Appendix B: Succeeding as A College Student

Another very important point about advising: Financial aid questions must be addressed to the financial aid office staff in Enrollment Services. The professional and faculty advisors usually have no access to your financial aid information. Students often run into financial aid problems for a number of reasons: dropping too many courses, failing to pass enough courses, and taking courses that are not required in their program are three major ones. Not completing the FAFSA on time is also a huge obstacle to navigating the financial aid universe. The financial aid office staff are the experts and you need to check your email, Banner, and your postal mail for notices from them about deadlines and your awards from financial aid.

The first value is rigor. That means the learning tasks require effort from students. You could say it means the courses are hard, but there is more to it than that. It means the academic standards and expectations are high. At Dalton State, we have a tradition of being a rigorous college. Our stu- dents who transfer do very well historically at other colleges. Our health professions students do very well on certification exams. To be honest, we take pride in being rigorous and having high standards but also in empowering the students to meet those standards through good teaching. Teaching is what our faculty do, and it is our priority.

The second is diversity and inclusion. College will allow you, and sometimes force you, to encounter people and ideas that you have not before. Your instructors may be from other countries or parts of the U.S., as might be your classmates. You will have classmates who are twenty or even thirty years older than you—or younger. Your instructors may teach theories and concepts you personally disagree with. One thing that students often find in college is that the old cliques and “drama” that happened in high school simply don’t apply in college. It’s about the learning and the work, not social status, cliques, or in-groups. Everyone belongs, no matter what they look like, as long as they do the work.

I have mentioned faculty several times in this section on values, and there is a reason for that. The persons you will have the most contact with on campus, other than students, are your faculty. You may spend several hours a week with them. It is best if you start to think of them in positive and constructive manners rather than as stern, rigid, distant authority figures who have no connection to your lives. The following is from a PowerPoint I created for a first-year seminar course taught in 2016 I called “The Care and Feeding of College Faculty.”

Forget all the things you have heard about college professors. You might have been taught that college faculty: * Spend most of their times writing books * Are introverted, weird, or eccentric (the absent-minded professor stereotype) * Have inappropriate relationships with their students (while this has happened in some colleges, it usually ends badly, as in unemployment. ) * Don’t work very hard (We might only be on campus about 30 hours per week, but we work away from the office many more hours.) * Are mean. Students have informed me that their high school teachers told them that college professors were uncaring. Perhaps they said that so that the students would not expect the professors to be easy; perhaps those high school teachers did have bad experiences. I can say this is not the case at Dalton State and probably not at your institution. You will find your instructors to be warm, polite, helpful, and friendly—but professional. Part of growing up is to learn to negotiate between those two.

While there are a lot more things I could say about the journey of being a college student, some things you just have to experience. Not everything will make sense at first. Remember, it’s a long journey.

Expect your college life to have a cyclical nature. The first few weeks will be exciting and daunting; you may feel like your head will explode with all the newness. A few weeks in you might feel a little down. The newness has worn off and man, oh, man, the work is piling up. By the eighth week, it will feel like everything came at once, but you do get a short break about then. The stress and activity builds and builds until finals and whew, it’s time to sleep and binge watch shows on Netflix. You say, “I got to get a better start next time” before it starts again in January.

I’m telling you this now because the key word I want to leave you with is PROACTIVITY. Your college journey will be enjoyable and successful to the extent that you are proactive. I learned this all-important word from the best book on time management, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen A. Covey. In a sense it means “planning” but more than that. Because we cannot plan for everything, we plan margin and solutions for what we know we cannot plan for. I cannot plan when I will have a flat tire; I can plan to have the resources in my car to fix the flat when that happens. I cannot plan the traffic between my home and the campus, but I can plan to leave 10 minutes early every day to get a parking space and miss the worst of the traffic.

Proactivity is about having a future-orientation that is executed in the present. Paper planners, or electronic ones, can help. But you can write down or type into your phone all the plans you want if you don’t choose to execute the plans. After a while, proactivity can become a habit and you cease to even recognize it as such. For example, years ago I learned to put my clothes out the night before a workday. My husband sets the coffee pot up before going to bed. These are small things but they save loads of time and more importantly, stress. Much of the stress we feel is self-inflicted from poor planning.

