Academic Success Training (AST) Workshops

During the Spring 2008 semester, workshops will be held every Wednesday at 11am and repeated on Thursday at 4pm. If you are unable to attend due to a conflict with your class schedule, please contact our office to arrange an individual meeting. The topics that will be discussed are listed in the boxes below.

Time Management I
Let us help you organize your academic workload. We will begin this two-part series by handing out a Time Monitoring Worksheet that you will bring back completed for Part II. This worksheet will give us critical information that we will use when we build your actual plan. We will also begin to draft long-term goals and consider the steps we will need to take to help us accomplish our goals.

Time Management II
This workshop is a continuation from the previous week. Bring in your completed Time Monitoring Worksheet and the goals you began in Time Management I as well as all of your syllabi and your planner. We will use all of these materials to devise a study schedule for the semester that fits with your goals and lifestyle. And if planners don't work for you, we can talk about other options that might be more appropriate to your personality.

Reading Strategies
Have you ever read down to the bottom of a long page of text and realized you weren't paying attention? Or maybe you were paying attention, but there was so much information on that page that you couldn't tell what was really important? Reading strategies are helpful tools that train readers to process the material as they take it in so that they really understand what they've read. Join us for this workshop and be more efficient with your reading time.

Surface versus Deep Learning
Are you responsible for material that is "a mile wide and an inch deep" or "an inch wide and a mile deep?" What you do to be successful in those two situations is very different. In this workshop, we will talk about how to figure out the depth of understanding your professor expects and how to match your study strategies to that level.

Note Taking
Taking notes in class is more than just showing up with paper and pencil - there are actually three steps involved in good note-taking. This workshop will explore each of those steps and will offer helpful hints you can use to make your notes into valuable test-prep material. Bring in your own notes and apply some of the ideas immediately.

Learning Styles
Are you a visual learner? Do you learn better if someone explains things to you? Or are you a more hands-on learner that needs to work with things to really understand them? In this workshop, we will talk about how each of us learns best, and how we can capitalize on that strength. We will also talk about how we might adapt to the instructor's teaching style if it doesn't match our preferred learning style.