MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
UAAP
Learning to Learn

Assessing Your Skills and Needs - What's Your Baseline?

The first step in any project is to assess what's on hand and what you need to acquire. To improve your learning you need to figure out where you stand in five key areas:

Use the questions and inventories linked below to evaluate your current status, then move on to appropriate sections elsewhere in Teach Yourself to Learn to begin refining your skills.

Come to Your Senses: What's Your Learning Style?

Not every one absorbs information and thinks about it in the same way. Recent research has uncovered many different pathways to learning, none of which is necessarily better than another. It's crucial to identify your preferred approach so that you can maximize its use in class and study time.

Many people learn best through one of the primary senses—visual learners, auditory learners—while others learn through a combination of perception and action—drawing pictures, associating formulas with music.

The sites below offer shorter and longer quizzes (at no charge) to help you figure out your learning style. Take one or two, note the results, then investigate tips for using your preferred style on the Study Smarter, Not Harder page of this site. The sites below also offer good advice on studying in various styles.

Identify Your Study Skills

Studying efficiently is as much a skill as using a pipette or sinking a ball through the net. Every skill needs coaching and practice. Good coaching begins with existing skills and builds from there.

Use the following quick surveys to figure out areas in which you need improvement. (Submitting your answers brings up a sentence two of helpful advice.) Then visit our Study Smarter, Not Harder page for coaching in your areas of need.

Setting the Stage: Where Do You Study?

Success in studying depends on your environment as well as your skills. Consider the following questions:

If you answered YES to all of these questions, congratulations! Your study space is supporting your success.

If you answered NO to any of these questions, check out Setting the Stage—Where to Study on the Study Smarter, Not Harder pages.

Tracking Your Time

Time is a limited resource. How are you using yours?

You may feel too busy to assess how you are managing your time. Wouldn't time spent planning be better spent on assignments, studying, or catching up on lost sleep? In fact, like spending money on advertising to grow a business, assessing your use of time now will pay off in greater efficiency and achievement later.

Use the online Daily and Weekly Schedule Developer at the nonprofit site Study Guides and Strategies, or print a copy of our weekly Time Distribution Assessment. You can use the Time Distribution Assessment in two ways: fill it in all in one sitting, then review the results; or treat it as a diary by noting how long it takes you to accomplish each task through the week. Either way, you may be surprised to compare the facts about your time management with what you thought you were doing.

Review your results with the help of our Analyze Your Assessment Results page, but don't panic! The Take Charge of Your Time pages are chock-full of suggestions and techniques for organizing your schedule and using your time more efficiently.

Maintaining the Machine: Health Factors

Here at MIT it may be easier than elsewhere to think of ourselves as highly sophisticated machines. And that's not such a bad metaphor. After all, for peak performance, machines need a steady supply of energy, regular maintenance, and optimum conditions. For peak academic performance, we need healthy nutrition, enough sleep and exercise, and a manageable level of stress.

How are you treating your machine? Find out by using one of the following assessments:

Take your results to the Staying Healthy for Academic Success page for vital advice on food, sleep, exercise, stress, and mental health.