Book review
The book “Essential Skill for Science & Technology” is divided into five parts.
The title of the first part is you and tertiary study. In the first part, it tells the important of
the graduate attributes that are able to lead a student to success and experienced in his or her
life. It talks about the differences between high school’s life and university’s life. As
university life might cause some difficulties to the students such as, academic preparedness,
academic progress, financial affairs, personal concerns and so on. However, in this part have
suggested the skills for academic success, and the important key to success in the academic is
motivation. Once the students have entered University’s real life, the most problem found
among the students is time management. Therefore, in this part suggests how we can cope or
manage our time wisely by setting the goal, planning and making the study time table. It is
also talk about the reason of late submission which might causes from several reason either
person factor or outside factor. Procrastination is one of the reasons that cause the late
submission and chaos time management.
Learning and researching is the second part of this book. In this part, it talks about
how learning style help the students to success in your study. Every student has the different
learning style such as, some are visual learners and some might be the auditory learners. It
also talk about the different ways to transferring information such as taking down note while
listen to the lecturer, class tutorials or practices through the laboratory classes. Next, it talks
about how the e-learning facilitates the students for their study in which, it helps them to find
the easier information and able to interact with the lecturers or friends anytime and anywhere.
Additionally, it also talks about how the assessment is the evaluation students’ knowledge
and skills through the testing or examination. It suggests that the preparation, techniques for
answering exam and self-confidence are the main keys contribute to the successfulness of the
students.
The title of the third part is critical and evaluation. This part talks about how reading
the scientific literature helps the students to become more familiar with the language and
terminology of the materials that they have read. Moreover, the practice of scanning and
skimming also help the students to have the faster reading with the clearly comprehension. It
talks about how the critical skill is the greatest skill for both scientist and the science
students. Critical thinking plays the lead role to solve the science problem, thus it requires the
learners to practice thinking through assessing the evidence, analysis the text and
argumentation by asking themselves. Besides, it also talks about the academic argument. This
argument is the way the students present their point to convince someone by the particular of
the facts. The good argument includes with the acceptability, relevance and grounds.
Furthermore, the argument should be logical and have the explicitly evidence.
Continually, the fourth part is writing and presenting in the sciences. In this part, it
provides the essential of academic integrity when we study at university. The academic
integrity is how we are being honest and responsibility for our work. It reminds us that we
need to avoid plagiarism and paraphrasing by sources other works. It also talks about the
several referencing style such as author-date style and the Vancouver style. After learned
about the referencing style, it also suggests the best way to write for the sciences in which,
the students are required to analyse the question, planning for each structure and so on. It also
talks about the function in writing the report and the essential of each section that need to
provide the fully understanding for the reader. Apart from writing the sciences and the report,
it talks about how to write a laboratory report and to write an article review. As writing the
laboratory report requires passive voice and past tense. While, writing an article review
requires simple structure and critical analysis. Next, it suggests how to make an interesting
presentation as the speaker should have the preparation for the talk and use flow chart or
other visual aids. In this part also tells about the three stages of editing which these three
stages help the students to edit their work as best as they can by following each stage.
The last part is quantitative method. This part talks about the steps in problem solving
for instance, clarifying the problem, devising a plan of attack, implementing the plan and
checking the answer. These steps help to solve the problem easier and improve the solving
skills as well. Next, it also highlights some of the fundamental concepts of mathematics
frequently found in science such as, power and roots, logarithms and many more. After that,
it talks about the two major aspects of calculus which are differential calculus and integral
calculus. The differential calculus is used to find the rates of change of functions.
Simultaneously while, the integral calculus is used to find the magnitude of change. Lastly, it
introduces the basic statistical terminology as well as the some of the statistic techniques that
most use in the scientific field.