Tips on Becoming a Successful Student

Your learning will be enhanced by the many different ways that you can work with the course material. The section below outlines a number of strategies that successful students use. Try them out and see which work best for you.

Actively Listening to Lectures:

During your professor’s lectures you will have the opportunity to see large projected images of beautiful works of art, to hear when and why they were created, and to learn what they meant to the people for whom they were made. Your professor’s lectures are extremely important both in learning the material and in discovering what he or she feels is most important for you to learn. Pay careful attention to the course syllabus, checking to see the order in which topics will be covered, for you will find that you get more out of the lectures if you have read the relevant material in your text book before coming to class.

It is very important to learn how to keep your mind focused on what the instructor is saying and not succumb to the warm darkness that surrounds you or to let your mind wander. Taking notes on what the lecturer is saying as well as drawing sketches of the projected art works not only imprints the material in your mind, but also helps to keep you mind focused. When you look at them in the light, you may find that your notes are sloppy and hard to read, but nevertheless they are important. If you rewrite them after class this will further imprint the information in your mind and will provide you with material for integrating into your summary charts as you prepare for examinations.

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Reading the Text:

The text book is an important adjunct to your instructor’s lectures. Many students find that marking the text with a yellow marking pen as they read helps them identify the major ideas, and others write comments in the margin. I have always had mixed feelings about writing in books because most students want to keep their art history books after they graduate. Your text book is not only important as a part of the course you are taking but will provide a resource for you in the future as you travel and visit the works of art that you have studied. For that reason, I prefer to make little marks in the margins which help me find the major ideas, but which I can erase later.

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Filling out the Study Guide:

The study guide provides the place to write and to synthesize. Filling out the exercises in the study guide will contribute a great deal to your success in mastering the class material. Research has shown that the act of writing down a fact or idea rather than merely reading it serves to imprint it more securely in your mind. Furthermore, reading through the text for specific answers will help you concentrate. With the exception of the lists of definitions or identifications at the beginning of each section and the Discussion Questions at the end, the questions follow the order of the text, so keep your study guide beside you as you read. Fill out these questions as you read though your text and use both its glossary and index to find any terms that you may have missed as well as the terms and names found in the Definition/Identification questions at the beginning of each chapter.

You can use the text or sketches you made from your instructor’s lectures as the basis for the sketches requested in the guide. Don’t worry if your sketches are awkward; it is the idea that counts. It is also important to know that most people have better visual than verbal memories, and you are more apt to retain the image from your little sketches than from a written description. The maps are another type of visual shorthand, and they will help you put the art works in context and see which works are most closely related geographically. Use the maps in your text to locate the sites requested in the guide.

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About Memorizing Dates:

Students tend to be most apprehensive about how many dates they are expected to learn. Some instructors put much greater emphasis on learning dates than do others. My recommendation is to learn a structure for dates–patterns–rather than trying to memorize many individual dates. The guide asks you to complete a chronology for various sections. The request to write dates in the guide is to help you organize a structure, to create a scaffolding on which you can hang events, art styles, and artists. The comparative chronologies are intended to help you to see what was going on in various parts of the world at the same time, thus creating another type of structure. We learn patterns better than isolated facts, and it becomes easier and easier to connect facts once you have established the chronological structure, the basic pattern.

You should not attempt to memorize all the dates for the various periods, but the mere act of writing them down will help you create your mental structure. For the early periods think in terms of millennia, for later materials in terms of centuries, and for recent materials you might want to think in terms of quarter centuries. Often you need to learn only a few significant dates, and then organize various materials either around that date, before or after it. You will not be too far off you know that the High Renaissance was roughly the first quarter of the 16th century, with Leonardo starting work a bit earlier and Michelangelo continuing to work later. Sometimes a particular artistic event can help you determine the approximate date of an art work: two that come to mind are the invention of contrapposto in Greece in the early 5th century BCE and of linear perspective in Italy about 1425. Works that contain those characteristics must therefore be after the relevant date. You can often build from what you know to what you don’t know if you think and ask yourself questions rather than just trying to memorize a series of dates.

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The Discussion Questions:

The discussion questions at the end of each chapter are more comprehensive than the more factual questions included earlier, and they are designed to help you integrate what you have learned, make comparisons between the arts of different periods and places, and to speculate about explanations and theories. Your instructor may use them as the basis of discussion in your class, or you may discuss them with students in your study group (see Creating a study Group below). You may also use them as the basis for practice in writing essays (see below).

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Summary Charts:

Perhaps the most important aspect of the study guide are the summary charts included throughout the guide. It is here that you integrate the various things that you have learned from the lectures, your reading of the text, related films you have seen, and the work you have done in the guide itself. As I noted above, we remember patterns much better than individual items, and filling out the summary charts creates patterns in your head as well as on for it forces you to organize and relate things to each other. And actively filing in the chart is much more effective than merely reading a summary that someone else has prepared. You will probably find this method of studying so effective that you will create your own summary charts for other courses.

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Reviewing Images and Creating Flash Cards:

Active involvement with the images themselves by creating image flash cards is an excellent way to review the visual images. Some instructors mount slides in lighted cases while others create web sites with review images. Both of these are useful techniques. However, you can create your own image review by Xeroxing the images in the text, mounting them on 4 x 5 cards, and putting the relevant information on the opposite side. Some students have printed out thumbnail images from web sites and mounted those on their cards. You will learn a great deal just by making the cards, putting on the images, and writing the relevant information on the backs of the cards. However, you can get even more from them by shuffling them and testing yourself to see if you can give the information on the reverse when you look at the pictures. You can try sorting them by style, by chronology, or by medium. You might work with another student, selecting examples to test each other. You might even come up with some interesting card games, in which you win by having four Italian Renaissance sculptures, three Northern Renaissance paintings, and a Baroque palace, for example. Any devices that you can use to engage actively with the material will help you learn!

