Personal qualities that support academic success

Students who have the following personal qualities are much more likely to thrive in college.

• Self-awareness and self-acceptance

• Proactivity as opposed to reactivity

• Perseverance

• Skill in setting short and long-range goals

• Use of effective support systems

• Strong emotional coping strategies

Understanding a student's rights in college

Individuals with special learning needs are guaranteed special supports in elementary and high school by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. However, in college, no such guaranteed protections exist. Therefore, students need to work congenially with colleges to obtain reasonable accommodations that will facilitate their success.

It is best to have psychological and/or educational testing that was completed less than 3 years before applying to college because colleges usually demand recent testing to support a petition for accommodations.

Students will need to inform the college of their educational needs by registering with the office on campus that is in charge of reviewing and granting accommodations. This office goes by names such as Disabled Student Support Services or Office of Special Services.

Typical "reasonable accommodations" that colleges may decide to grant include:

• Extra time to take tests

• Providing a note taker

• Taking tests in a separate room

• Test read orally to the student and/or the student's answers transcribed or typed

• Use of tape recorder to record lectures

• Tutoring services (some colleges have tutoring geared for students with special needs, however, most colleges have tutoring available to all studentscheck both sources)

• Taking a reduced class load

• Requesting "full-time" status for purposes of qualifying for health insurance when taking a reduced course load

Instructors and professors have the power to make decisions that can help students be more successful. The following are some modifications a student may be able to negotiate on a case-by-case basis:

• Obtaining the instructor's permission to modify an assignment or getting extra time to complete the assignment

• Asking for advice about selecting classes or instructors

• Asking the instructor to award an incomplete rather than an "F"but be aware of the college policy in regard to "clearing" the "I"

Action steps a student should take to build a solid college support network:

• Think through what kind of support you'd like to have from your parents and friends and express your needs before you go to college

• Think about the kind of academic support you'll need (for example, will you need tutoring) and make plans to set this up

• Don't suffer in silencespeak out, reach out when you need to

• Get professional, trained help when you need it: tutors, doctors, etc.

Self-advocacy steps

Successful students understand themselves well. They know their strengths and they have developed ways to minimize the effects of their weaknesses. They also have a clear idea of their short-range and long-term goals, and are committed to meeting these goals.

These self-advocacy steps will help students obtain the supports they need, not only from others but from themselves as well!

• Have a clear plan to graduate in a certain time frame and set your schedule to realistically accomplish this plan

• Logically plan the kind of support you need to give to yourself!

• Meet with your teachers regularly

• Don't wait until things get bad to see you need a different approach; if it isn't workingtry another approach

• Pause, think and reflect before diving inavoid the "Opps! and regret"

• Remember: resistance and avoidance stunt maturity; meet challenges had on and don't be afraid to make mistakes

• Evaluate and think through setbacksthey are the teachers of success!

• Success is a consistent mindset that says "I can do this, I will do this!"

• Everything goes better when you get enough sleep and eat more healthy foods

• Plan ahead on how to manage stress, loneliness, and change

• Seek balance in all thingsacademics, relationships, pursuit of interests, career development, spiritual growth

• Seek out stabilizing forces (people, classes, work experiences, living arrangements, etc.)

• As soon as you identify a problem surfacing in a class, figure out how to remove it from your path

• Make better time estimates; after you figure out how long you think it will take you to do what you need to do, multiply that by as least 150%

• Keep your long-term, personal goals front and center in your mind, guiding you through the tough times!

• Reward yourself for meeting your deadlines and achieving your goals!

Study Skills

Students who master study skills and use their strengths to learn succeed in college. Try these tips:

• Set up a realistic study schedule and keep to it!!!! Don't let spontaneity ruin your completion of college

• Frequently review and critique your study approaches to find what is working and emphasize that

• Don't put off the "boring" or unpleasant tasks; doing so will leave you unprepared and can destroy your grade; find a way to see the value it brings to you as a person or as a professional

• Take frequent, short breaks when your attention fades

• Keep a calendar and an assignment book; record all due dates, test and quiz dates, etc. and schedule study/work sessions by backward planning

• Work with classmates who are strong students and stay on track

• While reading, stop frequently to retell the main idea and details in your own words

• As you read, take notes, jot down questions and related ideas, and make mental pictures of the material to increase your comprehension and retention

• Read the material before you go to the lecture; bring notes or an outline and fill in added material as you listen

• Ask for clarification in class if you miss details; increase your concentration during difficult listening situations

Source: http://www.edarticle.com/article.php?id=838

Like it? Share it!