It is common for textbooks on transitions for first-year students in college to contain a chapter on time management. In place of a separate chapter or appendix, we will include some online resources. Inventories, filling out sample weekly calendar/schedules, and tips on time management are very helpful, but they start with this attitude of proactivity and some of the mental processes discussed in the Part 2, specifically self-efficacy and locus of control. Now is the time in your life to realize that there are urgent things and important things in your life, and those will change as you go through various seasons.

Urgent means that for whatever reason the task must be done very, very soon. Important means that it is central to your values and to your reaching your goals. Urgent means the task or activity demands your attention now; important tends to mean it will demand your attention long-term. Some things are simply urgent, but not important; some are important but not urgent; some are neither, and some are both. The diagram on the next page is often used to show that comparison.

Many of you have family and work responsibilities. Being a student is one of your many roles. This means balancing priorities; you have more things in your life that are both urgent and important. For that reason, using tools such as planners are a must for you. As a friend of mine says, “Everything takes longer than it takes,” so be realistic about trying to pack too many activities into your day. For your health and good relationships, you need to plan “margin” in your life, time in the day that is not packed to the full. That time will probably be taken up by the urgent and semi-urgent things that come up that you can’t plan for or expect.

Author: Barbara G. Tucker, Professor of Communication, Dalton State College

“Remember, in business and in life – success is earned from learning how to do things that you don’t like doing.” (Llopis, 2012)

One of the most important things that you will learn in college is how to learn. Why does that matter? Because learning will be one of our jobs in the future. No matter what profession you eventually enter after your formal education—social work, nursing, accounting, social media director, elementary school teacher, business manager, respiratory therapist, banker, or one of many others—you will continue learning new procedures, new policies, new techniques, new ways of thinking. Your employers will expect you to attend training. You may decide to change careers completely or slightly and have to learn new skills. Software and technology change constantly. Many of you will eventually want to earn a graduate degree.

Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy said many years ago, “Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.“ This quotation has often been attributed to the futurist Alvin Toffler, who used it in his book Future Shock from the 1970s. These men’s words were prophetic, although they could not have foreseen all of today’s technology.

Of course, not every learning task will be the same as the type you do in college. However, the truth remains that you are only beginning to learn as an adult, and this is the time in our life where you can focus on learning, on understanding the process, on how you best learn, and how you can expand your repertoire to learn better.

There are many theories about how we learn. While in some cases they contradict, for the most part they complement and supplement each other because they concern themselves with different aspects of the learning process, either the physiological effects of learning on the brain and body, the social aspects, or the personal and psychological effects.

Thanks to magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs), other medical science, and the growing field of neuroscience, we know much more today about how we learn. We know that learning creates a physical change in the brain as synapses grow. We know that this happens not by passive reception or exposure to information but by our effort. We know that memories are formed by passing from a short-term category to long-term through rehearsal, usage, and other efforts.

We understand how attention works and that distractions inhibit learning rather than helping it. While you think listening to music may help you study, it probably is not, and your open laptop in class is distracting the students behind you. In fact, the idea of multitasking is a myth. You may think you can do several things at a time, but you are actually cutting the efficiency and quality of the work you are doing. In other words, you might get some things done when you multitask, but you won’t do them as quickly or as completely or as well. We understand now that intelligence is malleable (changeable, flexible) and that a person with a fixed mindset about learning (those who say they are just born to be good at a skill like math, music, or writing) will face frustrations and obstacles in comparison with those who have a growth mindset. A growth mindset sees one’s failures in a learning task as ways to find new methods for learning, not as a stopping off point in learning. Also, to the advantage of all college students who sometimes feel like their heads are going to explode, we know that learning is not a zero sum game. Learning one thing does not mean it has to displace something else. Your brain is an organ that is developing new and more intricate connections; it is not a box that will only hold so much. We also know there are different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of intelligence, and we know there is a distinct difference in learning and processing between novices and experts.

We also know that some of the common ideas about learning do not have much evidence. One of them is learning styles. You have probably taken a test that classified you as a visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learner. While there is nothing wrong with being classified in such a way, there is no evidence from scientific studies that you will learn better if your instructor teaches to your learning style. Unfortunately, I have heard many students over the years attribute their failure in a class to the professor who didn’t teach to their learning style. What the students did not understand is that we learn through all styles (visual, print, hearing, and activity) depending on the demands of the learning tasks.

