From the Instrustructor's Resource Manual to accompany this text

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The Master Student Guide to Academic Success has been written and designed to help students succeed in one of the most important endeavors that they will ever undertake: their college careers. The execution of this journey is not always easy, yet its navigation and successful completion can determine the course of a student's life for years to come. Whether making the transition from high school to college student to working professional or balancing the conflicting demands of family, work, and school, students often need advice, direction, and support. We hope The Master Student Guide will help to provide these. In addition, you, as an instructor, teacher, or professor, can play an important role in guiding and supporting a student through this undertaking. The Master Student Guide can be one of the tools that you use to help your students to successfully accomplish their academic journeys.

The Guide provides a unique structure and features to help students and professors achieve these goals. The book is tabbed throughout, and each tab provides students with a quick summary or reference of the key concepts introduced in the corresponding chapter. This allows students to find the topics they are searching for easily. In addition, this tabbed page can serve students as a review sheet to brush up on material without having to read an entire chapter. Each chapter also contains checklists that provide students with places to interact with the text, allowing them to participate as active learners in the new concepts that they have studied. Further, frequent sidebars and examples are used throughout the text to provide students with additional ways to apply these skills throughout their college courses and in other areas of their lives. Examples of sidebars include: Ways to Set Priorities (Chapter 6); Ways to Evaluate Your Notes (Chapter 15); and Reduce Fear of Public Speaking (Chapter 25). Finally, students are encouraged to apply the skills from each chapter directly to other courses they are taking as well as to their own lives through "Experiment with a Strategy from This Chapter." This excellent resource is found at the end of each chapter. Students are encouraged to complete these exercises in the space provided in the text. These features allow you and your students to tailor this book to the unique needs of your courses and their lives. As a result, the Master Student Guide can be used as a main textbook, ancillary supporting book, primary resource support, or reference guide. You can choose to cover all of the chapters or quickly and easily select the ones that most directly relate to the needs of your classroom situation.

Although the primary focus of the lives of college students is, or should be, academics, most students cannot shut out all of the other parts of their lives in order to concentrate only on their academic success. Many students will be away from their homes and families for the first times in their lives. They may feel lonely or insecure. Many students will have to work while in school. Some students may have families to support or care for. They must try to balance these conflicting demands on their valuable time. Some students may face social pressure to participate in unhealthy or dangerous behaviors. In addition, students may experience a volume and/or level of academic work that is new to them. The simple management of time and balance of conflicting demands can be difficult challenges for them to overcome.

Therefore, The Master Student Guide to Academic Success addresses a student's academic success in the context of the whole student. Though the Guide develops skills in the traditional areas of note-taking (Chapters 11-15), outlining (Chapter 14), active reading (Chapter 9), research (Chapters 20-21), test-taking (Chapters 18-19), and many other essential topics, it also examines decision-making (Chapter 5), creative idea generation (Chapter 4), learning styles and cycles (Chapter 2), successful student interaction (Chapters 1-2), as well as many others. In addition, as The Master Student Guide explains and teaches its lessons, it is cognizant of the fact that if a student is healthy, he can learn better and more efficiently. It understands that a student who is not distracted can focus more fully. It knows that it is normal to feel overwhelmed sometimes in college or to have low self-confidence in the face of a subject that is difficult to master. The Guide understands that a student who believes in herself can achieve more.

As you and your students work toward their academic success, the Guide attempts to teach yet at the same time enable students to understand that life seldom presents the ideal environment and conditions for academic discipline. While The Master Student Guide presents the academic skills needed for success in college, it also hopes to help students understand that conflicting priorities will be encountered, multiple demands will be made on their time, less than ideal influences will be met, and unhealthy habits will be developed. Yet it offers guidance to overcome all of these challenges, maintain focus on study and course work, and ultimately achieve success in one's chosen area of study.