By; Michelle R. Davis

Arizona's Vail school district is the kind of customer that gives big textbook publishers pause.

The 12,000-student school district swapped out printed textbooks for digital material in 2006, but students aren't using e-textbooks. Instead, the district collects instructional materials the way a teenager creates a song playlist, taking digital content from various places, often for free. Meanwhile, for a fee, the Vail district shares its electronic library of resources with 68 partner districts across the state.

"We are not beholden at all to the big textbook publishers," says Superintendent Calvin Baker. "We used to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in the textbook cycle, but we don't do that anymore."

The push continues for school districts to move away from paper textbooks and toward digital curricula and e-textbooks. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan urged educators last year to move quickly to adopt digital textbooks and materials. Also last year, the Federal Communications Commission and the Education Department released a report, the "Digital Textbook Playbook," which provided a blueprint for schools to make the shift.

Florida, for one, has already adopted legislation requiring districts to spend half their instructional-materials budgets on digital content by 2015-16, and other states are considering legislation promoting digital textbooks.

In this atmosphere, big textbook publishers must change their strategies and they must do it quickly, educators say, to provide schools with the innovative digital material they're seeking. This flux is also occurring as districts in nearly all the states must consider their textbook needs in light of the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and math.

And how do the big textbook publishers today plan to meet the new demands? Interviews with officials of the "big three"London-based Pearson, New York City-based McGraw-Hill Education, and Boston-based Houghton Mifflin Harcourtsuggest they're taking different approaches. They're developing new products, and new methods for educators to use those products, that they hope will help them keep customers and expand their market shares by doing a better job meeting the needs of districts like Vail.

Pearson is moving aggressively into the digital-content market, says Luyen Chou, the chief product officer for K-12 technology at Pearson Education. In 2011, the company purchased SchoolNet, a New York City-based company that creates personalized education software, and where Chou was the chief product officer. More recently, Pearson invested $89 million in Nook Media, the Barnes & Noble e-reader subsidiary. The company generated a third of its sales from digital products and services in 2011.

Chou says Pearson's strategy is to create a technology platform that allows for digital content to be distributed to educators. The platform will be content-neutral so the digital curricula it will share with Pearson customers may not necessarily have been created by Pearson content specialists, and it may even be free. Chou says there's a new role for Pearson in curating and organizing electronic content and using its own experts to vouch for quality, particularly when it comes to open, or free, educational resources.

In addition, Pearson says it is trying to break away from the way digital content is being used now. "What we've done to date is use digital technology to still support a pretty traditional direct-instruction model," Chou says. "We're going to see our digital instructional content look less like glorified PDFs."

That means embedded assessments, video-gaming strategies, interactivity, and student-collaboration tools built in, he says. The company is also developing a digital common-core basal curriculum, designed specifically for tablets. It's Pearson's first comprehensive curriculum created for tablets and the company may not even produce a print version. The curriculum will feature activity-based approaches, small group work, and hundreds of manipulatives and simulations.

"It will be born digital," Chou says. "It's very cool stuff."

A pilot version will be released in 2013, he says.

Bite-Size Content

At Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bethlam Forsa, the executive vice president of content development and publishing operations, says the company is working to break digital content into bite-size pieces. "Don't refer to our curriculum as an e-textbook," she says. "That has the connotation that it's a book, but this content is going to be highly modular."

The company is aiming to slice and dice standards-based digital curricula into the smallest teachable units and offer them across any type of technology or device, she says. That content will be adaptive, she adds, and will have the ability to personalize technology for different types of learners with many options for a variety of learning styles.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has already headed in that direction with its Fuse math products, available as an app on the iPad, with assessments and interactivity built into the digital content. Future material will be even more adaptive, Forsa says.

That means that if a student is more of a visual learner, he or she can access the curricular material in better ways through video or graphics. If gaming seems to resonate with a student, those techniques will be accessible. New digital content and products will track where a student is in his or her learning progression and be able to prescribe the next step, Forsa says.

