7 Steps to Academic Transformation
This post provides 7 steps to achieving academic transformation. Get the accompanying infographic to help your students start the transformation process! You’re invited to our upcoming Academic SMART Goals webinar. Have you ever had a transformative experience? I’m not referring to an occurrence in which you made external changes that you hoped would produce internal benefits. I mean a period …
Why Our Academic Solutions Fail – Part IV: Addressing Nora’s Skill Deficit Problem
Nora was required to meet with me as a condition of her academic probation status. She’d missed several days of class and had a .8 GPA at the end of her first semester of college. Her serial absences gave her professors a seemingly clear signal that she was disinterested in college. However, after getting a more holistic perspective, I realized that Nora’s inability …
WHY OUR ACADEMIC SOLUTIONS FAIL – PART III: Correcting Marcus’s Faulty Conceptions
In my experience, the learning problems of college students have conceptual roots dating back to their elementary school days. By the time students reach adulthood, they’ve been doing school “stuff” for many years: taking tests, reading books, writing papers, solving math problems and attending class. Students have invested more than 20,000 hours in school activities before stepping foot on a college …
Why Our Academic Solutions Fail – Part II: Dispelling Ayanna’s Faulty Disposition
As a high school student, Ayanna had excelled in an advanced placement program at a reputable private academy. She said high school had come easy to her. College hadn’t started out so trouble-free, however. Ayanna’s chemistry course had become her most pressing concern; she’d “bombed” her first two tests, which was particularly unsettling because this was the area in which …
Why Our Academic Solutions Fail: How to Help Students at the Source of Their Problems
The education community consists of the some of the most highly trained people in the world. So why are we educators so inept at improving student academic performance? I believe the difficulty stems from an inability to distinguish between symptoms and causes. Educators need to hone in on the origins of learners’ academic woes. To do so requires that instructors …
Using Mental Cues to Trigger Students’ Critical Thinking Skills
Educators should take a cue from marketers who’ve been using mental triggers to sell products for decades. Educators can use triggers to activate students’ deeper thinking skills. The process is simple and highly effective. The short article below introduces the tactic and provides a few examples of its impact. Have you ever noticed that many of America’s most successful television commercials …
Using Athletic Literacy Skills to Develop Academic Literacy Skills: A Promising Innovative Approach
As athletes transition from high school to college, significant cognitive demands are placed upon them. They must learn more sophisticated concepts at deep depths. Their football knowledge base undergoes significant quantitative and qualitative changes. Their mental representations of the various concepts are challenged, refined and further developed. This post applies Patricia Alexander’s Model of Domain Learning (MDL) (Alexander, pp. , …
