Keys to College Success

Book excerpt: Keys to College Success is an established first year experience textbook, designed for use with students taking courses related to the college transition and student success, and featuring a tried-and-true college-career-life connection and emphasis on thinking skills and problem-solving. This ninth edition adds a COVID-19 update -- a ten-page frontmatter section with up-to-the-minute information on digital and distributed learning as well as wellness and self-management strategies in the time of COVID-19. Update topics include synchronous and asynchronous learning elements, navigating technology and course websites, coping with stress in a time of crisis, and more. This text is build around a risk and reward theme, showing students how risking action to grow, thrive, and contribute can lead to the rewards of learning, meaningful employment, and community involvement. Inspiring case studies open and close each chapter and show how a real person faced and surmounted a challenge by taking a calculated risk. Thinking skills coverage is another text-wide framework; comprehensive content with research references lend credibility and perspective to concepts, targeted exercises that explore personally relevant situations in context, and sustained focus throughout each topic. The text is tailored to the four-year program experience; acknowledging global economic change and instability, Keys to Success frames the four-year college experience in practical, work-relevant ways even as it supports the value of a liberal education. New coverage of resources, topics, and research, including work by Robert Sternberg, Carol Dweck, and Martin Seligman, support concepts. The twelve chapters cover all major student success topics -- adjusting to college; goals, time, and stress management; emotional and physical wellness; personality and learning preferences; critical, creative, and practical thinking; reading, research, and writing; note taking, memory, and studying; test taking; people, resources, and opportunities; planning for career success; mathematical and financial literacy; and diversity and communication. Exercises and features incorporate coaching language and intent, building accountability for the student, guiding the student to create personally relevant work, and asking powerful questions that encourage reflection and the development of self-knowledge.