How to start studying: task initiation, momentum & curiosity

Welcome to the first session of Genio's 15-Minute Fixes, the webinar series that takes one problem your office or your students face and shows how Genio Notes helps solve it. 

Today's problem: "Students don't know where to start studying"

Students often stall not because studying is hard, but because starting is. In this 15-minute session, Scott Lomax, Account Executive at Genio, shows three ways students can start studying in Genio Notes: building momentum, following their curiosity and finding the gaps in what they know.

Drawing on his own experience as a student with dyslexia, he explains how Disability and Accessibility Services teams can match each method to the student, as part of their note taking accommodations.

What will you learn from this session?

• Why is getting started often harder than studying itself?
• Which students find task initiation hardest?
• How can note playback help students work through a class from top to bottom?
• How can Outline help students start with the topic that interests them most?
• How can Quiz Me show students what they don’t know yet?
• Which method should you suggest to which student?

Find the full session and transcript below.

Paddy Heaton: Welcome to this Genio webinar. This is the first in our series of Genio's 15-Minute Fixes, 15 minute webinars where we look at a problem that you, your office, or your students face day to day and look at how Genio Notes helps you to solve that problem.

And today we're looking at the problem that students don't know where to start studying. We hear this from disability services offices, we hear this from students themselves as well. And my name's Paddy, I'm one of the marketing team here at Genio and we're joined here today by Scott, one of our expert demo-ists who's gonna walk us through how Genio Notes helps students to solve this problem and helps your office to answer the question, how do I help students who don't know where to start studying?

So Scott, over to you.

Scott Lomax: Yeah, thank you, thank you very much Paddy. So yeah, as Paddy said, I'm Scott, I've been working with Genio for about four years now. A little bit of background about me, I have dyslexia and when I was in higher education, I was offered lots of supports but just outright refused them, didn't want them.

And one of the key things that I struggled with was actually knowing what to do with my time when I was studying. So this is a thing that's a little bit close to home for me. So I'm really, really looking forward to showing you through how Genio can support your students with that and how you can support students and talk them through some different methods in how to get started in their study process.

So to start off, students, for students that you support, one of the hardest things isn't studying itself, it's getting started with the studying. Task initiation is an executive function and it's one of the first things that students will struggle with, perhaps if they have ADHD, anxiety, depression, fatigue conditions or many other different learning differences.

And starting an hour long recording, sitting back down and reviewing an hour long recording or a big long set of notes, there's no real clear way or position to start for students. And that's often where they will stall in that study process.

So I'm going to share my screen now and run you through a few ways that Genio can help out with this. I'm going to talk about three different methods in how students can start studying within the Genio Notes. And I'm going to focus on two different ideas.

One of them being momentum and the other being curiosity. And when we talk about curiosity, there's two stages or two types of curiosity. You've got the curiosity where the student is enjoying exploring this new thing. And then you've got the second type of curiosity where the student knows that there is a gap in their knowledge that they need to fill.

Method 1: building momentum with a chronological approach

But we'll start with the first method, which is momentum. So I'm going to open up a normal class in Genio Notes and I'm going to start recording. This is how I would typically use Genio. I would hit record, hit microphone, and I'm in focus mode and we're going to start recording out here.

Anything that I think is exciting or interesting to me, I'm going to hit important and it will make that mark for me. If I have a question or if I'm confused about anything, I'll hit question and confused. This makes it really simple for me to take notes in a class.

If I pause and finish the class, what you'll see is I've got these different notes written out here with no text in them. The first point of call for a lot of students is the chronological order. So how do we start looking back at these notes?

Maybe we just work through them chronologically. A lot of classes, a lot of professors will set out their classes in a way where the information that you learn at the start informs what you learn next. So they build on momentum.

So coming back to your class and studying through top to bottom, listening back to this note and then filling it out is a really good way to follow along with the class and use the momentum that professor was building in the class. And probably the most simplest way for a student to come back to their class and review their notes.

So an example of this in a past class, I would sit down, I would hit my transcript and I've got the entirety of the transcript here and then I'm gonna just hit this first note and I'll hit play. You'll be talking to us about the essential equations that govern our universe.

It'll play out that first note and I will either delete this or fill this note out with more context. And I'll just run through those one by one going from top to bottom. Where this is helpful is the maybe students which like predictability and like a clear path, just having them sit down and just go top to bottom in their notes is a really clear path for them.

Or perhaps the students like me who have dyslexia or processing difficulties, the idea of being able to sit back and listen back to each one and fill it out with more context, just one by one prevents me from having to dot around or move different spaces in the class and worry about what's next or what I need to focus on.