Finally, while the primary focus of The Master Student Guide to Academic Success is the achievement of success in the student's pursuit of higher education, it is understood that the skills and strategies developed to meet these challenges can also provide both professional and personal benefits. It is from this viewpoint that the Guide is written. It makes frequent reference to the benefits of a healthy, well-adjusted personal life and to the advantages gained by a responsible, organized, and well-managed professional life. The Guide never focuses only on college life. It hopes to convince students that the strategies, skills, and habits that are outlined and taught within its chapters will help students in all areas of their lives. For example, when strategies to enhance creativity are discussed in Chapter 4, the text not only addresses college papers and projects, but it also explains the ways in which enhanced creativity can solve problems at work or a different perspective may help to resolve a difficult personal problem. When time management is discussed in Chapter 7, the text not only explains its strategies in the context of college courses, but it also points out that when time is well managed, one has more time (or at least some time if one is a busy student) to pursue enjoyable personal activities. The Master Student Guide also advises that it is essential to make some time for these personal activities in order to relieve stress, ensure one's emotional well-being, and, ultimately, achieve academic or professional success.

By working to develop those areas that will help students to achieve academic success, but also by using a whole-life context in which to address a student's college career, it is hoped that students will be able to more fully relate and appreciate the purpose, strategies, and lessons developed in The Master Student Guide to Academic Success. It is often a struggle to ensure that students use the books they purchase. We believe that the academic/whole-life conceptualization of the Guide; its unique structure as reference guide and/or textbook; its distinctive use of tabs, checklists, sidebars, and the like; and its consequent utility will make it both desirable for students and attractive to instructors. Ultimately, we believe that the more useful the Guide is, the more likely a student will be to use it.

Overview of Text

There are many different types of professors and instructors. With this comes different teaching methodologies, ways to set up and structure a course, and avenues and methods by which to deliver course content and knowledge. And, of course, students are diverse in their learning styles. One of the greatest strengths of the Master Student Guide to Academic Success is its flexibility. The text itself can serve many different purposes: as a main textbook, as an ancillary resource, as a reference guide with no main text required, or as a suggested reference guide.

As a Textbook
The Master Student Guide to Academic Success is comprehensive in its selection of the topics that students need to master in order to achieve academic success. It is well suited for use as a primary textbook in a traditional College Survival, Student Success, or first-year course. All necessary topics, including chapters on the cycle of learning (Chapter 1), creativity (Chapter 4), and research (Chapters 20 and 21), provide the professor with ample material for a traditional credit-bearing, textbook-driven college course. The Master Student Guide, along with this Instructor's Resource Manual, provide extensive lecture material, topics for discussion, exercises, activities, quizzes, and references for additional material that can be used to expand and supplement each chapter.

As a Supplemental Text
The role of the Master Student Guide is not limited to that of main textbook. Given its unique format and structure, it is also ideal for use in other ways, such as an ancillary guide to a main textbook. Chapters and topics, as well as exercises and activities, can be assigned selectively and independently to supplement another textbook that is used as the primary vehicle for classroom lecture and course structure. Meanwhile, the Master Student Guide is still available for the student to use as a resource if she needs help in an area that might not be covered by other lecture material or course work, such as Making Effective Presentations (Chapter 25). The Guide's easy-to-use structure and accessible style and tone, especially with the tabbed format, make it an attractive resource guide for students to use to supplement individual weaknesses or gaps in their skill levels.

As a Resource Guide
In still other instances, some instructors prefer to teach a College Success or First Year Seminar course without a textbook. Given the nature of the subject matter, the use of the course as a bonding experience for students, a focus on building student self-confidence and self-esteem, and even the use of the course as a retention tool, some professors choose to structure their courses on their own and develop campus specific content. It is often difficult to find a single textbook that encompasses these diverse areas in a single title, thereby providing further incentive for an instructor to teach such a course without a primary text. In these cases, the Master Student Guide can serve as a useful and powerful resource guide to support the professor's individually created and textbook-free curriculum. Individual topics, chapters, and activities can be identified easily and assigned separately to supplement the instructor's own lessons when needed. Or the Guide can provide individualized support for a single student or a group of students whom the instructor has identified as deficient in some area or who themselves feel are insecure in a particular skill area.

As a Reference Guide
In addition, the Master Student Guide may be used by a professor simply as a suggested independent reference guide. The book's many essential and easily found topics within its well-organized and tabbed structure make it an excellent source of support for a student to have available when he encounters academic problems or difficulty. Although a professor may choose neither to lecture directly from any of the chapters nor to formally assign any of the exercises or activities in the Guide, he can recommend the Master Student Guide for Academic Success to his students so they have a source of academic support readily available at all times. In this way, a student will always have easy access to note- and test-taking skills (Chapters 11-15, 18-19), time management techniques (Chapter 7), exercises for creativity enhancement (Chapter 4), ways to relieve math anxiety (Chapter 29), and many other topics that help to overcome obstacles to academic achievement.

