significantamount of time and energy into memorizing the material I giveyou. Success on my tests will depend on your ability to rememberthe details, as well as the general idea. In most cases it isNOT ENOUGH to simply read and reread your lecture notes. Youwill have to use some technique to truly memorize the material. This might mean making flash cards, or, better yet, teachingmachines that force you to write out the material. After my lectureon Modes of Reproduction, I will show you an example of a "teachingmachine", in case you are not familiar with this method ofmemorization.
3. Be able to reproduce and labelall graphs and diagrams that I put on the board. In order todo this, you will have to practice making them in preparationfor the tests. Note: I do NOT expect you to be able to reproducethe high quality, professional illustrations included in the IllustratedNotes.
4. Memorize all new terms and definitions. Many multiple choice questions require you to know the preciseand complete definition of a new term. It will be helpful to youin your study of science if you learn the Latin and Greek rootsused in scientific terminology. In writing your essay questions,be sure to define all new technical terms.
5. ESSAY QUESTIONS: I will alwaystell the class the possible essay topics for the exams (if youremember to ask me during the lecture preceding the exam). Donot "bet" on one of these. You must be preparedto answer all of them. I am intentionally unpredictableabout what essay question I ask. If you are going to use an abbreviationin your essay, be sure to define it first. These questions usuallyaccount for 25-30%, sometimes 40% of the points on a 100 pointmidterm. So be sure to leave enough time to completely answerit. In answering the essay question, be sure you respond to allof the elements of the question, and do not spend a lot of timewriting about something that isn't part of the answer. If youare uncertain about the question, ask me for clarification beforeyou start writing.
6. FILL IN THE BLANK (FITB) QUESTIONS:About 25-30% of the midterm points are in the form of fill inthe blank questions based on the classification and characteristicsof the vertebrates. In order to answer these questions you mustknow all of the characteristics of the groups and you must knowthe higher levels in the classification, as well as the scientificnames of the taxa. You should practice writing out the classification.
7. MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS: Thesequestions will be selected to cover the material not includedin the FITB and Essay questions. Successfully answering thesequestions depends on a detailed understanding of the material. On the test you will be told to indicate the "most correct"answer. All of the statements are either true or false. Therefore,none of the statements can be "more true" than another. So what do I mean by this? In some cases more than one statementis true. When this is the case, one of the answers will indicatethat two or more statements are true. This would be the "mostcorrect answer". However, you should not assume thatmore than one is correct simply because one of your choices sayssomething like "both a and b are true". Finally, want to give you my little spiel on how to use "Teaching Machines" to help you memorizethe material we will study in this class. As you are probably beginning to appreciate, there is a substantialamount of information that you are going to get in here. And yoursuccess on the exams is going to depend upon your ability to masterthe material. I have, for example, asked an essay question on modes of reproduction.And basically you have to just regurgitate back everything thatI told you about all the major terms and what they mean and howthey relate to one another. My experience with students in here is that the overwhelming majorityof them don't have very efficient techniques for memorizing largeamounts of material. You know, you could probably go home andtell an interested siblings about what you learned about modesof reproduction in five minutes. But when you -- if I give youan essay question on the first midterm which is worth 30 points,you know, 2 paragraphs, even if you can write 2 paragraphs, thatwould be worth about 12 points out of 30. So you need to have a method of memorizing substantial amountsof information. And a lot of those ideas and terms you just haveto memorize them. The interesting thing about biology is thata lot of the stuff makes sense, it's pretty simple. I haven'tsaid anything that's conceptually complicated so far. Have I? But if I ask to write an essay on the modes of reproduction andyou just kind of forget about embryonic development, or forgetto talk about oviparous and ovo viviparous, and distinguish betweenthe two, and talk about the condition of the young at birth, andthe difference -- get altricial and precocial reversed in yourthinking for some reason. I mean, they are similar words, or getpolygamy, polygyny and polyandry confused in your mind. How hardwould that be? Not very hard. What you need to do is you need to have a method of memorizingmaterial. And in your Illustrated Notes, you have this exampleof a teaching machine. The basic idea of a teaching machine is that you are going tohave a series of questions and a series of answers. You are going to take, I do not recommend that you do this ona computer. I have done this on computer to make it cleaner andeasier for you to read. I recommend that you do this on a pieceof lined paper, college-ruled lined paper. You want to have a series of questions and a series of answers. Write this on a piece of lined paper. Fold the paper down the middle and write