Striving for Excellence in College: Tips for Active Learning (2nd Edition) - Softcover

Browne, M. Neil; Keeley, Stuart M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130220582 ISBN 13: 9780130220585

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2000

Synopsis

This brief but comprehensive, reader-friendly book takes a practical, direct approach to teaching students of college—and life— how to be more effective learners. It offers useful, immediate tips that can be used every day in almost every learning situation. Containing numerous concrete suggestions that any learner can use to accelerate achievement in college and beyond, it also provides a model of what it means to take our minds seriously. Chapter topics include how to take charge of your own learning and avoid being entertained, mental habits that interfere with active learning, evaluating reasoning, asking questions and making sense of reasoning, and finding peers who respect active learning. For anyone who loves to learn, or wants to become more open to and capable of this process.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Takes a practical, direct approach to teaching students to be more effective learners by providing useful, immediate tips that can be used every day in almost every learning situation. It also provides a model of what it means to take our minds seriously.

From the Inside Flap:

PREFACE

We can all learn how to improve our mental performance. We wrote this book to help you become more like the learner you want to be—productive and engaged. Besides encouragement, what we have to offer are tips that skilled learners already know and use to their benefit. We want you to know them, too.

We have faith in your curiosity and desire for self-improvement. But you need specific guidance from experienced learners to move your natural inclinations along. Learning is a process that uses particular skills and attitudes to expand your awareness and appreciation. These skills and attitudes do not fall into place just because you go to school or get a little older. We all need teachers to give us the clues and strategies that will allow us to reach a point where we can feel confidence about our capability to learn on our own.

This book is a gift to you from two teachers who are your partners in learning. In fact, as we wrote the book, we found ourselves reminded of many tips that we needed to use more frequently as we, too, continue to learn. For example, we both get lazy at times just like any learner and forget to take careful notes when we hear a wonderful speaker, read a moving passage, or discover for the first time a creative scientific experiment. We included so many tips for learning that we guarantee you will find several that will jumpstart your own learning. We hope this is a book that you will want to keep as a reminder of the many ways in which you can be a better learner tomorrow than you are today.

The aim of the book is not just learning, but excellence in learning. By excellence, we do not mean some lofty goal that only a few geniuses can hope to reach. Instead, we mean steady improvement toward your learning goals.

As you read this book, latch onto those tips that seem especially useful to you. The book is full of helpful hints, but you are the best judge of which ones will be beneficial as you continue to learn. We wrote the book so that college students, regardless of their current abilities, would finish the book with an expanded ability to think and learn more effectively, both during and after college.

This second edition has benefited from the constructive criticism of a number of students and teachers who used the first edition as a guide to excellence in college. In response to their suggestions and our own re-thinking, we have made the following changes in this new edition:

More examples of the active learning that Striving recommends. Speed bump boxes that attempt to model how an active learner is always trying to think against the grain. Active learning boxes that suggest how readers can practice what we are urging. End-of-the-chapter web sites and supplemental reading. Additional tips for active learning. More emphasis on the joy of active learning.

With these changes and the help of our readers, old and new, we offer this celebration of the active learner.

M. NEIL BROWNE
STUART M. KEELEY

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0130220582
• ISBN 13: 9780130220585
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 127