So far, the Master Student Guide has been discussed as a tool in the teaching of a fairly traditional College Success or First-Year course. There is no doubt that this guide can serve as an excellent textbook or reference guide for a course of this type. The objective of such courses, as well as one of the primary objectives of this book, is to provide an orientation to college life and to provide the skills necessary to achieve academic success. Therefore, the Master Student Guide is entirely appropriate and highly recommended for these courses. However, its unique structure, independence of topics, tabbed format, and well-organized layout and design give this book great flexibility for use in many additional situations encountered in the world of higher education.

For Major-Specific Courses
The flexibility built into the Guide by giving students the ability to easily select independent topics for study makes this book an excellent choice for a reference guide as well as a textbook. This greatly expands the potential uses for this title. For example, the Master Student Guide could be used as a suggested or required reference guide for major-specific courses. In this context, it becomes an important source of information for students who discover personal deficiencies in some area that inhibit their performance in their course work at any time in their academic careers. An instructor in these courses would seldom take class time to address these individual challenges, and some students might be too intimidated to admit their frustration and deficiency and, therefore, not seek the help that they need. The Master Student Guide would be a valuable resource to guide students through these difficult academic areas. Any professor could feel confident that her students would be able to easily use this guide as a first resource to help them to overcome obstacles encountered in many of their courses.

For Learning Communities
In related circumstances, many courses are now linked together as part of learning communities. That is, for example, common themes or topics are taught across several courses to a common group of students in a given semester. Although these courses and "communities" are clearly designed to enhance the academic experience for students and promote educational success, there are some students who still might encounter difficulty in the classroom or with the material taught. Yet a support structure to deal with the deficiencies of individual students that are not easily apparent may not be readily accessible. Nor would the instructor necessarily be able to accommodate such deficiencies with increased classroom attention when so much course content must be covered. Here again, the Master Student Guide makes an excellent resource to help students meet such challenges and avoid being left behind.

Learning communities, as described earlier, can be developed and used anywhere within a two- or four-year college curriculum, and the Master Student Guide is an appropriate resource tool to support learning at any time. However, often a group of courses within a student's first semester in the first year of college are grouped or linked together in order to provide an enriched learning experience, a supportive environment, and a situation in which the students have the opportunity to connect and establish meaningful relationships with each other. Some college programs do not offer or require a full College Success or First Year Experience course. And if such a course is offered at an institution, it is almost certainly included in this type of early learning community in order to help promote success. The Master Student Guide clearly becomes an important tool in either situation.

If a specific College Success course is not part of the learning community of classes, then the Guide becomes a principal source of reference for professors to use and recommend to students in situations in which they need additional help and guidance during their first year. If an actual College Success or Survival course is part of the learning community, then the Master Student Guide becomes an integral part of the curriculum. The text is written across the curriculum, including sections on research (Chapters 21-22), presentations and public speaking (Chapter 25), organization (Chapter 7), generating ideas (Chapter 4), decision-making and problem-solving (Chapter 5), math anxiety (Chapter 29), and many others. Obviously, just as academic content is taught across classes in these learning communities, so too these skills are important across the linked curriculum. The Guide offers an accessible, easy-to-teach, and easy-to-use tool for instructors in both the First Year Seminar class and the other academic courses within the learning community. The Guide allows the skill and support topics described within to be easily connected to the academic content in each of the linked courses. It fits neatly into the purpose of the learning community: to enhance and increase academic success through a focused and linked approach.

For Orientation Programs
The classroom structures described previously can be characterized as the more traditional, full course-length (or nearly so) types, including those within the learning communities. By this time, it is clear how the Master Student Guide to Academic Success can very effectively serve as a textbook within these courses or as a primary reference guide supporting them. However, there are many other less traditional first- year and academic support structures in which the Guide can serve an equally important and effective purpose. Some colleges do not offer their College Success course as a full semester-length course, but instead utilize another structure, such as a summer orientation session or a brief (three- to eight-week) first-year orientation program within the student's first semester or term. Due to the ease with which topics, activities, and exercises can be found (using the tabbed format), selected, rearranged, and skipped over, the Master Student Guide is an excellent resource for these programs in which a select amount of focused material needs to be covered. At the same time, the student has a text to take with him for his own use and review that clearly explains the topics that could not be covered within the program. And, of course, the Guide serves as a reference book for use whenever a student needs additional help or encounters a new academic problem.

