Communication & Thinking Basics
The person who will read, hear, or view your message.
What is audience?
The process of connecting new information to prior knowledge.
What is encoding?
A calendar showing all major deadlines for the entire semester.
What is a semester calendar?
The three stages of reading for academic texts.
Before reading, during reading, after reading.
Thinking about your own thinking and learning.
What is metacognition?
The formal style of communication used in school and professional settings.
What is academic language?
The memory system where all thinking and processing happens.
What is working (short‑term) memory?
A weekly tool that helps students see fixed responsibilities (work, class, etc.).
What is a weekly schedule?
Writing thoughts, questions, and reactions in the margins of a text.
What is annotation?
The lowest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
What is remembering?
Paraphrasing is different from quoting because of this key reason.
Paraphrasing uses your own words, while quoting uses the author’s exact words.
The act of pulling information out of long‑term memory.
What is retrieval?
Planning tasks by breaking them into smaller steps and working backward from the due date.
What is backward planning?
What should students do immediately after finishing a section of reading?
Summarize in their own words.
The highest level of Bloom’s Taxonomy, involving the creation of new ideas.
What is creating?
A judgment reached through reasoning and evidence.
What is a conclusion?
Why can’t the brain multitask two cognitive tasks at the same time?
Because working memory can only process one cognitive task at once.
Why is estimating time inaccurately a major challenge for students?
Because it leads to poor planning, procrastination, and rushing.
Why does previewing help before reading?
It activates prior knowledge and prepares the brain for what’s coming.
A tool that visually shows how concepts and ideas relate to each other.
What is a concept map?
A student writes an academic email using slang and emojis. Which communication principles are they ignoring?
Audience awareness, medium, and word choice.
A student rereads a chapter three times but still doesn’t remember it. Which cognitive issue explains this?
Passive learning kept information in sensory memory without processing into long‑term memory.
Create a study plan using a semester calendar + weekly schedule + weekly planner. Explain how all three work together.
Semester calendar shows major deadlines, weekly schedule shows available study blocks, weekly planner schedules specific study tasks.
A student reads an entire chapter without remembering anything. Using the three reading stages, what should they have done differently?
Explain how a student can use metacognition + Bloom’s levels + concept mapping to better prepare for exams.