You did not learn to drive a car simply by reading about it or looking at videos (print, visual). You had to drive around in a car and listen to the instructor (kinesthetic and auditory learning). Think about learning how to ride a bicycle—same scenario. On the other hand, learning to speak a foreign language requires auditory and visual input, not just one, and is enhanced by movement. It would be better for you to use all four modalities than to pigeonhole yourself and limit your learning to a certain modality. As Steiner and Foote (2017) stated,

Like other labels, learning style labels may contain a grain of truth. A student who prefers to learn auditorily may find studying more productive when her notes are spoken aloud into a recording device and revisited later. But she may also find that when studying for a geometry test, drawing diagrams (visual) and physically manipulating shapes on paper (kinesthetic) work best for her. 

In fact, it’s just as important what you do with the information after it is accessed (enters your mind) than how it gets in there! As a college student and developing adult learner, you will want to be aware of what learning tasks require, especially what they require of you in terms of effort, attention, and time. You will want to notice what you are doing when you learn and even when you do not learn as you hoped to. You will want to think about and talk about how you learn best because using language is part of the effort behind creating those synaptic connections. These behaviors are called metacognition, or “thinking about thinking.”

This need for metacognition is why your professors will often ask you to turn to your partner and discuss some of the lecture material, such as what was unclear– “the muddiest point”—or to compare notes you have taken. It is why your instructor might have you look at the questions you got wrong on that midterm exam and figure out why you got them wrong— what processes did you go through to get that answer, and where, perhaps, did you get off track. It is why your professor might give you a pre-test at the beginning of the course to see what your pre-conceptions about the material are.

Of course, learning is not just about adding knowledge but also reshaping your understanding and approaches. For an example, I’ll use public speaking. Students come into the class with ideas about public speaking that they have to “unlearn.” One is that they cannot do it, because of bad past experiences or fear. Another is that all they have to do to be a good speaker is be funny, even silly. Another might be that public speaking is not an important skill, or that public speaking is just reading to an audience. As another example, science instructors often see that their beginning students have faulty ideas about science as a field of knowledge as well as about specific scientific facts. Their goal is not just to fill the students’ minds with scientific facts but to think like scientists, to understand what the scientific process involves and to apply that process in new ways.

All this is to say that one of the things you will hear over and over again, and one of the things that is a major difference between high school and college, is “time on task.” College learning, because it is “higher” in terms of the thought processes your professors want you to engage in, takes time. You cannot jot off a ten-page paper in a couple of hours. You cannot study for a midterm for an hour the night before. Well, you can try, but how successful you will be, in terms of really learning and earning good grades, is up for grabs.

Six theories of learning I would like to present here that will be of value to you as a student are Bloom’s/Krathwohl’s/Anderson’s taxonomy, Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy, self-directed and self-regulated learning, the usefulness of mindset, Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, and Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. What matters with each is that learning is effort. While learning can be enjoyable, the old “learning is fun” adage gives the idea that it is easy and that it shouldn’t require much effort. It learning does take effort, the erroneous thinking goes, then something must be wrong. On the contrary, learning is hard work.

The important thing for you to get from this is that your instructors will have some learning tasks at the bottom—remembering facts or concepts, such as being able to recreate lists of information on a test, and understanding, such as being able to define the concepts in your own words . However, in higher education we move higher up the taxonomy. You will be asked to apply the learning, and then do new things with it. You will also be asked to learn a greater volume of information for tests, in most cases, than what you have been used to in high school.

So in a history class, obviously you will have to remember dates. Then you will have to be able to explain or define an historical concept such as Manifest Destiny. Then you will be asked to apply, such as “Did the concept of Manifest Destiny influence a president’s behavior?” In this case the instructor may have never addressed that question specifically in class; you are supposed to take the concept and compare it to what the president did and said. Those are the lower levels, and it is possible that those will be your major learning tasks in your first year or so of classes, although not entirely.

However, as you progress, you will be asked to:

•   Analyze (taking apart, contrasting and comparing parts): “What are the beliefs behind Manifest Destiny and where did they come from?”

•   Evaluate: Assess how a concept or practice stands up to other criteria, standards, or philosophies: “Does Manifest Destiny violate the U.S. Constitution in spirit or in letter?”

•    Create: Develop a new thesis from the materials you have learned.

