Intellectual growth lies at the heart of college life at Wellesley. The Pforzheimer Learning & Teaching Center offers programs to help students maximize their educational opportunities and realize their academic potential. The APT Program is an important resource available to students. One of the most important goals of this program is to help stimulate and improve intellectual life at Wellesley by creating and maintaining a dialogue among students, faculty, administration, and staff and by strengthening the bonds that unite our community in the learning process.
An APT provides academic support to students in her residence hall. An APT provides one-on-one tutoring and gives workshops with a focus on basic sutdy skills and academic life at Wellesley. She also serves as a referral agent, helping students find the appropiate academic support service. Some specific skills learning strategies that she helps students with are note-taking, test-taking, memorization, communication, and time management.
Study Skills Tutors and Workshops
The Academic Peer Tutor (APT) Program is a dorm based academic support program. APTs are trained 1) to help individual students acquire effective study skills, 2) to provide study skills workshops, 3) to stimulate intellectual life on campus and 4) to refer students to other campus resources.
APT Reading Tips of the Week!
non-text books (materials without headers, or bold type, or pictures, etc.)
1. create your own headers (highlight or write topic sentences in the margins for your own use)
2. take reading notes, on paper if you can but even just mental ones if you're pressed for time (like the hour before the class!), using a priority-driven outline format to organize details
reading in the content areas for your specific courses or major
1. for econ courses, getting the concepts is the most important. therefore, quantitative details are second in priority and should be treated as much, but if a certain statistic does pop up a lot be sure to remember it because it'sl probably something that is common knoweldge for the field.
2. you really have to be able to dissect poli sci reading materials in papers and discussion in classes, so there's no way to get around the reading. it's important to be able to invest the time into it.
3. to be able to better participate in class discussion and generate ideas for quality papers, think of critical arguments while you're reading and write questions in the margin of issues to bring up. examples, point out contradictions, extensions, or analysis of points presented. do this, because stopping after sections to think critically is good practice anyway and will help you absorb material even if most of the questions you come up with are force and uninspired.
Jane Zhou '10
*************************************************
For Biology or Chemistry journal articles: Read the abstracts to get a general idea of what the paper is about. Relate the figures to the textual descriptions and see if you can interpret the data. The last sentence of each paragraph often summarises the main conclusion or result, so you can use that to guide your understanding of the various experiments.
Shloka Ananthanarayanan '10
