110 Strategies For Success In College And Life - Softcover

Rollins, Joan H.; Zahm, Mary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1524639966 ISBN 13: 9781524639969

Publisher: AuthorHouse, 2016

Synopsis

For newcomers wishing to merge temporarily  or permanently into Rome's city, this book is a gift. The Vade Mecum is a special blend of Roman reference, history, directory, prose, guide, recipe, journal game book. Use it as your lamplight, your friend. Mysterious places of Rome Knights Templar, entity-trodden spaces and odd places absorbed in illusion may fascinate curious people. Little lessons of speech and lingo compliment a decent glossary of words and phrases stuffed with accurate pronunciations. I've listed pages of full bus schedules day and night with landmarks and remarks for best travels. Learn facts or frights or relax with Roman-dusted puzzles. Boundless information is awaiting you within its covers. --welcome to your Roman portal.

About this title

About the Author

Joan H. Rollins, Ph.D. is Professor Emerita and a former Chair of the Psychology Department at Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island. Previously, she served as a member of the Rhode Island Board of Examiners for Psychology, as President of the Rhode Island Psychological Association, President of the New England Psychological Association, and as a member of the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Rollins is the author of Women's Mind's/Women's Bodies: The Psychology of Women in a Biosocial Context (Prentice Hall, 1996) and editor of Hidden Minorities (University Press of America, 1981), an interdisciplinary book about several ethnic groups in southern New England. Mary Zahm, Ph.D. is Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at Bristol Community College (BCC), Fall River, Massachusetts. She is also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Rhode Island (URI). Dr. Zahm has received awards for outstanding teaching at both BCC and URI as well as the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD) award for excellence in teaching, learning, and leadership at BCC. She has also served as President of the New England Psychological Association. Dr. Zahm is the author of Create Your Ideal Life (AuthorHouse, 2010), a textbook for Psychology of Personal Adjustment classes. She also brings a practical bent to the book based on her 13 years as a Human Factors Engineer for Raytheon Company. Drs. Rollins and Zahm have a combined total of over 60 years of college teaching experience, including the freshman college seminar. They developed the Academic Self-Regulation scale, with their colleagues Dr. Gary Burkholder and Dr. Peter F. Merenda, which is highly correlated with grade point average and graduation rates of college students. They are available for the presentation of workshops on strategies for college student success.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

110 Strategies for Success in College and Life

By Joan H. Rollins, Mary Zahm

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2016 Mary Zahm and Joan H. Rollins
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5246-3996-9

Contents

Chapter One Develop Your Identity: Who You Are and Who You Want to Be, 1, 
Chapter Two Learn The Rules of the Game in College, 27, 
Chapter Three Read and Write Effectively, Overcome Test Anxiety, and Ace Your Exams, 49, 
Chapter Four Manage Your Time, Energy, and Money Wisely, 76, 
Chapter Five Develop Multiple Learning Strategies, 96, 
Chapter Six Develop and Use Metacognitive Skills to Learn Information Efficiency and Effectively, 117, 
Chapter Seven Know Thyself, 138, 
Chapter Eight Improve Your Creativity, Critical Thinking, Constructive Thinking, and Decision Making Skills, 161, 
Chapter Nine Achieve Your Most Important Life Goals, 180, 
Chapter Ten Select and Prepare for a Rewarding Career, 196, 
References, 221, 
Index, 241, 

CHAPTER 1

Develop Your Identity: Who You Are and Who You Want to Be.

Success in college will not happen by luck or by accident. You need to have educational goals and a detailed game plan to be able to sustain the high level of motivation required to achieve them. So, the first step is to identify the lifestyle you want and the type of career you would like to pursue. Identify tentative goals and a game plan to get you started if you are not sure of your desired career. You will be able to clarify your educational and career goals as you complete exercises in this book and your college courses.

You also need to be an active learner who believes you can succeed through hard work and persistent effort and ignores any messages from others or yourself to the contrary. Increase your chances of success and enjoyment of college by getting involved in a college club or student government. You will make friends with peers who share your interests and feel connected to the college.