The company's World History iBook, available for the iPad, is another indication of where the company is headed. It emphasizes multimedia, containing video, interactive diagrams, and maps built into the curriculum, Forsa says. In addition, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is working on ways to promote digital curricula across subjects. A given learning object might satisfy a standard in social studies as well as one in language arts, for example.

"We've got to think of this in a holistic way," says Forsa, "and a digital medium allows us to do that."

Blending Print and Digital

But Stephen Laster, McGraw-Hill Education's chief digital officer, says it's important to recognize that many school districts still are not ready to go totally digital.

"Digital is clearly the future, but we're in this blended world, where digital and print are really what our teachers are using today," he says. "McGraw-Hill doesn't think you should throw out the way education has been done and start from scratch."

The company is not seeking to create a learning-management platform or get into the device business, Laster says. Instead, McGraw-Hill will focus on developing its own content, making it adaptive and personalized for students, and putting more effort into developing data dashboards to organize information for teachers.

The company last year acquired Key Curriculum, a math technology company based in Emeryville, Calif., in an effort to invest more heavily in the data that digital curricula can help collect about how students learn. McGraw-Hill is integrating its own digital offerings with those of Key Curriculum, featuring math-visualization software, data-analysis tools, and data-visualization applications.

Games and simulations will also play a larger role in McGraw-Hill's digital content, building on the company's current iBook textbooks, which feature built-in assessment "probes" to track student progress and help teachers determine how a student should review or move forward through the curriculum. New products will also be able to track a student's time spent on tasks and have the ability to see how a student moves through the learning environment. The goal is to allow students to take a variety of paths through digital curricula based on their own learning styles.

Beyond those changes, McGraw-Hill is partnering with learning-management-system companies to provide content that aims to ensure that learning taking place outside of school through online learning is just as high quality as face-to-face instruction.

Educators say they're looking forward to the more interactive, digital curricula and technological approaches the big textbook publishers are pursuing.

But they say the publishers need to change their business models to better meet the needs of K-12 schools.

"What we consider as a textbook is actually dead right now, though it might take a few years before the rest of the world realizes it," says Jay McPhail, the director of instructional technology for the 44,000-student Riverside school district in California.

Publishers need to stop thinking of the majority of their offerings as proprietary, he says, and reconsider selling content as a large e-textbook package. The idea of offering a smaller learning object, or small chunks of curriculum, is more relevant, and digital content should give students the ability to rearrange that content according to their own learning styles, for example.

"The technology potential there is huge, but the big publishers can't stay alive the way they're structured now," McPhail says.

'Shaping Better Products'

Mary Jane Tappen, the deputy chancellor for curriculum, instruction, and student services for the Florida Department of Education, says that as districts in her state transition to digital curricula, schools want to pull the very best content from multiple sourcessome they might buy, the rest might be free.

"We're moving away from one book per content area per grade per student," she says. With digital capabilities already in development, Florida will be able to track what pieces of content are the most successful with students. Tools providing a rating for pieces of digital content will be visible on each teacher's desktop, allowing the teacher to sort the material by standard and the best rating.

Tappen compares the process to that of the online retailer Amazon, which allows customers to rate and search products.

Tammy McGraw, the director of educational technology for the Virginia Department of Education, says one way for big textbook publishers to figure out what K-12 educators want and need is to work more closely with teachers and administrators.

Several years ago, as iPads were just starting to be used in schools, McGraw says, she approached the major publishers and asked them to think about how to deliver textbooks through a browser. Some publishers ended up partnering with the Virginia department to convert their print textbooks to apps, and both educators and publishers learned a lot about what students liked and didn't, says McGraw, and about the difficulties in digitizing print textbooks.

Students, for example, didn't like to use the browser on the iPadthey wanted the textbook to be accessible using an app. Students liked the interactive media and the electronic note-taking and highlighting features, and they loved to quiz themselves and do assessments on the fly. Many of those features ultimately became integrated into the products offered by the publishers, according to Tammy McGraw.

The process taught McGraw that textbook publishers play an important role, even in an age when a lot of digital curricula is free.

"Just because you have these tools that allow you to technically produce [curricula] doesn't mean you do a great job putting it together," she says.

But educators need to play a role and realize that each new technology development means a change for publishers. "We expect that right out of the gate they're going to deliver something perfect," McGraw says. "We have to do more to develop opportunities to give feedback to publishers, and we need to assume responsibilities for shaping better products."