This is not to say you will be asked to do all six levels of the taxonomy in anyone class; in fact, that is unlikely. But I introduce this for you to understand what your instructors are trying to do. If you come into class with the pre-conception that you will be learning lots of facts and taking tests on them, that is only partly true. You will be expected to operate more at the applying, analyzing, and evaluating levels.

The second theory we will examine is that of Mindset. This theory is based on the work of Carol Dweck, a psychologist from Stanford University in California, and it has encouraged a great deal of research on learning. It is simple, “elegant” as some say, but also has a number of parts and offshoots.

Learning is work, sometimes hard work. You do not learn a task primarily because you are inherently good at that task; you learn it because you work hard in the right way. Learning researcher Angela Duckworth shows that experts—the really skilled—spend an average of 10,000 hours becoming that skilled person. For example, concert musicians and professional athletes do not approach their tasks as “I am just talented at this” and let it slide. They constantly practice and keep working on skills.

A person with a fixed mindset does not realize this and thinks that ability in a skill and the ability to learn that skill are inborn; you either have it or you don’t. They take failure badly and take success almost as badly. “I succeeded because I am just talented” and “I failed because I’ll never be any good at this.” They might not try new things but prefer to stay safe at the things they are “good at.” They may get too much self-worth from what they think is inborn ability or from other people’s comments about “how intelligent Dylan is” or “how gifted Jamie is.”

A person with a growth mindset sees learning as possible and due to hard work. They will try new methods to learn because they don’t see having the skill as either “born with it or not.” Also, a person can change their mindset; it would be against the theory to say someone could not change! Thankfully those who are trained to recognize how their fixed mindsets are affecting them can change to a growth mindset. Finally, children (and adults) should probably not be praised for being “smart” or “gifted” but instead for “working hard,” “finding new ways to do things, “ and having perseverance or endurance. (From https://mindsetonline.com/whatisit/ about/)

A second note. Up to this point I have not used the two most important words about learning in college. Those words are “self-directed” and “self-regulated.” Self-directed learning is learning you choose to do, that you are invested in and that you direct. The fact that you are in college should say that you are self-directed, because college is not legally required—we choose to go. Now, I realize that some people go to college for reasons other than choice (that is, someone told them they had to in order to get some kind of reward or avoid some sort of punishment), and those people usually are unsuccessful. I have heard of students who enrolled in college because their parents said, “You either go to work at manual labor, go in the military, or go to college,” and college sounded like the best of the three. That type of student is rarely self-directed.

Self-directed also means that you choose the method of learning and you decide when you have learned it. In this case, college cannot be totally self-directed because, unfortunately, the college expects you to learn a certain amount and show that you have learned in order to get a degree. You have to get certain grades and take certain courses to even stay in school. However, you can still be self-directed by choosing the hours that you take the classes, the professors, the number of hours of classes you take each semester, and the subject matter of the courses.

The point is that your instructors expect a large amount of self-direction from you, because you are an adult now and not required by law to be in their classes. Granted, you may only be in that biology class because two lab science classes are required for your major, but in general you have chosen to be there.

I make this point because it relates to an aspect of self-efficacy called “locus of control.” We do better at tasks, generally, when we have an internal locus of control rather than an external one. In other words, if I am the one making the choices in my life and I recognize that, my viewpoint on learning and success will be quite different than if I think I am just being bossed around by external forces, and therefore a victim. Locus of control means I take responsibility for my life rather than blaming others. If I get a ticket for going 15 miles per hour too fast in a 35 mph zone, I might blame the fact that the police officer was “out for me.” That’s external locus of control. If I own up to the fact it was my foot was the gas and I was going 50, that’s internal locus of control.

On the other hand, self-regulated learning is more about the actual behaviors you engage in as a learner. The concept of metacognition that we mentioned earlier is key here. A self-regulated learner reflects and recognizes what he or she is doing as a learner and seeks to find approaches that will make him or her more successful (and that includes being more economical in use of time and resources). A self-regulated learner is like an athlete who pays attention to her body and outcomes and what they are telling her about her athletic performance.