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Establishing a Study Group:

Research has shown that students who work with others in study groups generally do better than students who work by themselves. The three elements that you will need to coordinate are 1) locating two to three students who would like to join your group, 2) finding a convenient time and 3) finding a convenient place to get together. If you live on campus in a dormitory 2 and 3 will be easier, but even if yours is essentially a commuting campus you can usually find a quiet place and a convenient time to get together in one of the classrooms that is not in use or in a corner of the student cafeteria. Some students like to get together for an hour before class each week, while others prefer to spend an evening every week or every two weeks. You instructor will probably give you a minute or two at the end of class to identify other students who might be interested in forming a group with you or groups of their own.

Activities at group meetings can vary. The discussion questions in the study guide can serve as an excellent focus for your group, with different students assigned to prepare to lead the group in discussion of specific questions each week. Each student might be responsible for preparing a specific number of image cards that can be used by the group to quiz each other.

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Studying for Examinations:

The self-quizzes included in the study guide can be a great help in preparing you for course examinations as well as in letting you know how well you are progressing. The quizzes include types of questions often asked in art history examinations: matching, multiple choice, chronology exercises and attribution of unknown images. The guide itself contains other types of questions that are also commonly used: fill-ins, short answer, definitions, and essay questions. If you fill out the study guide as you go along, and fill out the summary sheets and take the self-quizzes included in each section before examinations, you will find that you will not need to "cram" the night before. While "cramming" can put things into short-term memory, it is not an effective way to learn. The various exercises done over an extended period of time put things into your long-term memory where they have a much better chance of being retained. The best students study as they go along; they will have completed their review and might go to a movie on the night before the examination while their classmates are staying up all night trying to re-read the text and make out the scribblings in their lecture notes.

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Taking the Exam:

It is important to be calm when you take the exam. This means checking the date and time of the examination and getting there a little early so that you have a chance to relax before the exam begins. It also means being sure that you have the appropriate type of answer sheet, if one is needed, a sharpened pencil for marking it, appropriate paper for writing an essay, and a pen, as well as backups in case the pencil breaks or the pen runs out of ink. Some of these things may seem trivial, but if you are not prepared, you can be thrown off base. Before you begin, write your name clearly on all your examination materials, including the answer sheet and the various pages you used to write your essay. There is invariably one student who forgets to write his or her name on something of importance.

Find out if the instructor subtracts for wrong answers or just counts up correct answers. Some instructors do not want you to guess, but others don’t care. I always tell students to guess rather than leaving something blank. Your wrong answer may be quite creative and cheer the instructor up. (I still recall the student who identified a Renaissance floor plan as a Mondrian painting!) Whatever you do, read the questions carefully. Also read the DIRECTIONS carefully. I always allow students to select one essay question out of three or four, but every so often there is some poor soul who tries to answer them all, and does them all badly. When you have finished the examination, check to make sure that you have correctly transferred all your answers to the mechanically scored answer sheet, if you have used one as part of your examination, and that all the blanks are filled in. Check again that your name is on everything, turn in your papers, and go home and relax.

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Writing Essays:

Learning how to write clearly and to succinctly is one of the most important tasks of your college career, no matter what your major. While some examination questions will be multiple choice, fill in or short answer, most exams will also include at least one essay question. Since many essay questions will either ask you to trace the development of an art form, to compare and contrast the work of two cultures or two artists, or to set particular works within their cultural contexts, the work that you do in your study guide will prepare you to answer them. The summary charts are particularly useful in this regard, for as you fill them out you do the type of summary and synthesis that serves as the basis for answers to many essay questions. Many of the discussion questions in the guide are similar to essay questions that you will find in examinations. The materials you wrote in the summary charts can be extremely useful, for you are asked to list typical examples of the work of each period or artist. Here are the examples you need for your essay. You will most likely be able to include the material you write in the stylistic characteristics column. Look carefully at the essays included to the answers to the identifications in the self-quizzes at the end of each section of the study guide. You will see how specific examples are cited in the context of generalizations and how both stylistic features and iconography are used to provide attributions to specific cultures and/or artists. For many essays the material that you included in the significant historical people, events and ideas will be highly relevant.

You can practice writing essays by using some of the questions in the guide. First of all, read the question carefully and answer the question that is asked. This is important, for often students will go off on a tangent and not clearly deal with what they are asked. With many questions you are asked to support your generalizations by specific examples. Be sure and do so! It might be helpful to set some time limits for your practice essays so that you can get an idea of how much you will be able to write in 15 minutes or in 30. You could work with members of your study group, perhaps by all tackling the same essay. At the end of a set time you could critique each other’s essays, pointing out good points and offering suggestions.

Whatever essay question that you are tackling, first jot down your ideas and then make an outline of your proposed answer, noting which specific examples you will use to support the points you are making. The outline will serve at least two purposes: 1) to organize your thinking and to help you build you essay to answer the question that you were asked, and 2) to let the reader know what points you would have made in case you run out of time. Begin your essay with an introduction noting the subject of your essay. Develop the points that you made in your outline, and then end with an appropriate conclusion. Assume that you are writing for an uninformed reader. Don’t omit relevant information because you think that the teacher already knows it; your instructor is interested in what you know, so be sure and make that clear.

One last tip: Even if you are thrown by the questions, don’t just walk out and leave a blank paper. Write something!! You may not gain any points, but you won’t be any worse off, and you might just come up with something that is worth a point or two.

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