Set Personally Meaningful Goals then Have Self-Control and Grit in Order to Achieve Them

As the old saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for because you might get it." Goal setting is a very powerful motivating force, which acts as a servomechanism keeping an individual moving in the direction of the goal. It is important to select goals that are in harmony with one's moral values, conscience, and priorities as to what is really important in one's life. Goals are in themselves neither good nor bad; it depends on what the goals are and how much you must sacrifice to achieve them. You might have a goal of earning $500,000 per year. But if you lie, cheat, and steal to achieve the goal, or have to travel extensively and are not able to spend time with your children and spouse, achieving the goal will be detrimental to you and your family (and you may well spend time in prison). Thus, you must carefully select your goals to be in accordance with your moral values and not in conflict with other priorities in your life. The power of the goal for transforming your life increases when you write down the goal, in explicit detail, and read the goal on a daily or weekly basis.

An important reason why some people are more successful than others in achieving their goals is self-control, which enables them to regulate attention, emotion, and behavior. We will discuss the concept self-regulation and the Academic Self-Regulation Scale (ASRS), which is a measure of how well a college student is able to regulate or control his or her behavior relative to their lives in college. Another important cause of success is grit, which refers to the determined and consistent pursuit of a major goal despite setbacks. Grit may require the persistent pursuit of the goal over years and even decades such as when a student has the goal of becoming a professional such as a surgeon, or a clinical psychologist (Duckworth & Gross, 2014)

The initial reason for selecting a goal can influence the likelihood of achieving it (Sheldon & Elliot 1998). In a study designed to test the hypothesis that goals caused by external incentives will lose appeal with time, Sheldon and Elliot (1998) asked 128 undergraduate students enrolled in psychology classes to generate a list of 10 personal strivings (such as "trying to be physically attractive" and "trying to seek new and exciting experiences") and to rate how much they pursue each striving on a scale from 1 "not at all because of this reason" to 9 "completely because of this reason" for each of four reasons:

• Extrinsic/Controlled — Striving because somebody else wants you to do so or thinks you should.

• Introjected/Controlled — Striving because you would feel ashamed, guilty, or anxious if you didn't.

• Identified/Autonomous — Striving because you really believe that it's an important goal to have.

• Intrinsic/Autonomous — Striving because of the fun and enjoyment that the goal provides you.

The students were asked to indicate how successful they had been in attaining their goals within the past month or so using a scale ranging from 0 (0–9% successful) to 10 (90–100% successful). The results of this study indicated that students who had Autonomous goals were more likely to attain them than students who had Controlled goals. Goals that we ourselves choose and are self integrated will be the ones on which we continue to work hard over time and that we are more likely to achieve.

In a follow-up study of goal attainment, 141 undergraduate students enrolled in psychology classes were asked at the beginning of the semester to first select a set of eight achievement goals from either the 51 items listed on the Achievement Goals Questionnaire (which included strivings commonly reported by college students in previous studies such as "Try new and challenging activities," "Avoid procrastination," and "Fulfill my potential") or to fill in their own goals. They were then asked to rate both the reasons they would pursue their goals and the amount of effort they intended to invest in the goals. The same four reasons listed above were used in this study. The students rated their intended effort on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all hard) to 9 (very hard). Eight weeks later, the students rated the amount of effort they were actually investing in each goal. At the end of the 15-week semester, the students rated how well they had attained each goal. "The researchers concluded that achievement goals pursued for more autonomous (i.e., identified and/or intrinsic) reasons were better attained over a 15-week period (Sheldon & Elliot, 1998, p. 550). They attribute this goal achievement, in part, to the students working harder on their autonomous goals eight weeks into the study. In contrast, although participants intended to work hard in their highly controlled goals, their efforts declined during the first eight weeks of the semester.

A second study tested alternative explanations, such as perceived self-efficacy, for the autonomy effect observed in the studies summarized above. The results of this second study also found that autonomous motivation for personal goals was positively related to attaining those goals, whereas controlled motivation was not related to achieving them. Autonomous goals were apparently attained by engendering sustained effort. Notably, both the intrinsic interest in the goal and a goal consistent with one's enduring values and beliefs independently predicted effort and attainment, indicating that both provide motivation to continue toward the goal. Controlledness was found to be associated with intended effort but not actual hard work (Sheldon & Elliot, 1998).