With all this talk of self-efficacy, self-regulation, and self-direction, it may sound like I am saying that learning is a very individualistic, “lone wolf” kind of phenomenon. That is not what I want to communicate, only that ultimately it does boil down, especially in college, to your own choices and work. However, one of the best parts of college (and one of the downsides of online classes) is that learning is social. Although Bandura originated the self-efficacy concept, it is rooted in his social learning theory, which states that an individual’s actions and reactions are influenced by the actions that individual has observed in others. So, if we have self-efficacy (also called personal efficacy) it’s not because it just sprang from nowhere or we figured it out on our own somehow magically. It came largely as a result of accumulated social interactions and observations over the lifespan.

The good news is, though, that even reading this textbook is a social situation for learning, as are the classes you are enrolled in this semester—especially the public speaking class! College allows you to learn in the best of situations—you can learn from others, directed and regulated by yourself.

Of course, one of those people in the situation is the class instructor, and this brings us to the last of the theories. Go back to the beginning of this appendix and read the quotation that starts it, from Forbes Magazine online. (Forbes is a leading business magazine.) Mr. Llopis has put in his own words the essence of Vygotsky’s theory called “Zone of Proximal Development,” which sounds like something from science fiction but is really quite simple and useful.

Vygotsky claimed that we learn only when we are given new tasks that are just outside our ability to do them. If we are given tasks to do that are within our ability, what’s there to learn? Only when we have to stretch out- side the “zone” do we learn. Just like an athlete who will try to beat his last time or distance, we have to be asked to do something we cannot do right now in order to learn it. The qualifier is that it cannot be too far outside of the “zone of proximal development,” because the learner will fail and not really be able to figure out why. Ideally, learning tasks must be staged as a series of challenges just outside what you can currently do.

Public speaking instructors do this by making your series of speech assignments longer and more complicated. Your first speech will be short and probably personal; your last speech will be much longer and involve higher-order thinking such as found on the Bloom’s taxonomy. Your history instructor in First Year U.S. History will probably not assign you to write a twenty-page paper. If you are a history major and take the seminar course before you graduate, you will by that time have the skills to write a forty-page, in-depth paper with scholarly sources.

It is your instructors’ and professors’ jobs to structure the classes this way. It may feel like the challenge is too far outside your “zone.” Sometimes, it is; that doesn’t mean you are incapable of the challenge, only that there are some steps in between that you need to do first. In that case, you might need to visit the tutoring center on campus and meet with the professor for extra help.

Many people do not realize that we read at different rates for different purposes. For instance, if we are looking for an answer to a question, we scan very quickly through the material to find the answer, and once the answer is found, we move on to something else. When we are reading a magazine for pleasure, we most likely read it quickly, skimming through the material and slowing down in sections that are especially interesting to us. We are reading for understanding, but we do not intend to memorize the material for a later date.

In college reading, we have to read slowly with an intent to remember what we have read because we know we will be tested on the material in the future. The most popular method of college reading uses a system known as SQ3R – Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review. This system has been used since WWII when it was created by Francis Pleasant Robinson from Ohio State University and is the most popular method for study reading used today.

The Survey step of SQ3R is be used to familiarize yourself with a new book or just a chapter of a book, depending on your goal. If you are looking at an entire book, you want to review the table of contents to see what the chapters are about. Many texts have two tables of content, one is general and short, and the other is detailed. The detailed one will give you the best overview of the text.

Next, look to see what else the book has to offer. Does it have an index? A glossary? Appendices of supplemental information? Self-tests throughout the chapters or at the end of each chapter? Lists of important terminology for each chapter? Terms defined in the margins? Terms defined in a single glossary or after each chapter? Boldface printed terms within the chapters? An introduction to each chapter? Objectives for each chapter? A summary or outline at the end of each chapter? Knowing what your text has to offer can help you devise a study plan for your reading that will be effective as well as giving you an idea as to what the text and the course will cover. Having this information allows you to start reading with background information which improves your concentration and focus, and your comprehension of the material.

When you use the Survey step of SQ3R to survey a single chapter, you want to look for and skim the chapter’s objectives and introduction. Then focus on the words in boldface print that divide the chapter into sections and emphasize the terminology. Browse the pictures, graphs, and charts and read their captions to see what examples are given of the information being presented. Look for a summary of the chapter at its end.

Once you have skimmed over for all these aspects, you will have created background information so that when you begin reading, you are not going into it cold, and you have improved your ability to focus and concentrate on the reading as well as comprehend it. This entire step should only take about ten minutes because you are skimming through the material to familiarize yourself with its contents.

