Essential Unit 1 & 2 Concepts
How the Brain Works & How Learning Happens
Study Strategies & Time Management
Mindset, Motivation & Grit
Goals, Elaboration & Approaches to Learning
100

The person who will read, hear, or view your message.

What is audience?

100

Connecting new info with what you already know.

What is encoding?

100

What are the three stages of reading strategies?

 Before reading, during reading, after reading.

100

 Believing abilities can grow with effort and practice.

What is a growth mindset?

100

A desired future result that someone plans and works to achieve.

What is a goal?

200

Putting an author’s ideas into your own words.

What is paraphrasing?

200

The memory stage where all thinking and problem‑solving occur.

What is working memory?

200

A calendar that shows deadlines for the entire semester.

 What is a semester calendar?

200

Motivation that comes from internal satisfaction or personal meaning.

What is intrinsic motivation?

200

Name one difference between a performance goal and a learning goal.

Performance focuses on outcomes/grades; learning focuses on mastery and understanding.

300

The practice of pulling information out of long‑term memory.

 What is retrieval?

300

Gaining knowledge or skills through experience, study, or being taught.

What is learning?

300

A learning tool that visually shows the connections between concepts.

What is a concept map?

300

The persistence to achieve goals despite difficulty.

What is grit?

300

 Expanding on ideas, explaining details, and making connections is called this.

What is elaboration?

400

Why is multitasking with two cognitive tasks impossible?

 Working memory can only process one cognitive task at a time.

400

What is metacognition?

Thinking about your thinking and monitoring your learning.

400

Why is backward planning helpful for large assignments?

 It breaks tasks into manageable steps and prevents procrastination.

400

Why do people with a fixed mindset avoid challenges?

They fear failure will reveal a lack of ability.

400

Identify the three approaches to learning.

Surface, strategic, and deep approaches.

500

Why is highlighting alone a passive learning strategy?

It keeps information in sensory memory without processing or encoding.

500

 A student reads a whole chapter and remembers nothing. Which learning science principle explains what went wrong?

They did not engage working memory → information never encoded into long‑term memory.

500

Explain how using a weekly schedule + weekly planner together improves learning.

Schedules show fixed commitments, planners show when work will be completed, supporting self‑regulation.

500

A student believes they “just aren’t good at math.” Give two specific strategies for shifting to a growth mindset.

  • Reframe mistakes as     learning opportunities
  • Focus on effort,     strategies, and progress—not ability
500

A student wants to move from a surface approach to a deep approach. What two actions should they take?

  • Engage in active     learning strategies (summaries, connections, retrieval)
  • Focus on understanding, not memorizing, and     connect concepts across chapters
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