Source: http://www.edweek.org/dd/articles/2013/02/06/02textbooks.h06.html?tkn=UNMFofq%2BLkWwEL1NbPxZYnYPRh7T0vu9bJIW&cmp=clp-edweek

Like it? Share it!

WASHINGTON (AP) We know a lot about how babies learn to talk, and youngsters learn to read. Now scientists are unraveling the earliest building blocks of math and what children know about numbers as they begin first grade seems to play a big role in how well they do everyday calculations later on.

The findings have specialists considering steps that parents might take to spur math abilities, just like they do to try to raise a good reader.

This isn't only about trying to improve the nation's math scores and attract kids to become engineers. It's far more basic.

Consider: How rapidly can you calculate a tip? Do the fractions to double a recipe? Know how many quarters and dimes the cashier should hand back as your change?

About 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. lacks the math competence expected of a middle-schooler, meaning they have trouble with those ordinary tasks and aren't qualified for many of today's jobs.

"It's not just, can you do well in school? It's how well can you do in your life," says Dr. Kathy Mann Koepke of the National Institutes of Health, which is funding much of this research into math cognition. "We are in the midst of math all the time."

A new study shows trouble can start early.

University of Missouri researchers tested 180 seventh-graders. Those who lagged behind their peers in a test of core math skills needed to function as adults were the same kids who'd had the least number sense or fluency way back when they started first grade.

"The gap they started with, they don't close it," says Dr. David Geary, a cognitive psychologist who leads the study that is tracking children from kindergarten to high school in the Columbia, Mo., school system. "They're not catching up" to the kids who started ahead.

If first grade sounds pretty young to be predicting math ability, well, no one expects tots to be scribbling sums. But this number sense, or what Geary more precisely terms "number system knowledge," turns out to be a fundamental skill that students continually build on, much more than the simple ability to count.

What's involved? Understanding that numbers represent different quantities that three dots is the same as the numeral "3'' or the word "three." Grasping magnitude that 23 is bigger than 17. Getting the concept that numbers can be broken into parts that 5 is the same as 2 and 3, or 4 and 1. Showing on a number line that the difference between 10 and 12 is the same as the difference between 20 and 22.

Factors such as IQ and attention span didn't explain why some first-graders did better than others. Now Geary is studying if something that youngsters learn in preschool offers an advantage.

There's other evidence that math matters early in life. Numerous studies with young babies and a variety of animals show that a related ability to estimate numbers without counting is intuitive, sort of hard-wired in the brain, says Mann Koepke, of NIH's National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. That's the ability that lets you choose the shortest grocery check-out line at a glance, or that guides a bird to the bush with the most berries.

Number system knowledge is more sophisticated, and the Missouri study shows children who start elementary school without those concepts "seem to struggle enormously," says Mann Koepke, who wasn't part of that research.

While schools tend to focus on math problems around third grade, and math learning disabilities often are diagnosed by fifth grade, the new findings suggest "the need to intervene is much earlier than we ever used to think," she adds.

Exactly how to intervene still is being studied, sure to be a topic when NIH brings experts together this spring to assess what's known about math cognition.

But Geary sees a strong parallel with reading. Scientists have long known that preschoolers who know the names of letters and can better distinguish what sounds those letters make go on to read more easily. So parents today are advised to read to their children from birth, and many youngsters' books use rhyming to focus on sounds.

Likewise for math, "kids need to know number words" early on, he says.

Mann Koepke agrees, and offers some tips:

• Don't teach your toddler to count solely by reciting numbers. Attach numbers to a noun "Here are five crayons: One crayon, two crayons..." or say "I need to buy two yogurts" as you pick them from the store shelf so they'll absorb the quantity concept.

• Talk about distance: How many steps to your ball? The swing is farther away; it takes more steps.

• Describe shapes: The ellipse is round like a circle but flatter.

• As they grow, show children how math is part of daily life, as you make change, or measure ingredients, or decide how soon to leave for a destination 10 miles away,

"We should be talking to our children about magnitude, numbers, distance, shapes as soon as they're born," she contends. "More than likely, this is a positive influence on their brain function."

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/03/25/math-skills-predicted-early/2018461/

Like it? Share it!