the questions on one side and the answers onthe other side. Questions are constructed in such a way as to cover all the materialthat is in the lecture. So, for example, you can see up here,I started off with what I called major issues. Not every lecture is going to have major issues. But it have several-- if you were outlining the thing, remember how I said thesewould be roman numeral 1, 2, 3 and 4. Those are what you wantto put there. Courtship. Fertilization. Development. Parentalcare. And notice that this is an answer over here; this is a questionover here. But now courtship and fertilization and embryonic development,they occur as questions on other side. Just like the major sub-headingswithin your outline would appear over there. The answers need to be very short. They might very well need beto abbreviated. They probably should fit on one line. And whyis that? This idea of constructing a teaching machine is a way of utilizinginformation that the people who study human learning have discoveredabout the memory process. This is based upon what we know abouthuman learning. What we know about human learning is that you have an area ofyour memory that's called "short-term memory." And youhave another area that's called "long-term memory." And there is a subconscious controller that transfers informationfrom short-term memory into long-term memory. You don't have consciouscontrol over that, over that transfer. We all had the experience of having something be in short-termmemory and not get transferred into long-term memory. Like, ifyou were introduced to somebody. Had that experience? You getintroduced to somebody and 30 seconds later you know that youwere told this person's name and you couldn't remember if yourlife depended on it. Anybody had that experience? So you know that you have a short-term memory and you know that-- you know it was in there. And it is totally 100 percent gone.If it doesn't get transferred over to long-term memory. So what is it that affects and causes information to be transferredfrom short-term memory into long-term memory? That's what we needto know is how do we cause that? We can't just flick a switchand say remember everything this guy said says for the next 50minutes. We have to play some tricks on our brain in order to do that.And what the learning psychologists have told us and discoveredabout human memory is that things that cause information to betransferred into long-term memory include repetition of it. It includes -- if the information is processed by several areasof your brain, it's more likely to be transferred into long-termmemory. So when you are introduced to somebody, if you say their namerather than just say, "Hi." If you say, "Hi, George."Then you have processed that information in the parts of yourbrain that are responsible for acoustic and talking and hearing. Well, a teaching machine is better than any other method of studyingif and only if you will write out the answers. And that's why the answers need to be short. They are not fullsentences. They don't have all the necessary articles and conjunctionsand stuff like that. They are lists of terms. Look up here, theseare lists of terms. They may be abbreviated. But it will only work if you will writeout the answers. If you don't write out the answers, this is basically like flashcards. And most people have used flash cards at some time in theiracademic career. And there is value in doing that, because inorder to decide what goes on to the flash cards or on to the teachingmachine, you have to understand the structure of the lecture.You have to go back over your notes in order to understand that.These are all useful things. But what makes a teaching machine a more effective method of memorizationis the fact that you are going to write out the answers. And youmight even say the answers. Instead of, you know, in a flash card, you think, you see, youread the question. You think to yourself what the answer is, thenyou look at it to see if that's the right answer. And if it'sthe right answer you put it in one pile, and if it's the wronganswer you put it in another pile. But with the teaching machine, you actually write it out. Andyou should write it out and say the answer. And then the informationis being processed by the parts of your brain that are responsiblefor spelling it, the parts of your brain that are responsiblefor your penmanship. If you are saying it, it's your speech centersand your hearing centers. You're reading it with your eyes sothat your visual systems and your systems for reading words arebeing involved. And the writing process will cause you to learn this materialin just 1 or 2 repetitions. And you'll learn it very thoroughly.So that's why I recommend that you make teaching machines. As I have said, I have students write back from medical schoolwho are using teaching machines and doing great. It is a veryeffective means of memorizing. So your extra credit assignmentis to write a teaching machine based on the remainder of the lecturethat I will give you today. It will be a short one. The real pointis to get you to actually make one. But I want you to write it out. And if you -- what you find yourselfdoing is writing three or four lines of material which is whatI frequently see, then what you have done is, you haven't madea concise list. In other words, you only need to put into the thing, definitionsof terms that are new to you. You if you remember the definition of fertilization, then youdon't have to put it in the list. Don't be so fixated on completingthis that you put in things that are unnecessary. Only put inhere things that you really need to memorize. The idea would be that you