Study Skills for Success: How to Learn, Know and Show You're "The Expert"

By Mary-Claire Hanlon

Study Skills for Success is a guide book for anyone who wants to learn how to study effectively and succeed in exams. Written in three parts, it is an easy read: the first part simply focusses on how to get information into and out of your brain, the second part is concerned with study strategies, and then the third part is all

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Centre of Serendipity
• Release date: Feb 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780646814179

Mary-Claire Hanlon

Internationally-published personal development author, Dr Mary-Claire Hanlon runs The Centre of Serendipity in Australia, facilitating individual and team change for emerging leaders. An engaging adult educator and speaker, awarded for international and national presentations on her mental health research, Mary-Claire uses psychological techniques to creatively produce transformation. Participants feel empowered and love the unexpected things about her books, workshops and seminars. As at the start of 2020, Mary-Claire has written two self-help books. Her first book, [RE]BIRTH, is about self-realisation. Her second book, Study Skills for Success, is designed to help learners to learn better! Readers love her gentleness and depth, and her easy writing style.

Book preview

Who, What and Why?

Congratulations on choosing to purchase this book – it shows that you are willing to make a commitment to improving yourself, and the world! And you will!

This book is not a text book. It’s a Self-Help book. You won’t find references here, sorry. This book is for students – school students, university students, anyone who wants to improve how to learn, how to succeed at exams, and how to impress the people who count in your world. Mums and Dads and other special people might also use this book so they can help the students in their lives too. In less than 3 hours, you will know what to do, and feel confident too!

So, why would I write this book? Well, I understand what it’s like to struggle with studying. When I was in primary school, aged about 8, I started learning to play the piano. My tutor, a very elderly Catholic Sister of Mercy, would hit my hands across the knuckles with a steel-reinforced ruler, and declare, You haven’t been practising! You haven’t been practising!. The fact was, I loved to play. I practised every afternoon after school, and no-one in my family told me to stop (and I’m from a really big family; my siblings would have told me if I was terrible!). No-one said that my playing was awful. But this old nun thought otherwise. She erroneously accused me of not practising, and she underestimated my sense of justice. Finally, I stood up from the piano stool, looked her straight into her bespectacled eyes, and said, I quit. I calmly walked home (we lived nearby), and told my mother, who said, Fair enough.

I learned from that experience, that no amount of homework would please my teachers, and I stopped doing all homework for school. It didn’t matter that I would be punished with the boys who failed to do homework (girls in my class were obedient, boys weren’t!). Each afternoon, my mother would ask if I had homework, and I would reply, no, even though there was.

She would tell me to read the dictionary. We had a great encyclopaedic dictionary produced by Readers’ Digest, which included Maori and Australian Aboriginal law and words, Greek and Roman mythology, and all sorts of other interesting stuff. It was informal and self-directed, which might have been great, but it wasn’t what I really needed. It was good to sit down and read each day (habit-forming), but not syllabus-oriented.

Regardless, I managed to do well in my secondary school entrance exams, even scoring 93.5% for mathematics in Year 7 (aged about 12ish). Things went downhill from there, though, because I hadn’t developed the habit of studying. I could read, very well, and I had excellent comprehension; but I had no idea of how to summarise, synthesise, analyse, and produce a critique of anything. You need these skills when doing exams!!

In Year 7, I had a friend, Evelina Michelini, who would call me every night at dinnertime and ask, Have you done your maths homework yet?. Of course, I hadn’t! Evelina would say she needed help, so I would get my books and go through the material with her over the phone. I credit Evelina with being my first student and my first tutor. She was also my first study-buddy. And a great, cherished friend.

Unfortunately for me, she had less need of me in the intervening years, and my marks sunk. By Year 12 (aged about 16), my maths mark plummeted to 27%. I failed to get into university and had no idea what to do with my life after high school.

Fast-forward to the early 90’s, the first time I enrolled in university (after completing the Open Foundation Course for entrance). I had done pretty well to last 18 months at Macquarie University – I worked full-time (Monday-Friday, 9-5) and I went to uni 4 nights per week (Monday-Thursday, 6-10pm). Because I lived alone for the start, and didn’t have a TV, I got through my subjects. But I had to work, because I lived in Sydney, away from home.

Eventually, I stopped my degree, started TAFE certificates that were relevant to where I was working (first Property Valuation by correspondence, then Real Estate done face-to-face). I didn’t manage to finish any of those courses, because work got in the way. I was very close to having my Real Estate Certificate and licence, though.

Meanwhile, I discovered I was a good masseur and did a couple of courses in that, which involved exams, but were awesome because I developed what they call muscle memory by practising therapeutic and remedial massage on classmates. I moved home from