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GLOSSARY
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).
Active listening: A type of communication in which the listener summarizes
and paraphrases what he or she has heard from another individual so the
individual feels that he or she has been understood.
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 establish -
ing norms of appropriate behavior.
Formulating skills: Group skills directed at helping members understand and
remember the material being studied.
Functioning skills: Group skills that involve managing and implementing the
group’s efforts to achieve tasks and maintain effective working relationships.
Hierarchies: An organization of ideas into levels and groups.
Information processing system: The cognitive structure through which infor -
mation flows, is controlled, and is transformed during the process of learning.
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