would make a teaching machine for everylecture. So if you want to record lectures, that fine. SometimesI find I have a whole slew of tape recorders up here. That's fine. But what I wish I could tell you how many times I have had a studentcome in and say, "Dr. Hoyt, I took you so seriously. Yousaid this was a hard course. So I tape regarded your lecturesand I went home and I transcribed my notes. And look at thesebeautiful, wonderful written notes and all the pictures are in3 colors and all that kind of stuff." And I say, "Well,then, how did you study that?" He said, "Well, I readover them 75 times." And yet when we look at his answer on the multiple choice question,there is information missing. When we look at his essay answerhe left out everything to do with embryonic development. How is that possible? He said, "I knew that material."Well, you just plain forgot some of that material. You didn'treally know it. You thought you knew it, but you really didn'tknow it. It was his short-term memory. There is a difference betweenrecognizing some piece of information and understanding it andbeing able to produce that information out of your memory. And that's what you have be able to do in an essay. You have tobe able to produce all of that stuff. Just memorize what are theparts of it. I don't think it's a good idea to write out the answerof the essay question and try to memorize it. Just memorize theparts, you don't have to memorize the definition of a word thatyou already know, but you may need to memorize that that wordis part of the answer for the essay. So that's my recommendation. And you can hand in the extra credit assignment based upon theremainder of this lecture on Monday. But normally I'm a real pussy cat when it comes to deadlines.But this deadline I'm not going to be flexible on. I want thisextra-credit assignment, teaching machine, on the remainder oftoday's lecture handed in on Monday. Because I don't want youputting this off until after the first exam. If this is goingto be a useful technique to you to use in this class, you needto jump on it and get going on it immediately. THE FOLLOWING COMMENTS WERE MADE TO THE CLASS WHEN THE TEACHINGMACHINES WERE BEING RETURNED: One of the things you want to think about in creating a teachingmachine, Number 1, remember, that you have to be willing to sitdown and write out the answers for a teaching machine to be betterthan a flash card. If you are not going to write out the answers, then you mightas well just make flash cards because there are some advantagesof flash cards. You can sort them into things you know and thingsyou don't know. But the thing that really makes a teaching machine a more effectivemechanism or memorization is that you write out the answers. Thatmeans you don't put stuff on there that you don't need to memorize.Some people are compulsive, and they have to put everything onthere. And they are putting on there things that they alreadyknow. And when you have a bunch of things that you already know,you are going to pissed off when you go down to write the thingout, and you are not going to write it out, and pretty soonyou are going to stop using the machine, and it's not going tobe any better than flash cards. The other thing is to think about, how do you need to memorizethis stuff. For example, does it make more sense when you haveyour teaching machine and you have your questions on this side,and your answers on that side, does it make more sense to putsomething, a term that -- you know, polygyny as a question, andthe answer as being many females. Does it make more sense to writeit that way or does it make more sense to construct the teachingmachine so that maybe this occurs over here as well? You know, if you assume you are going to be taking a multiplechoice question on this material, then all you have to do is recognizethe word and it's probably adequate to write the new term thatyou are not familiar with as a question, and then you just haveto remember the definition of it. But you cannot assume that,or you cannot assume that you are only going to be answering onlymultiple choice questions on this material. You must -- in fact, it's better to assume that you are goingto be writing an essay on the material. And if you are going to writing an essay on the material thenyou are going to have to produce that word out of your own memory.You will have to be able to pull it up out of your memory. Youare going to have to remember it's part of a set of ideas thatinclude polygyny and polyandry and polygamy. Because you are goingto have to produce that whole set of ideas out of your memory. Then it make more sense to construct it so that it appears asan answer. That's really why I give you essays questions in here,because it really requires you to memorize material in a differentway. I saw some people who wrote down the 4 the facts, and they wrotethem out so that they took, like, 4 lines. Well, you don't reallyneed to make them be that long. You can do little tiny abbreviations.All you have to remember is a single half a term as an abbreviationfor one of those 4 facts, and you can probably write several sentencesabout the fact. And what happens as a result of it, because biologyis pretty simple stuff to understand. It's remembering all thecomponents of the answer that is the difficult part. It is for me, anyway. So anyway, I encourage you to use teaching machines to practicemaking graphs and diagrams and labelling them and labelling theaxes and there is one more set of information that we'll startworking on when I start talking about the classification of theanimals, and I'll have specific suggestions about how to studyfor that as well.