After years of working alongside students as Assistive Technology Trainers, we were all too aware that collecting and organising research for assignments and exams can be a stressful, overwhelming and daunting challenge, particularly for students with additional needs. The same reoccurring issues were apparent: students would struggle to get started with an assignment, often had too...
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After years of working alongside students as Assistive Technology Trainers, we were all too aware that collecting and organising research for assignments and exams can be a stressful, overwhelming and daunting challenge, particularly for students with additional needs. The same reoccurring issues were apparent: students would struggle to get started with an assignment, often had too many internet tabs open, would lose track of where their research had come from and would be saving their work across multiple Word documents. Pro-Study evolved from a realisation that there was no other, easy to use software available to students to eliminate all of these issues.
Being in the unique position of working closely with students, and being able to use student focus groups, we developed Pro-Study with the needs of students and researchers within our core values. To enable students to reach their full potential, we listened to their challenges and created a product that would enable them to collect...
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Being in the unique position of working closely with students, and being able to use student focus groups, we developed Pro-Study with the needs of students and researchers within our core values. To enable students to reach their full potential, we listened to their challenges and created a product that would enable them to collect and organise their research in an accessible and easy to use format, whilst also promoting inclusion.
Pro-Study has been designed to simplify your assignment research process by allowing you to effortlessly collect and organise your research and other important information such as text, graphs, charts and images in a dedicated colour coded centralised database that is easily accessible. Simply create a project, break it up into colour coded categories, and begin adding...
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Pro-Study has been designed to simplify your assignment research process by allowing you to effortlessly collect and organise your research and other important information such as text, graphs, charts and images in a dedicated colour coded centralised database that is easily accessible. Simply create a project, break it up into colour coded categories, and begin adding your research and other important information from multiple sources using our super easy one click save system. You can capture information from multiple sources including websites, journals and textbooks and then store it all in the programme's dedicated centralised database. Each piece of information that is captured will automatically produce a hyperlink back to the original source as well as automatically capturing the reference information. You can use the camera on your webcam or the Mobile App to capture information from textbooks and use the camera again to scan the barcode to automatically capture the reference information. If online text cannot be selected Pro-Study has a powerful OCR feature that makes inaccessible text accessible, a very useful tool when accessing online books etc. You can also drag and drop whole computer files into your Pro-Study categories within your projects. Finally, you can Export your chosen projects into a Word Document, your favourite mind mapping software or the Cloud. The exported document will be a full report containing all of your research and references as well as a Contents Page, Titles and Headers and Footers.
The nature of the many simple but innovative features, along with additional accessibility tools, allows you to personalise and order your work in a way best suited for you to effectively manage your projects. Pro-Study is the leading software for providing support throughout the whole research process, from gathering research into specific colour coded topics to exporting finished projects into full MS Word reports with the referencing completed.
With Pro-Study you also have access to the reference information for over 27 million+ books and you can reference in over 9500+ different styles.
Pro-Study helps you organise your research and reading into a simple format, assisting you to begin to structure your assignments or revision into specific topic areas. Rather than just bookmarking whole webpages, it allows you to highlight specific text and add to one of your pre-made categories within a project, saving you time that would otherwise be spent trying to find specific quotes.
Having all of your research is in one place makes it easy to switch between projects when you have multiple assignments on the go. As you go along you can edit projects or categories and colour code into specific themes and topics. It’s accessible design and additional features make it adaptable and easy to use for a wide range of users with individual learning styles. Using the keyword search function allows you to quickly search though a centralised database to revisit previous projects and your all-important sources, allowing you to keep track of your research over time.
Once you have collected all of your required research, you can export straight into Microsoft Word. The exported document will be a full report containing all of your research and references as well as a Contents Page, Titles and Headers and Footers. You can choose to either export a whole project or individual categories from the software's database. This also allows you to use previous research from other projects in new assignments. If you have separate Mindmapping software, you can easily export your research into a Mindmap to further structure your research and get on with writing your assignment.
Pro-Study is the primary software for supporting you all the way through your assignment process, from your initial reading right through to referencing. It stores all of the referencing information from your sources and exports this to create a bibliography, taking the stress out of referencing. Within the export option menu, you can edit the format of the referencing to suit your University’s individual style.
Jamie, an English literature student, was tasked with completing a literature review for his dissertation. Because of his dyslexia, Jamie’s biggest challenge was his working memory and often forgot where he had read research to use within his work. He was able to use Pro-Study from the beginning of his research process to organise his work and could keep track of everything he had read by bookmarking and categorising all of his literature. All of the quotes he had read were easily accessible after exporting to a Word document along with a complete bibliography. This meant he could spend more time getting on with writing his dissertation and not worrying about his referencing.
Here is what Jamie had to say…
“In my final year, I had to complete a literature review for my dissertation. My dyslexia impacts my working memory and I often forget where I’ve read quotes to add to my work. Using Pro-Study allowed me to categorise everything I’d read, right from the initial research stage all the way through to referencing. Having everything easily accessible in a Word document alongside a completed bibliography definitely took out the stress of writing and it is so easy to use.”
- Jamie, Theatre Studies student
Charlotte’s Biology course involves a number of exams at the end of the year, but often the amount of revision often becomes overwhelming. Charlotte uses Pro-Study to set up different projects for each exam, colour coding into different topic areas. She highlights the most important parts of her lecture notes, takes quotes from online journal articles and captures diagrams from her textbooks to have one central database to store all of the most relevant information she needs to revise.
Here is what Charlotte had to say…
“Exams have always caused me anxiety and stress, and I used to feel there was just too much information to process when revising. Now I feel much more organised by using Pro-Study to set up different projects for each exam, colour coding into different topic areas. I highlight the most important part of my lecture notes, take quotes from online journal articles and capture diagrams from my textbooks to have one central database to store all of the most relevant information I need to revise. The ease of which I can then find and recall the sources by just a click of a button has saved me the nightmare of finding an article and then losing it. Pro-Study really is the most useful thing available to me right now”
- Charlotte, Biology studentStudents from any course can benefit from Pro-Study’s unique research features. You decide how you would like to categorise and colour code your research, supporting you with the organisation and referencing of your work, whether it’s for an essay, revision, reports or presentations.
The high volume of research within the Higher Education sector make it the ideal setting to utilise Pro-Study. Both staff and students can take an abundance of literature and quickly order and catalogue this in a quick and effective manner. Providing full access to Pro-study via a site licence across the institution enables all users to easily access their research and information wherever they are working. Please get in touch with us to find out more.
Pro-Study is an approved Assistive Technology software that has been purposely developed to help disabled students who may face challenges with their work due to a disability. The way that information is easily collected and categorised from multiple sources by using coloured topics makes work much less stressful and more accessible as it encourages a more thematic approach. This inclusive process will particularly help students with SpLDs, including dyslexia and dyspraxia, those with AD(H)D, Autism Spectrum conditions, Mental Health conditions, brain injuries, memory conditions, and other disabilities which can impact on a student’s ability to organise information.
Researchers can utilise this dedicated centralised database to store all of their research, should it be for personal, education or business use. Your research is stored securely and automatically within the software’s own database and can be easily searched and accessed. Having the ability to back up your projects to the Pro-Study cloud or your own OneDrive, Dropbox or Google Drive account means you are never far from your research.