Significance of honing listening skills at schools

 

Academic Benefits of Listening

As you are reading this section as part of your college class, it seems appropriate to start with how listening is beneficial in academics. It is easy to surmise that to learn in a traditional classroom, listening is required. Bommelje, Houston, and Smither studied effective listening among 125 college students and found a strong link between effective listening and school success, supporting previous research in the field linking listening skills to grade point average.^[1] This finding is unsurprising as the better you listen while in class, the better prepared you will be for your assignments and exams. It is quite simple really. When students listen, they catch the instructions, pointers, feedback, and hints they can use to make the assignment better or get a better score on the test.

In today’s world, the uses of academic listening are changing. Online classes may require listening to pre-recorded lectures. You may be learning at a distance through a video-conferencing application. This educational format brings advantages and challenges for listening. One great advantage is the capability of recording synchronous lectures. Some professors like to record their sessions, and those that do make it easier for students to revisit the lecture content at their convenience. You can replay sections and listen to the information until you feel you retained it. For pre-recorded lectures, it is nice to be able to fast forward and go back to sections. You can review the material until you are confident in your knowledge. It is also easy to be distracted if you don’t have to be physically present in a location. You may know how hard it can be to pay attention to a video conference when your child is crying. If the professor is not engaging, it is really easy to surf to a website, finish some work, or play a game on your phone. To listen actively takes work and discipline. Active listening will assist you with retaining course information better, which results in doing better in your education. As discussed in the prior section, so much can be missed by passively listening. It is better to be focused solely on the task at hand. Just as active listening is essential to your academics, it is equally important at your job.