ABSTRACT
Asked what they are doing as they engage in school-or university-related activities, students might say, “I’m working on my project,” “I’m doing homework,” or, commonly, “I’m studying.” Charting the boundaries of studying is a fuzzy task. Colloquially, the range of activities it encompasses is nearly synonymous with all the activities that probabilistically lead to “a relatively permanent change in cognitive structure.” 1 However, several features may distinguish studying from the subsuming category of learning activities. In particular, studying:
Rarely includes direct or frequent intervention by a teacher.
Is often a solo activity, although peer mediation is also common.
Often originates with a general goal set by a teacher that the student subsequently interprets at the studying session’s outset and refines in a recursive way as studying unfolds.
Quite often involves searching in and synthesizing information from multiple sources, for example; a text book, notes taken in a class or borrowed from a friend, a volume of an encyclopedia, a video or TV show, or online databases (e.g., PsychLit).
Quite often occurs in settings where the student can engineer the studying environment to satisfy personal preferences (e.g., studying with or without the radio turned on, automatic calls that check email, or stimulants supplied by tea or coffee).
Almost always produces observable traces (Winne, 1982) of cognitive processing in forms such as notes in a notebook or in the margins of a textbook’s pages, outlines, summaries, self-generated questions, diagrams, records of attempts to solve problems, and especially highlighted (or underlined) text.
