CHAPTER 9
JOURNAL ACTIVITIES
How Motivated Are You?
How hard are you working this week to achieve your goals? If you had to estimate, how many hours per
day are you spending doing reading, assignments, and exam preparation per day? How many days out of
the week are you doing academic tasks outside of class? To be successful in college, you need to make
academics your top priority. What is your top priority right now? Are you willing to spend four to five
hours outside of class at least five days per week to achieve your goals? Are you willing to spend five or
more hours per day seven days a week to achieve your goals? Why or why not?
Evaluate Your Strategies and Your Motivation
Think about the strategies that you learned about in this chapter. Select the strategy that helped you the
most so far this semester. Briefly describe how you used the strategy in one or more of your classes.
How did it help? Did using the strategy increase your success? How? Did using the strategy increase
your motivation, too? Why or why not?
Take Notes on Different Textbooks
Choose one of your textbooks and take written text notes as you read the first ten pages of the chapter.
Then repeat the process with each of your other texts. What did you notice as you read and took notes on
each of your texts? Did taking notes improve your understanding as you read some of your texts? Which
ones? Why? Did you feel that you didn’t need to take notes on some of your other textbooks to
understand the material? Which ones? Why? What changes do you plan to make now that you have
experimented with taking text notes?
Experiment with Mapping Text Information
What was your reaction as you read the section on mapping in this chapter? Do you think you would
benefit from mapping the information in your texts? Why or why not? Read the next ten pages of each
of your textbook chapters and try mapping the information. Did you feel that mapping the information
helped improve your understanding as you read each of your texts? Why or why not? Did mapping help
you better organize the information than taking written text notes? Which method of taking text notes do
you plan to use for each of your textbooks this term?
Review Your Text Notes
Select a set of text notes that you took recently. Divide the notes into three sections. Review the first
section by reciting the information using the headings to prompt your memory for the details. Review the
second sections by replicating your notes—rewriting them from memory. Finally, review the last section
of notes by creating recall questions in the margin and reciting the answers from memory. Which review
strategy helped you learn the information? Write a paragraph or two describing what you found.