Once you have finished the “S” and surveyed the chapter, you want to create questions related to the information that you can answer after reading. Basically, you want to be able to identify the main points the author is trying to get across to you. A simple way to do this is to take the boldface printed subtopics and turn them into questions. For instance, in chapter one of this text, the first section on page eight is already in a question format for you. You just have to read to find out what public speaking is. The second section on page nine is not in question format, but you can form a question out of it, such as “Why does public speaking produce anxiety?” Once you have the question, you can read to find the answer which will give you the important information in the section.

Intend to remember. Tell yourself you will recall this information because you want to remember it.

Learn from the general to the specific. In essence, build a framework or create context first. Superior, Erie, Michigan, Huron, and Ontario mean nothing if you don’t identify them as the Great Lakes first.

Make the information meaningful by creating associations. Create a concept map of the main points and supporting details of what you have read or are trying to remember. Concept maps show the relationships between ideas and make memorization easier. They also allow you to create a “picture” of what you are learning. Pictures are easier to recall than lists of words or outlines because they allow you to visualize the information. In addition, when you try to remember lists or outlines, you have a tendency to recall the beginnings and the endings and confuse the information in the middle. An example of a concept map is on the next page.

Study actively. Look for answers, recite the material aloud, create flash- cards, or write notes, and test yourself.

Recite and repeat, the more often the better. Overlearn the information. This means once you think you know the information, test yourself one more time.

Suppose you needed to remember the six listening faults: daydreaming, closed-mindedness, false attention, intellectual despair, memorizing, and personality listening. You would take the first letter of each meaningful word; in this case, D, C, F, I, M and P and create a new word or phrase, such as PC DIMF or DC PIMF. The word or phrase doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to be memorable. When you have your test in hand, take a moment to write down PC DIMF in the margin. When you come to the question that deals with the six listening faults, you will have a memory tag all ready to aid your thinking. If the list of items to be remembered has to be in order, you will be limited in what you can create, so you might want to create an acrostic instead.

Have you ever noticed that when a song comes on the radio or TV, you can easily recall the words? Create a jingle or a song of concepts to aid your memory. Perhaps you are familiar with the jingle:

Thirty days has September, April, June and November. All the rest have 31 except February, it’s a different one. It has 28 days clear, and 29 each leap year.

An acrostic is another effective memory device. A popular one you may be familiar with is “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.” This acrostic, which is a sentence using words with the same first letter as the words you are trying to recall, is a clue to the planets in order from the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. The six listening faults could also be recalled using an acrostic. For instance, I may call proper friends daily. I for intellectual despair; M for memorizing; C for closedmindedness; P for personality listening; F for false attention; and D for daydreaming.

Author: Ms. Cathy Hunsicker, Associate Professor of Communication, Dalton State College

All students experience some test anxiety – a fear or worry about having to take a test. When the anxiety is normal, it raises your alertness and is productive. When the anxiety is severe, it can cause mental interference which will make concentration difficult and make you easily distracted. It also can produce physical symptoms, such as restlessness; “butterflies in the stomach”; accelerated heart beat and/or breathing; nausea, sweaty palms and a headache, among other symptoms.

The worst part of severe test anxiety is that it causes a mental block which makes it difficult to focus on the task at hand and remember all the information you have studied. If you are very anxious about a test and have studied effectively, you can still do poorly on the test if you are unable to control your anxiety.

The most important step to take to control anxiety is to be prepared. You need to self-test and practice the information repeatedly to make it your own. You also need to keep your perspective and not let your emotions interfere with logic. Consider why you are anxious. Are you anxious and afraid because of self-defeating thoughts? If you think you will do poorly, you are setting yourself up to do just that.

You must keep a positive attitude and talk to yourself. Say, “I have studied for this test and even though I may not know all the answers, I do know most of them, so I will earn a good grade;” or in the case of a speech, “I have researched this speech effectively, and I have practiced this speech numerous times in front of my friends and family, so I will be able to deliver it successfully in class.” Use your imagination and visualize your-self being successful. See yourself acing the test or delivering your speech calmly and in control. Imagining yourself successful in a situation sets you up to be successful as long as you have completed all the requirements to be successful, i.e. studying and practicing.

