This section has encouraged you to gather evidence about yourself. This process of learning about yourself is put forward as being a useful first step in achieving personal change. It is also a process that has used skills that are useful in becoming a successful student. You will remember from our previous discussion that these skills can be described as ‘academic skills?.
The mind mapping activity above asked you to go back over what you have done in this section and produce a mind map. The next activity asks you to use this mind map.
Have a careful look at the mind map you created in Activity 26. Use this to pinpoint what academic skills you feel you have used ? remember that academic skills include any skills which help you to study. (Using your mind map in this way is a good way to check out whether it gives you useful information.)
Make a note of anything that you think might count as an academic skill. You can either keep this as separate list or add to your mind map.
If you want to, feel free to have a look back over other notes you have made or return to any part of this section.
It has already been pointed out that the skills of communication, problem solving and self-organisation are important for successful study. You can think about these as possible starting points, but you will get a more detailed picture of academic skills if you can break these down into things that you have actually done as you have studied this section. For example, if you use time management as a starting point you might say that you allowed time to read this section or make notes. Reading and making notes are the academic skills that you might add to your list.
You have used many skills that count as academic skills to study this section. You could include any of these:
One way to view Learning to change is as a small-scale research project which focuses on how you might go about personal change. Every academic research project goes through a similar early stage of accumulating evidence. This project has been about you and has involved gathering evidence from a variety of sources. You have used your own thoughts, feelings and experience as a source of evidence. You have also used the written and video materials that make up the unit. In addition you have been encouraged to gather evidence by seeking feedback from another person.
It is important to note that many of these so-called academic skills are similar to what we do in everyday life.
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