What are the implications of Sheldon's and Elliot's research for you? This research clearly demonstrates that in order to optimize your successful goal attainment, you should only pursue goals that are personally meaningful and truly important to you as well as harmonious with your core values and essential beliefs. When you pursue goals that either engage your natural interests or express your authentic personal values, you are most likely to be effective because you will have the stamina to continue to expend the effort required to achieve your goals in the long run. This stamina will help sustain your efforts even in the face of inevitable obstacles or hardships that everyone experiences in their lives.

What are you passionate about? What work would you love to do? Begin your college career by exploring a variety of academic subjects and working in community organizations. These experiences will help you to find out your special talents and academic interests (such as computer science, history, mathematics, medicine, law, psychology, political science, science, sociology), the type of cultural activities that excite you (such as art, music, or theater), and the type of life work that interests you. Then you will be able to identify personally meaningful long- and short-term goals for yourself and you will be motivated to achieve them and work hard to do so.

Focus on Your "Vision for Your Success" and Have a Step-by-Step Plan to Stay on Course

It facilitates your academic achievement to have life goals, which are the purposes toward which your efforts are directed or the objectives you intend to accomplish. You also need a life plan, a detailed outline of the steps that you must complete to achieve your goals. Your plan not only helps you remain mentally focused on the steps you need to complete, but also is a visual tool that enables you to chart your progress toward achieving your goals. However, many entering freshmen are explorers who do not know what they hope to accomplish in college. Rather, they hope to discover areas of knowledge that they love to study and find meaningful work in a related field. If you are an explorer, the best way to start defining your life goals is to focus your attention on creating your future life vision depicting what you and your life will be like when you graduate from college.

Start to define your vision for your success by reflecting about how you and your life will be different when you graduate from college and record your answers in a success journal or notebook for future reference. Develop the habit of updating or refining your future life vision any time during your college career and your life. Understanding and visualizing the key components of your future life will provide an incentive that motivates or impels you to take action and work to turn your vision into your reality.

In a diary study investigating the uses of visualization as a cognitive tool for effective living (Kosslyn, Seger, Pani, & Hillger, 1990), people reported using visualization techniques for such diverse activities as problem solving (e.g., forming cognitive maps for navigation purposes), mental practice (e.g., forming an image of a swimming stroke), memory improvement (e.g., trying to remember a name by forming an image of someone's face), and emotional or motivational inducement (e.g., using imagery to induce a relaxed state under stress).

Research has shown that combining mental imagery with setting of a goal and creation of a goal implementation intention plan is an effective strategy for enhancing goal achievement. "Implementation intentions are concrete action plans that specify in an if-then format when, where and how one will act in order to achieve a specific goal ...," (Gollwitzer 1993, 1999; Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006, as cited in Knauper, Roseman, Johnson, & Krantz, 2009, p. 181). Research that combined training of a group of college students in vivid mental imagery with goal setting ("I want to achieve goal X!) and creation of a goal implementation intention plan ("If I encounter situation X, then I will perform behaviour Y!") found that this combination resulted in increased goal attainment (completion of a menial task) compared with performance of students in a group that were trained in creation of a goal implementation intention plan without using mental imagery. (Knauper et al., 2009, p.181). Research in which low fruit consuming adults were trained to use "mental imagery targeting key elements of implementation intentions (the critical cues and intended action)," resulted in increased fruit consumption for that group of participants but not for high fruit consuming individuals (Knauper et al., 2011, p. 603). In another study, inactive adult women "mentally simulating an approach goal (linking the goal of engaging in the behavior to a desirable end-state)" increased their physical activity (Chan & Cameron, 2012, p. 349). This research suggests that setting goals, creating an implementation intention plan, and using vivid mental imagery targeting key elements of your implementation intentions or mentally simulating a desired goal will help motivate you to achieve your goals.