The last technique to controlling text anxiety is to learn to relax. If you find yourself breathing heavily and upset about the test or speech, take a little time and count your breaths for a minute. A breath is considered one intake and one outtake. Next, slow down your breathing and count your breaths again. The fewer breaths you take, the more your body will slow down. If you are anxious, you are probably taking fifteen to twenty breaths per minute; whereas, if you are relaxed, you can limit yourself to three or four breaths per minute without holding your breath. This little exercise can help you focus and relax before you take a test or give a speech, or during a test if you find your anxiety is worsening.

Author: Ms. Cathy Hunsicker, Associate Professor of Communication, Dalton State College

In many classes, the large part of your grade, and thus your success, will be from high grades on exams. These pointers will walk you through preparing and taking exams.

The first step to test-taking is to study. If you are prepared for the test, you will be less anxious and more apt to score a high grade. What should you study?

Key terms, definitions and examples: It is not enough to know the terminology and what each new vocabulary word means. You need to be able to provide an example or explain how the word fits into the subject you are studying.

Get a good night’s sleep. If you are tired while taking the exam, your focus will be weak, and you are more apt to make mistakes. Being well-rested will make you more alert during the exam.

Don’t cram. Schedule regular study times. The optimum way to study is to review the information you have read in your text and heard in your class on a daily basis. This can be just a quick reading through the information, but the repetition will make the concepts stick in your head. If daily is not feasible, schedule time to study your text and class notes on the days the class meets at a minimum. Looking over your notes as soon after class as possible increases your memory of the material and gives you the opportunity to clarify what you have written. Studies have shown that the longer you wait to review your notes, the more you will forget. In fact, you can forget half of what you have learned in just an hour if you don’t review!

The week before the test, you will need to schedule daily study times. Break up the information into workable parts. Study part one the first night. The second night review part one and study part two. The third night review parts one and two and study part three. Continue studying in this way to keep the information fresh in your mind for test day.

In addition, take breaks while you are studying. When you come back from your break, review the material you were focusing on before the break and start studying the new material. Break, review, study provides many beginnings and endings to your studying which is beneficial because we tend to remember the beginnings and endings of information and fudge up the information in the middle.

Take your books, pens, pencils, paper, etc. to class. In short, be prepared to take the test. Responsible college students have the necessary equipment to succeed in school ready every day, not just on test days. In addition to showing responsibility, having what you need with you provides a feeling of confidence because you are ready.

Be on time for the exam. It goes without saying that being on time to class shows respect to the instructor and your other classmates. Being on time also allows you to be more relaxed for the test. Rushing in late and worrying about whether you will have enough time to finish the test will weaken your focus and concentration.

Sit in a quiet spot and don’t talk about the material. Every exam day, you will find a group or groups of students hurriedly trying to make themselves remember the concepts they should have been studying all along. They tend to be frenetic as they ask each other questions and look up answers in the text. You have studied and the information is all in your mind. Don’t sit near these folks and join in their frenzy. Keep to yourself. You have put the material in your mind in a logical fashion and don’t need to upset your thinking by talking with these students.

Read all of the directions on the test carefully. Just because the questions appear to be the usual multiple choice or true and false doesn’t mean you are to answer them the usual way. Sometimes instructors want pluses and minuses instead of trues and falses or T’s and F’s. If you answer the questions using a method different from what the directions state, your answers will be incorrect.

Budget your time. Don’t spend so much time on a single question that you can’t finish the test. Mark the troubling question and come back to it if and when you have time.

Ignore those people who finish before you do. You are not in a race. Stu- dents who finish quickly either really know all the information or don’t know any of the information. You may not know all of the information, but you will know most of it because you studied. Use your time wisely and review your test if you finish before time is up to make sure you haven’t made any “stupid mistakes.” Use all the time you are given.

Answer the easy questions first. Answering the easy questions first tends to build your confidence as you proceed through the test. In addition, these questions may provide clues to the more difficult questions.

Mark the troublesome questions so you can look at them again later. Many times troublesome questions become clearer after reading and answering other questions on the test. Just be sure to keep track of the questions you have deemed difficult, so you can go back to them later. It is usually wise to select an answer to those difficult questions before you move on just in case you don’t have time to return them.

Watch for qualifiers, such as, all, most, some, no, always, usually, sometimes, never, great, much, little, more, equal, less, good, bad, is, is not.

