You might read "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", or if you don't want to read much, "The Investment Answer". Both rely on academic studies of stock markets over decades. Neither book recommends picking individual stocks, but rather to aim for low expense ratios and index funds. But knowing isn't the whole battle. Reading and learning can help you avoid investing based on panic.
Knowing the interest rates of those student loans would help with giving you advice. For example, a loan at 6% is high enough it might be better than investing... while a loan at 3% might be reasonable to pay over time. It's also okay to feel like getting free of student loan debt is more important than investing. Almost all private student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, so they never go away until paid off.
I love reading, so I'll definitely pick those up. As far as the interest on the student loans, each of the 6 are different. I think some are around 3% and are not too bad, but others are much higher. Our issue with them though is the loan "management company" for lack of knowing a better term, wont let us pay extra principle and won't let us pay down a specific loan more quickly if we pay more than the minimum. What seems to happen is we pay more than the minimum and they take the extra money and first pay extra interest, then randomly (or according to some algorithm they probably have) pay a very small amount towards principle of one of the loans.
People keep telling us that we should be able to direct them which loan's principle we want to pay down with the extra money we pay in a month, but there seems to be no option to do so, and when we call them, they tell us its not possible. Does not seem right to me, but hey, I know nothing about how the laws around student loans work.
In short, we would love to pay down the high interest loans quickly and have tried to, but seems like theres no way for us to do that exactly...