Student Success

Enabling Student Success

Student Success Strategies gives students a boost by addressing the issues that are fundamental to improving English proficiency.

The course interacts with the student as a peer, using familiar situations to teach better goal setting, time management, and active learning strategies.

Efficient Instruction

The course’s engaging teaching style improves student performance. And as always, the intuitive user interface make implementation easier than ever.

The course covers these key content areas:

• Goal setting
• Time management
• Active learning
• Improving concentration
• Test taking strategies
• Critical thinking

Goal Setting

Students often struggle in school because they can’t find a higher purpose for learning.

They have difficulty connecting what they learn to larger objectives they might have for their lives and careers. The goals they set are often overly optimistic and vaguely defined, making them difficult or impossible to achieve.

Set Realistic Goals

Students see how to:

• Organize priorities effectively to solve conflicts and eliminate non-priorities.
• Set achievable, targeted goals that won’t be overwhelming or frustrating.
• Determine concrete parameters for success.
• Create schedules that support instead of hinder their efforts.

Active Learning

Many students view learning as a passive process, in which the instructor lectures and the lecture content finds its own way into the students’ minds.

To succeed, students need to abandon this view and take responsibility for what and how they learn, and play an active role in the learning process.

Learn Responsibly

Students see how to:

• Connect with what they learn.
• Ask questions that engender active engagement with the learning content.
• Add value to what they learn by increasing the level and extent of their participation.
• Develop study strategies and techniques that play to their strengths and learning preferences.

Improving Concentration

Students must overcome distractions from their environment and the demands of their lives to concentrate on the task of learning. But often even external distractions are an outgrowth of and alibi for a lack of motivation. Managing distractions is essential to productive focus on learning.

Manage Distractions

Students see how to:

• Strengthen focus to improve concentration.
• Mitigate the effects of environmental distractions they can’t eliminate.
• Clear away external distractions they do control.
• Recognize that a lack of motivation can lead to a desire to find distractions.
• Develop good study habits that promote motivation and discourage apathy and lack of focus.

Test Taking Strategies

The task of studying for an important test can seem too large and difficult. Students often develop a fatalistic attitude as a retreat from test anxiety. They act as though no amount of studying can prepare them for the test, which becomes an alibi for doing no preparation at all.

Design Test Strategies

Students see how to:

• Break down test content into subjects of greatest importance to maximize the effectiveness of study time.
• Coordinate study efforts with peers to encourage greater success for all through cooperation.
• Manage and reduce test anxiety with meditation, exercise, and good nutrition.
• Develop targeted strategies to answer specific question types better and more quickly.

Critical Thinking

Students often resist new information unless it conforms to their existing biases or seems to come from a source they can trust, but these sources are not always reliable. They need to be able to identify which information is most useful to them as they learn.

Test New Information

Students see how to:

• Slow down and think about new information in a systematic, logical way.
• Assess new information with an open mind and without bias.
• Distinguish factually supported and useful information (such as information in a textbook from unsubstantiated opinion), hoaxes, and huckstering claims (such as deceptive ads).