Enroll in Academic Success with Dolphin STEM Academy
Course Overview
This one-semester elective course is intended as a practical, hands-on guide to help
you improve your study habits and enhance your prospects for academic success, now
and in the future.
This course is not divided into units and doesn’t have pretests by which you can earn
credit. Instead, it is designed to help you improve your study skills regardless of your
skill level at the time that you take the course. It is structured into lessons and Course
Activities as follows:
• The first five lessons are about specific aspects of studying. Before and after these lessons,
you will assess your study habits in two Course Activities.
• The last three lessons focus on writing as a process and using that process to write a
research paper. The lessons are followed by a Course Activity in which you will submit a
research paper.
You will submit the Course Activity documents to your teacher and will check your own
answers in the Lesson Activities that accompany each lesson. Each lesson also has an
online threaded discussion and a multiple-choice mastery test. A multiple-choice
end-of-semester test completes the course.
Because this course is designed to help you improve your academic effectiveness, you
are encouraged to use it in direct conjunction with other classes you are taking. For that
reason, if you would benefit from a different way of sequencing the content to better
support your academic needs than the order in which it is presented here, you are
encouraged to work with your teacher or other administrative personnel to adapt the
course content as needed. For example, if you are writing a research paper early in the
semester, you might want to take the last three lessons earlier in the term.
The Course Activities (submitted to the teacher) and the Lesson Activities (selfchecked)
are a major component of this course. They will guide the majority of the
learning that you will do for this course as they ask you to assess your current ways of
studying, make plans for improving them, and report on the results of the changes you
have made.
Course Goals
By the end of this course, you will have done the following:
• Explored the strengths and weaknesses of your study habits and experimented with and
adapted them to improve your effectiveness, especially in the following areas:
o the conditions in which you study and the methods you use for taking and processing
notes, for preparing for tests, for managing time effectively, and for maintaining balance
between your social life and your study life
o the process by which you write a research paper to avoid getting stuck, to showcase
your thinking and research, to maintain an appropriate focus and scope, and to
accurately keep track of the citations you need to attribute the ideas of others to their sources
• Increased your awareness of how you learn and how you can adopt your study habits and
ways of organizing a piece of writing to meet changing needs over your lifetime.
• Increased your awareness of what obstacles keep you from achieving greater academic
success and strategies for overcoming them.