Author: Ms. Amy Mendes, Lecturer in Communication, Dalton State College

Plagiarism in a problem in many classrooms. It is a problem for students, since plagiarizing robs them of learning opportunities and can get them in serious trouble. It is a problem for teachers, since it leaves them unable to tell how much a student really knows and causes them to have extra administrative work to deal with students who plagiarize.

Unfortunately, it is also common. Some researchers estimate rates of cheating in undergraduate classrooms at over 80% (McCabe et al., 2001a, 2001b; McCabe & Trevino, 2002; Dawkins, 2004; Callahan, 2004; Whitley, 1998). This statistic includes other types of cheating, but we can deduce from it that plagiarism is common. And some researchers say that committing plagiarism in college can be a predictor of dishonesty in the workplace later in life (Hilbert, 1985; Lucas & Friedrich, 2005). Failing an assignment or a class is a bad consequence, but if this sort of behavior continues, it can ruin one’s career.

One reason that plagiarism is such a problem is that students don’t have a good understanding of what it is. Although students may articulate some understanding of plagiarism, and that it must be avoided, they do not understand the purpose of citation itself. They may only think of it as a required convention of academic writing, rather than as a means of learning and contributing to an ongoing accumulation of knowledge (Lofstrom, 2011).

Some researchers have found that students feel confused by the rules, and express fear that they may accidentally fall into plagiarism even when trying not to, or even to accidentally echo a phrase previously encountered and mistake it for their original thought (Ashworth, Bannister & Thorne, 1997). This is consistent with other’s findings that students cannot identify plagiarism when given examples, do not know how to paraphrase and cite (Marshall & Garry, 2006; Yeo, 2007; Pecorari, 2003).

How do we teach about plagiarism?

The good news is that simply educating students about plagiarism helps reduce it (Landrau, Druen & Arcuri, 2002). But, a complicating factor in the public speaking classroom is the confusion that exists for some students about citation standards in verbal communication (Holm, 2002). Some students who may exhibit appropriate citation behaviors in written assignments fail to do so in speeches.

In a recent study (Mendes, 2017), student respondents on a plagiarism survey indicated some interesting things about their understanding of plagiarism. First, many respondents specifically used the terms “stealing” or “theft” and “words.” The implications of this usage are that these students focus specifically on others’ words, but not necessarily on thoughts, ideas, or conclusions. However, another significant minority of students used “thoughts” in their answers, indicating a more thorough understanding of citation requirements. Another important group of words that came up in the study was “knowing,” “intentional,” or “purpose,” indicating that plagiarism behaviors are always intentional (and that perhaps unintentional plagiarism does not count).

Below are a series of activities that will help you reach a better understanding of some important ideas about plagiarism:

• How to use quotation marks.
• When and how to paraphrase.
• How to cite information from multiple sources.

An Indian-American cricket enthusiast has announced plans to build as many as eight cricket stadiums across the US at an estimated cost of $2.4 billion to professionalize the game in the country. The eight proposed stadiums, each having a capacity of 26,000 people in New York, New Jersey, Washington DC, Georgia, Florida, Texas, Illinois and California, would create as many as 17,800 new jobs in the US, said Jignesh (Jay) Pandya, chairman of Global Sports Ventures (Press Trust of India, 2017).

Hopefully, this practice exercise has made it easier to understand when and how to cite, paraphrase, and combine sources. Your instructor can answer other questions you have.

References

McCabe, D., Trevino, L., and Butterfield, K. (2001a). Cheating in academic institutions: A decade of research. Ethics and Behavior, 11, 219-232.

McCabe, D., Trevino, L., and Butterfield, K. (2001b). Dishonesty in academic environments. Journal of Higher Education, 72, 29-45.

Mendes, A. (2017). “What even is plagiarism?”: Measuring undergraduates’ comprehension of source attribution standards in a Public Speaking class. Proceedings, 86, Spring.

Pecorari, D. (2003). Good and original: plagiarism and patchwriting in academic second-language writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 12, 317-345.

Press Trust of India, 2017. Indian-American to build 8 cricket stadiums in US. Times of India. February 2, 2017. Retrieved from http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/sports/cricket/news/indian-american-to-build-8-cricket- stadiums-in-us/articleshow/56930109.cms

Yeo, S. (2007). First-year university science and engineering students’ understanding of plagiarism. Higher Education Research and Development, 26, 199-216.