Page 118 - Keys to College Success

■ How do you manage your environment where you live? Do you prioritize order
and neatness, comfort, entertainment, something else?
■ With which instructors, friends, and family members do you connect easily? With
whom is the relationship more of a struggle?

Even with just this basic array of details about who you are, you can see that you
have more potential to succeed in certain settings and situations than in others. This
chapter will increase and focus your self-knowledge, giving you more ability to realize
your potential in favorable situations—and will improve your ability to make the most
of less favorable circumstances. Personality and Learning Preferences
Exploring Learning Preferences

You are born with particular learning preferences that combine with effort and envi- LEARNING PREFERENCE
ronment to create a “recipe” for what you can achieve. In this case, the term preference A way in which a person most
refers to how your brain naturally tends to function. Part of this recipe comes from effectively receives and
how you perceive yourself, which is affected by many factors and develops over time. processes information.
Self-perception is strongly influenced by how others see you. Maybe your mother
thinks you are “the funny one” or “the quiet one.” A grade school teacher may have
called you a “thinker” or “slacker,” a “go-getter” or “shy.” These labels influence your
ability to set and achieve goals, and can prevent you from taking productive risks if you
use them to define yourself too rigidly. Even as you accept that some truth lies within
your labels, realize that you are not simply stuck with them. At any age, intelligence can
grow when you work to keep learning.
Picture a bag of rubber bands of different sizes. Some are thick and some
thin; some are long and some short—but all of them can stretch. A small rub-
ber band, stretched out, can reach the length of a larger one that lies
unstretched. In other words, with effort and focus, you can develop what-
ever raw material you start with, perhaps beyond the natural gifts of
someone who makes no effort. As you’ll see when you learn more
about John at the end of the chapter, his story illustrates how far
effort can stretch a person’s natural abilities.
As you gather important information about yourself throughout
this course, the understanding you build will improve your vision of
where you are now, your projection of where you can go, and your toolkit of
strategies for coping with all kinds of situations as you make progress. There may be
much about yourself, your surroundings, and your experiences that you cannot control.
However, with self-knowledge, you do have control over how you respond to circum-
stances. Get ready to define your rubber band and work to stretch it to its limit.

Use Assessments to Make Choices and to Grow

Ask yourself: Who am I right now? Where would I like to be in five years? Assessments
POTENTIALS
focused on how you prefer to learn and interact with others can help you answer some of Abilities that may
these big questions. Whereas a test attempts to identify a level of performance, an assess- be developed.
ment, according to professor and psychologist Howard Gardner, is “the obtaining of
information about a person’s skills and potentials . . . providing useful feedback to the
person [emphasis added].” Think of an assessment as an honest exploration that will
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produce interesting and helpful information.
The assessments in this chapter provide questions to get you thinking about your
strengths and challenges. Note: Learning disabilities are specific, diagnosed issues that
differ from the learning challenges that all students face. They are discussed at the end
of the chapter.
The two assessments in this chapter—Multiple Pathways to Learning and the Per-
sonality Spectrum—will give you greater insight into your strengths and weaknesses.
The material following the assessments shows you how to maximize what you do well
and compensate for challenging areas by making specific choices about what you do

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