Academic Activities

Workshop series on university study methods for 1st year students - Session 3

18/06/2022

In order to form first-year students with basic knowledge and skills in searching and processing documents - an important skill in students' self-study at university, the Faculty of International Relations organizes a third Workshop with the topic "Methods of searching and processing documents" - This is a sharing session in the Workshop series of University Study Methods for first-year students of the Faculty of International Relations. The event took place at 6:30 pm on October 23, 2021 in an online form via the Zoom platform.

The event had the participation of the Dean of the Faculty of International Relations, the direct guidance of Dr. Tran Thanh Huyen, Dean, Faculty of International Relations and first-year students of the Faculty of International Relations for the academic year 2021-2022. The main content of the training session focused on guiding students on how to find and process information in the learning process. This topic not only helps students study well but is also necessary for those who are preparing to participate in student scientific research. Therefore, in addition to the 2021 class, the workshop also had the participation of the K19 and 20 students.

First, Dr. Tran Thanh Huyen asked the students: "How to study effectively?". After receiving some comments from students, Ms. Huyen gave the main ideas such as: building clear learning goals, forming a habit of studying regularly, learning from books, from basic things. The most basic and among them, the way to find materials in the self-study process plays an important role.

To know how to find materials, students need to know what types of assignments they will be doing in college. Ms. Huyen has introduced a number of forms such as essays, theses, scientific articles, and student scientific research topics. From highlighting the main types of essays that students make during their university studies, Ms. Huyen emphasizes the requirements that students need to pay attention to such as word count, content, implementation method, reading documents, and processing. information management. In addition, Ms. Huyen also introduced the students to the main parts of a research paper: the reason for choosing the topic, the history of the problem, and the research method.

Using the menti software, Dr. Tran Thanh Huyen collected students' opinions on the question "Where and how do you usually find learning materials?". The sources of information that you often use are from books, textbooks, articles, specialized websites, analysis articles of scholars, etc. Thereby, Ms. Huyen emphasized that the step of searching for documents needs to be done. Follow the following notes:

- Identify terms and keywords of the content students are documenting (by answering questions such as Who? What? When? Where)

- Identify the relationship between keywords and search terms.

- Conduct searches with the help of tools and algorithms.

- Identify sources of information and evaluate the materials you find.

In particular, Ms. Huyen reminds students to pay attention to novelty in the process of searching for books and documents. She also explains what a scientific resource is to students. When searching and researching, students must pay attention to outline clear timelines for each step, determine where to stop so as not to waste time, create rigor and seamlessness in the study process.

There is an issue that students are interested in, which is how to determine the source of information when doing the test. Specifically, Ms. Huyen introduces the method of searching documents through algorithms such as AND, OR, NOT so that Google can understand and give results suitable for students' search purposes. At the same time, you should be interested in and learn about the advanced information search function of Google, or Google Scholar in assisting you in finding documents with high scientific content. Some sources of information shared by Ms. Huyen are: books, electronic newspapers, electronic databases, electronic theses, online courses, audio-visual materials, videos requested by lecturers. In order to evaluate the information from the searched document, students should focus on reading to understand the context or background knowledge that the document refers to, compared with their purpose of finding documents to select suitable documents.

Finally, when should the document search be stopped? After students have found documents that match their keywords, look up Google Scholar to see who cited the source and when students began their research. Those are the times when you should stop your search and focus on the document processing step.

Through today's sharing session, the most important thing is that students should apply the knowledge shared by Ms. Huyen, practice with a plan to form habits as well as improve document search skills.

Thông qua buổi chia sẻ hôm nay, điều quan trọng nhất là các bạn sinh viên nên áp dụng những kiến thức đã được cô Huyền chia sẻ, luyện tập có kế hoạch để hình thành thói quen cũng như nâng cao kỹ năng tìm kiếm tài liệu của mình.