And then it's also very useful for maybe students which are anxious and they don't wanna choose about making decisions. They just want a clear, once again, another clear path of just, I'm just gonna sit down and go top to bottom on this.

That's the first method of where a student can start studying and probably the most simplest.

Method 2: use Outlines start with the most interesting topic

The next method brings in outlines. One of our features up here next to transcript. I hit outlines. What it will do is it will generate a list of all of the key topics that were spoken about in the class and it enables me to navigate to that specific topic that was spoken about in the class.

So why this works for a student is they can click, they can come through this outline and find any of these topics which most interest them. So if they come back and go, okay, I don't know where to start, but I remember from the class Schrödinger's equation here was probably the most interesting thing for me from that class.

So maybe I'm gonna start there and they'll click on this section and it will take them to that section of the class where it's all about Schrödinger's equation. So where this works best is it's because it's behavioral activation.

So a student is choosing the thing that excites them most and they're gonna start there and build on that curiosity and they're gonna enjoy exploring through just that focused topic there which will then take them onto the other topics around the class and hopefully build a snowball effect into where they go to next and what they study up next.

Method 3: building curiosity with Quiz Me

The next option is focusing on curiosity but about filling those gaps. So if I come up to the top here, we've got study tools,and I'm gonna hit quiz me here. You'll see I've done one earlier, but let me create a new quiz.

It will present on the page like this and then I've got some options. So I can customize a quiz which will use the transcript to generate a quiz for me on a particular topic or I can pick a quick quiz which will generate five questions based on the entire [unclear] transcript.

For a student who's just finished their class and don't know where to start studying, if they come directly into Genio and hit quick quiz, it will start to generate a five question quiz for them all multiple choice with three possible answers each time. I'm gonna be probably the worst quiz taker and just go down the middle and click B every single time and hope I get a third of them correct which has never worked, show results.

So I've taken that quiz now and now I've got a really good understanding of what I remembered from the class which was just question five apparently and what I didn't remember from the class. So now I know where I need to focus that energy.

So let's say here I struggled with Newton's second law. This is something I didn't quite understand in the class clearly because I got this wrong on the test. So I need to go and fill that gap. So I'm gonna come out here, come back to my notes and maybe I've got something where I've written down something about Newton's second law or as you can see here in the outlines I've got this section all about Newton's second law.

So that is where I'm gonna start my study process to fill those gaps. Where this is particularly really useful is maybe students which have struggle like planning and prioritizing because they've done the quiz and they know what they understand and what they don't know that decision has gone for them because they know that they need to focus on this section.

Or maybe students who have limited energy because this is a target study method which is super effective and makes their studying very efficient. Or once again, maybe it's for students who have memory difficulties and they want to engage that active retrieval and understand what they are retaining and not retaining.

Another point to make about the quiz me tool and using this method is that the quiz here is not a tense, like strict quiz which has loads of stakes. It's just a low stakes quiz just to understand where the student is at and know what to work on next.

So those are the three methods. I'll run through them again. You've got the chronological order where you just go top to bottom on all of your notes and listen back to them and fill them all out. You've got finding the thing that excites you most, using outlines and picking that thing and starting there.

And then you've got the quiz me where you need to fill that gap and you can go in there, find out what you don't understand and focus on that section as well. Giving students, giving you the ability to walk students through three methods in which they can start studying using Genio Notes.

And what I would like you to take away from this is if next time you're talking to a student and they're maybe struggling with their study process, ask them what's hardest for them. Like, are they struggling to know where to start? Are they struggling to get motivated?

Or is it that they just don't know what they don't know? If it's that they don't know where to start, try the chronological order. If it's that they don't know how to get motivated, try their favorite thing first. And if they just don't know what they don't know then move to the quiz me tool.

Once again, there's no single way to study with Genio. We provide lots of different options. And these are just three methods that you can use that and get started. Hope this has been helpful.

Paddy: Thanks Scott. And yeah, like Scott said, we really hope this has been helpful. If you are intrigued by what you've just been shown and you wanna learn more, we just launched a poll. You can let us know if you wanna speak to one of the team, we can get you set up with a one-to-one call about Genio Notes.

I've also just dropped a link in the chat, which is to this webinar series. We're running three different fixes over the next three weeks. So you can sign up for more sessions at the link in the chat there.

Should note that we've skipped over some other methods in Genio, things like focus time and things like reading view. Genio Notes is a flexible platform that students can approach in different ways. But yeah, we really hope that's been helpful.

We hope to see you on another 15 minute fix webinar later this month.

Discover more 15-Minute Fixes with Genio Notes