Motivation and Learning Strategies for College Success: A Self-Management Approach

Academic self-management : The strategies students use to control the factors influencing their learning.

Acronyms : Mnemonics that use the first letter in each word of a list to form a word (e.g., SMART goals).

Attention : A selective process that controls awareness of events in the environment.

Attribution : An individual's perception of the causes of his or her own success or failure.

Chunking : Grouping of data so that a greater amount of information may be retained in working memory.

Cognitive : Explanations of learning and motivation that focus on the role of the learner's mental processes.

Concentration : The process of continual refocusing on a perceived stimulus or message.

Diagrams : A visual description of the parts of something. Distributed practice: Learning trials divided among short and frequent periods.

Elaboration strategies : Integration of meaningful knowledge into long-term memory through adding detail, summarizing, creating examples, and analogies.

Encoding : The process of transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory.

Fermenting skills : Group skills used to stimulate academic controversy so that group members will challenge each other's positions, ideas, and reasoning.

Forming skills : Group skills needed for organizing the group and establishing norms of appropriate behavior.

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