Combining mental contrasting with implementation intention planning has been shown to be an effective metacognitive strategy to improve self-regulation of a variety of goals such as improving mobility in patients with chronic back pain (Christiansen, Oettingen, Dahme, & Kilnger, as cited in Oettingen & Gollwitzer, 2010). It has also been shown to be an effective intervention for personality development.

Mental contrasting ("imagining a desired future" and then reflecting "on the present reality that stands in the way of attaining the desired future") ... "helps people to make up their minds about whether to commit to the goal of realizing the future by scrutinizing the feasibility of reaching the goal. When feasibility (expectation of success is high, people commit strongly to attaining the goal; when feasibility is low, they form a weak goal commitment or none at all." (Oettingen & Gollwitzer 2010, pp. 115-116)

In a study in which college students were first trained to use the mental contrasting strategy to identify an obstacle, then to identify behavior needed to overcome or circumvent the obstacle, and finally to form "if ... then ... statements focusing on overcoming the obstacle" (e.g., "a noisy roommate" or ... "studying effectively for an upcoming test," the participants using these techniques reported an increase in self-discipline and self-esteem after a 1-week intervention compared to students in a control group (Oettingen, & Gollwitzer, 2010, p. 130). This research suggests that using mental imagery will help you to select realizable goals and create plans to implement them including coping with challenges faced along the way.

Likewise, you can use meditation mental imagery or creative visualization and reflection techniques to plan your future life vision, frame goals, create goal implementation intention plans, privately rehearse and refine new behaviors associated with achieving all of your desired goals before performing them in public, and generate creative solutions for the roadblocks you encounter in your life.

When you use meditation, creative visualization, and reflection together regularly, you will be better able to create a clear, integrated, and self-affirming life vision and identify the college, relationship, career, and personal goals that will lead you to living it. It is important that you achieve a clear, integrated, and self-affirming future life vision before attempting to implement any of your future life plans. Doing so will help you avoid the problems that people typically experience when they impulsively make a desired life change, such as taking a job they don't like because it has a high salary or making a geographic move for a new job, without first assessing how it will impact other aspects of their personal and professional lives. Using meditation, creative visualization, and reflection regularly to reevaluate your future life vision will also help you to anticipate, identify, proactively prepare for, and be in a position to meet life challenges and to capitalize upon new opportunities in our fast-paced and changing world. Once you can picture your future life vision and goals clearly in your mind, you will be able to start turning the future life of your dreams into your reality. Creating your future life vision, however, does not guarantee change. It must be followed by choice and decision making about your goals, making implementation intention plans for achieving your goals, and execution of your plans.

Do not be concerned if you think that you do not know how to meditate or use creative visualization techniques. There is really no right or wrong way to meditate. It is more important for you to develop a reflective style that feels natural to you and to make sure you meditate on a daily basis than it is to follow a particular ritual. Most of us practice some form of meditation and creative visualization when we daydream. You probably already do know how to use these techniques, but are not consciously aware of the exact steps you use in the process. Use meditation and visualization techniques to begin to create a vision of your future by following the steps outlined below. Then you can modify them to suit yourself. You will learn to become proficient in using these techniques as you practice them.

• To begin creating a vision of your future life, get into a relaxed, meditative state. You can either lie down or sit in a comfortable position with your back straight and your feet touching the floor.

• Starting with your feet and moving upward, tense and relax every part of your body, in turn, while breathing deeply. Quiet your mind to achieve a mental state in which you can think clearly about your future life vision. Many people find that the easiest way to quiet their mind is to focus on their breathing. As stray thoughts enter your mind during meditation sessions, gently release them (by mentally putting them in an imaginary bubble and letting them float away with your breath as you exhale, for example) and return your attention to your breathing. If you recall hurtful things that happened in your past, say a short prayer or affirmation (positive self-talk) indicating that you now release the person who has hurt you from punishment by you without condoning their behavior. Refocus your attention on your future life.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from 110 Strategies for Success in College and Life by Joan H. Rollins, Mary Zahm. Copyright © 2016 Mary Zahm and Joan H. Rollins. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse.
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Edition details

• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1524639966
• ISBN 13: 9781524639969
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 280