JumpStart Your Learning Tutorial: Making the Transition

   At the end of this section, you should be able to explain the difference between being a high school student and a university student.

Bloom's Taxonomy can be used to illustrate how learning at university is assessed and can help you understand some of the differences between what is expected of you in university and what was expected of you in high school.

Why Bloom?

Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist who categorized learning into several levels or domains. He suggested that learning is hierarchical, including both lower and higher levels, and that 'lower-level learning' is necessary before 'higher-level learning' can be achieved. The pyramid below helps to illustrate this hierarchy. For the purpose of understanding why learning in university is more demanding than learning in high school, as well as how your learning at university will be assessed, we have associated the 'lower-level learning' categories with high school and the 'higher-level learning' categories with university. Note, however, that this is not exclusively true because you probably have and will continue to experience learning at every level throughout your academic career.

In the activity below, drag and drop the definitions and place them beside the words they define.  Study the graphic and Reflect on the types of activities you might be engaged in at university that call on your ability to analyze, evaluate and create. Is it possible to accomplish these tasks without first mastering the lower-level learning concepts?

Source: Adapted from Bloom's Taxonomy by Patricia Armstrong, Vanderbilt University, released under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

  At the end of this section, you should be able to describe the expectations placed on you as a member of a scholarly community.

As an academic scholar, you will be expected to use analysis and evaluation to create and share knowledge through research projects (the higher-level learning skills of Bloom's Taxonomy). This interactive video describes what it means to be an academic scholar and a member of a scholarly community. There are quiz questions embedded in the video that will help you to meet the second learning outcome and will reappear in a self-assessment exercise at the end of the module.

   Listen Attentively and Click to Respond to the questions at each interval in the video.

Intervals are represented by  O . It is not possible to skip ahead in the video but you can rewind, using the icons beside the play button.

Source: Join the Scholarly Conversation by Kishwaukee College Library

  At the end of these sections you should be able to define your role as learner, help-seeker, community-builder and co-contributor.

Thus far, you have explored what it means to learn at university, be a member of a scholarly community and a contributor to scholarly conversations. This section explores the importance of becoming a skilled help-seeker.

Research suggests there is a positive correlation between 'academic help-seeking behaviour' and academic achievement¹. This means successful students have the ability to recognize when they need help and ask for help when they need it, but it does not mean, however, that successful students always ask for help. There are very few students who make it through university without ever asking for help and, by the same token, there are very few who do well if all they ever do is rely on others for help. Striking a balance between asking for help when you need it and helping yourself when you can is an important component of developing this skill.

The following questionnaire can help you determine where you are on the spectrum between always asking for help (Dependent Help Seeker) and never asking for help (Avoider). Finding yourself somewhere in between (Independent Help Seeker) is desirable. Independent Help Seekers are not afraid to ask for help when they need it. Independent Help Seekers also ask the right types of questions - questions that help them to solve problems on their own rather than getting others to solve the problem for them.

  Click the Start button and agree or disagree with each of the statements to discover the type of help seeker you are.

Source: All questions in this survey are reprinted from Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 108, Svetlana Komissarouk, Gal Harpaz, and Arie Nadler, Dispositional differences in seeking autonomy- or dependency-oriented help: Conceptual development and scale validation, Page 105, Copyright 2017, with permission from Elsevier and Svetlana Komissarouk.

Now that you have established the type of help-seeker you are, it is important to be able to find the help that you need,

For first year students, meeting the demands of academic life at university can be quite challenging. The secret to your success as an academic scholar is being able to understand what those demands are, and being willing to meet those demands by seeking out the help you need when you need it. The following supports are available on campus throughout the academic year to help you meet those demands.

Clicking thewill reveal information about each service.