For Workshops
Some colleges and universities continue to provide support for their students beyond their first-year experience and throughout their academic careers. They often do this through workshops targeted to specific student-centered areas, such as career development, test-taking strategies, resumé writing, creative thinking, leadership, and many others. The Master Student Guide can support many of these workshops as well by providing an excellent source of easy-to-find information. In addition, the text provides several activities for each topic that would be appropriate for use in a workshop setting. Furthermore, upon completion of the workshop the participant has a guide to take with him for review of the material that was covered, for future reference of all included topics (which can contribute to academic, personal, and professional success), or for use at future workshops. Perhaps an entire series of workshops could even be developed around The Master Student Guide to Academic Success. Students could participate in those workshops that cover topics of interest to them or in which they feel they need a quick refresher and at the same time take away a reference guide that allows for additional independent review and help on topics that might be needed in the future but were not covered at the workshop that they attended.

For Online Courses
The Guide's easy-to-use structure and accessible style also make it a good fit for an online course structure, where more intimate student/instructor contact is less frequent, or not present at all. With minimal guidance, students are able to find the information they need on the vast range of topics present in the text. For additional support specifically in the area of online learning, the Guide is easily paired with E-Learning Companion by Ryan Watkins and Michael Corry (Houghton Mifflin Company, ©2005). Ask your sales rep about packaging these texts together for your course.

For Nontraditional Students
Finally, we have not yet specifically addressed the subject of the nontraditional adult learner who makes up an increasing percentage of college students. This segment of the college population is diverse, often attends college part-time, is usually employed either full- or part-time, may have increased family responsibilities including children to care for, and includes students at different levels of academic preparation. Two characteristics are clear: the adult learner has many responsibilities, and he has been away from the classroom and the world of education for some length of time, from a few years up to several decades. These students have different needs than those of traditional, eighteen-year-old first-year students.

At the same time, colleges and universities do not always provide these students with the same type of first-year support that they do traditional students. Nontraditional students often attend college part-time or in evening or weekend programs. Given their personal and professional responsibilities, they often attend accelerated programs. It is often believed that the lives and schedules of these students leaves little room to accommodate traditional College Survival programs. As a result, topics that are often essential for academic support and success are left to an orientation evening, voluntary workshops, or worst of all, never offered to the adult learner. Yet, in many ways, this group of students faces the highest risk of not achieving its academic goals.

The Master Student Guide to Academic Success is an obvious resource for the adult learner. First, it includes the nontraditional student in its audience. It addresses the challenges, responsibilities, and demands placed on their lives. It incorporates the need for all students to balance many different aspects of their lives while focusing on the achievement of academic success. It references specific examples of situations faced by the nontraditional adult learner, thereby allowing him to identify with the challenges faced by those pursuing higher education. It clearly and specifically includes the adult learner and works to make her a part of the education process by referencing and representing her unique responsibilities and challenges. And it offers specific suggestions and strategies for overcoming her particular obstacles and achieving academic success.

Second, the Master Student Guide is an excellent textbook or resource guide for an orientation program, First-Year Experience (FYE) workshop, or College Survival seminar. Unfortunately, the adult learner will most likely experience his College Success studies in this format instead of a semester-long, traditionally structured FYE course. The format of the Guide allows for its easy adaptation to this purpose. The professor conducting the seminar chooses only the chapters and activities that specifically support the material that he covers in the seminar. Meanwhile, the student has a resource to take with her from the seminar that can be used to reference any topics that she needs that were not covered in the orientation seminar and to use to support her learning throughout her college career.

Finally, in cases where no College Success or FYE seminar of any kind are offered for the nontraditional learner, students can use the Master Student Guide as a comprehensive reference guide to support their academic studies. The Guide is structured and organized for quick and easy reference. It is comprehensive and includes all areas that will affect a student's academic success. It is clearly written, easy to understand, and also easy to use independently in order to manage time efficiently, balance conflicting responsibilities, develop the skills needed to achieve academic success, and continue on to a satisfying career after college.

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