Dvorak Psychological Keys to Student Success

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4835-4701-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 90 Seiten

Students get advice about how to study all the time. However, if students want to maximize their learning, they also need many thinking skills. The emphasis of this book is teaching you HOW TO THINK. Thinking skills are NOT the same as studying skills. Thinking skills will make your studying skills more effective. The Psychological Keys to Student Success (PK2SS) address the thinking skills and personal characteristics students can develop in order to thrive, not just survive in college.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dvorak, Troy

Leseproben

PK2SS #1 –BELIEFS AND MINDSET

The beliefs you hold about learning are the first place you must look to understand your level of learning and achievement. “At its core, student success is determined by the attitudes and behaviors of individual students.”1 Did you catch that? Did ya? Developing a positive perception of yourself as a learner, and of the learning environment, is an important factor in deep learning.2

Imagine that a friend says to you, “It doesn’t matter what I do. I can’t learn this stuff. It’s too hard. I’m just stupid.” Prior to an exam, how will his belief about the material and his intelligence affect his approach to studying? Imagine that you run into another student who says, “I don’t understand why people ask so many questions in class. The instructor gave us the information. That’s it. It is what it is. I hate it when people try to complicate things with stupid ‘what if’ questions.” If she believes that everything is black and white and that considering different viewpoints is useless, how will it affect how she studies?

It amazes me what many teachers and schools fail to teach. Many teachers don’t come right out and tell you to consider your beliefs about education, knowledge, and learning. They frequently have you discuss your beliefs about “hot” topics such as discrimination, religion, culture, public policy, and sexual orientation. Very few teachers stress the importance of your personal beliefs about knowledge and learning. Really, how do people learn? How do YOU learn? What is knowledge and what do you believe it means to be knowledgeable? Let’s delve into this and explore the importance of your beliefs!

Epistemological Beliefs

Epistemological beliefs are your beliefs about knowledge and learning. “Epistemological” can be a tricky word to pronounce (try this: Ah-pi-stem-ah-logical). These beliefs begin to develop when we are children. Young children have simple beliefs about knowledge and learning. They tend to believe that knowledge is absolute; it is about knowing “facts” and adults are experts who give them the facts. As we get older, many people begin to develop epistemological beliefs that reflect the fact that knowledge and learning are things that are complex and develop slowly over time. Sometimes not knowing is knowledge!

In my experience, when you try to learn something new and unfamiliar, especially if it is complex, it is common to try and just memorize the “facts.” It is as if we are naturally trying to simplify complicated material. But, as you know, that doesn’t always work because some things really are complicated!

Educational psychologist Marlene Schommer has researched epistemological beliefs and identified four aspects: innate ability, quick learning, simple knowledge, and certain knowledge.3 Each aspect is like a dimension that ranges from naïve (simple) to sophisticated. The diagram you see below is a summary from an article written in 2005.4

Here is an example from my teaching experience. In psychology, we study human thoughts and emotions which are affected by many different factors and situations. There are no equations for our thoughts and emotions. That kind of ambiguity (i.e., when something unclear or can be understood in many different ways) makes psychology difficult for students who believe that knowledge is simply about facts. If you believe that knowledge is like rules that do not change (i.e., knowledge is absolute), courses like psychology, philosophy, and ethics may frustrate you.

Epistemological beliefs affect your approach to every class you take, every book you read, every moment you study, and every exam you complete. Stop and consider the four aspects of epistemological beliefs for a class you are taking (or one you took in the past). Maybe you want to consider your beliefs about knowledge and learning for a math class. Perhaps you are taking a math class and a history class. Compare your epistemological beliefs for both. For example, maybe you think that math is an ability you are born with (or without) but you believe that learning about history is something that can improve over time. Maybe you think math is something you ‘get’ or you ‘don’t get’ but that history is something you can catch onto. Is math about facts or is it ambiguous? How about history? Understanding these beliefs about knowledge and learning will help explain your approach to different classes, and it will also give you insight into your overall approach to school.

How Epistemological Beliefs Affect You – Some Research

Schommer’s research demonstrated that students who believe that learning is quick and absolute in nature were more likely to draw overly simplistic conclusions when reading and do more poorly on tests.5 Conversely, students who believed that learning is gradual had higher GPA’s.6 Schommer and one of her colleagues found that students who believe that ability can improve over time valued education and were more likely to persist when they encountered academic challenges.7

Recent research demonstrated that students who believe learning ability is something they are born with (or without) used fewer strategies “to connect their prior knowledge with new knowledge that is to be learned” and they did not “think critically about the information that they [were] processing.”8 Students who have more sophisticated epistemological beliefs (i.e., the right side of the chart) showed more effort and persistence.9 Epistemological beliefs also influence achievement goal orientations, the third PK2SS you will learn about.

Beyond Schommer’s Work

I am going to extend this discussion of epistemological beliefs beyond those mentioned thus far. Let’s consider other common beliefs students have. For each, decide what you believe and then think about whether the belief helps you or hurts you.

Your Learning History

Everyone has positive and negative learning experiences in school. Those experiences, combined with your current educational goals, contribute to your beliefs and expectations about school and your academic abilities. How do beliefs about your abilities matter? Here is an example. A study of 253 university students in a macroeconomics course showed that those who had a lower GPA were more likely to overestimate their exam performance. However, having a higher GPA, higher ACT scores, and previous experience with the topic all reduced the tendency to overestimate ability.10 This means that having accurate beliefs about your ability is very influential on your academic performance. Are your beliefs about your academic abilities accurate? We will consider this again in PK2SS #4.

“Easy” Classes

I’m sure you have taken a class and thought, “This will be easy.” Many college students, when choosing elective classes, try to manage their schedules by selecting classes they hope will be less challenging to offset the workload of their required, harder classes. For example, some students who have never taken a psychology class before believe that psychology is “all common sense.” After the first exam they realize this belief was very inaccurate. They spend the rest of the semester trying to recover from doing poorly on the first exam. Your beliefs about classes will influence how seriously you take them!

What Classes “Should” Be Like

What about your approach to learning in a class? If you believe that a class or instructor does not fit with your goals or your preferred learning style, you might experience negative emotions such as boredom or anxiety. These feelings can distract you and lead to lower performance.11 A common example occurs when a student thinks that college classes should have a lot of discussions, group work, and projects. When that student enrolls in an introductory course that is lecture-based, he may start to think over and over about how the class is “pointless” and “stupid” and “boring” and how the teacher sucks. That kind of belief can be a big internal distraction, and it is entirely unnecessary.

What Teachers Should Be Like

What should and shouldn’t teachers do? Your beliefs about this will affect your willingness to learn. Should teachers simply give out facts or should they challenge your beliefs too? What if teachers suggest things that are contrary to your religious or personal beliefs? Is that a sticking point you want to argue about or are you prepared to consider different perspectives as part of the educational process? Questions like these help you examine your epistemological beliefs. No matter how hard a teacher works to make a class interesting, how much a teacher knows about a topic, or how many different teaching strategies the teacher uses, it is your perception of the teacher, teaching strategies, and topics that matter most. The teacher could be awesome (like me) but if you don’t like him/her or if you don’t care about the class, it doesn’t matter what the teacher is like. That’s entirely on you (and how you think)!

How to Study

Another important belief relates to how to study for different types of exams. Many students adjust how they study based on the type of examination they expect to take and based on their belief about what the instructor expects of them on an exam.12,13 Here is an example of this from my teaching...