Highway to Success
The WHAT? The WHY?
And HOW TO DO IT!
Copyright © 2008 Kathryn S. Atman, Ph.D.
Presentation Agenda
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Program Description/Research
The Conative Domain: A useful classification “niche” for
developing self-regulation skills.
The Executive Function: Contribution of MRI research on the
brain to understanding maturational development.
The Program Sequence/Skills: Study Skills, Health Fitness,
Communication Skills, Organization/Planning Skills, Executive
Function Skills/Process, Managing Time/Stress, Career
Orientation/Leadership.
Program Mechanics
LIFE’S CHALLENGE
for EACH STUDENT IS:
• TO FIND OUT WHAT HIS/HER TALENTS AND ABILITIES
ARE, AND
• TO LEARN THE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS NEEDED TO
MAKE THE BEST USE OF THE TALENTS AND ABILITIES, IN
ORDER TO BE READY
• TO GRADUATE FROM BASIC EDUCATION AS COMPETENT,
CONFIDENT, RESPONSIBLE YOUNG ADULTS.
How do we “make this happen”?
 By providing an academic program that is intellectually
challenging.
 By helping students develop appropriate social skills (for
example, getting along with others and respecting self and
others).
 By supporting each student’s natural development toward
self-management and maturity.
Highway to Success is
Research-Based
 Across nine research studies at the middle and high school
levels, academic achievement has been shown to be
significantly related to seven specific goal-oriented behaviors.
To become an academic achiever, a student needs to
develop and use these seven skills:
1. Have a long-range goal.
2. Be aware of what is going on around and within you.
3. Set short-range goals.
4. Organize.
5. Don’t procrastinate.
6. Make it happen.
7. Finish what you start.
Goal Orientation Index (GOI)
Research
 Data from nine studies were collected using the Goal
Orientation Index, a 96-item self-report instrument that
provides an individual with a profile of his/her goal
accomplishment style. (Atman, 1986)
 In each of the nine studies, significant differences in 7
out of 12 skills were found between the profiles of
achieving students with a GPA of 3.25 and above and
non-achieving students with a GPA of 1.99 and below.
Goal Accomplishment Style
 A student who takes the GOI can receive a profile of his/her
goal accomplishment style based on his/her responses to the
use of 12 goal-oriented skills.
1. Recognize need, problem, challenge, opportunity.
2. Set goal.
3. Brainstorm alternatives.
4. Assess risks.
5. Select strategy (be decisive).
6. Visualize how a project will be when it is completed.
7. Organize.
8. Make it happen.
11. Evaluate
9. Don’t procrastinate.
12. Have a purpose, a long-range
10. Finish what you start.
direction.
What the Profile Reports
 The twelve skills imbedded in the GOI mirror the 12 steps in
an entrepreneurial planning model that incorporates both
problem-solving and decision-making skills.
 The twelve skills have been classified as: Acting, Planning, or
Reflecting behaviors.
 The profile provides a graphic “picture” of relative strengths
and weaknesses in each of the 12 skill areas. This data is then
used as the basis for setting goals directed toward improving
the rate of goal accomplishment.
Implications of a GOI Profile
 A student’s profile shows individual “scores” in each of the 12
skill areas. It also makes possible the examination of
behavioral patterns related to goal accomplishment. For
example, a student’s low scores in all four of the skills found
in the “Planning” sub-scale would suggest that immediate
attention to the skills in that area could have a measurable
impact on the student’s academic grades.
 The profile data “paints a picture” of the student’s use of the
12 goal-oriented skills. In this way, “seeing helps believing.”
Conation Defined:
“[When] we say we are trying, striving, endeavoring, paying
keen attention, making an effort, working hard, doing our
utmost, exerting ourselves, concentrating all our energies;
in technical terms, we are manifesting conation.”*
*McDougall, W. 1932.The Energies of Men. NewYork: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
A Recipe for Success
• Making an effort.
• Working hard.
• Concentrating all our energies.
These are the behaviors associated with striving and volition
found in the Conative Domain: an appropriate learning
partner in any classroom.
Four Psychological Domains
that Operate in every classroom.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Cognitive Domain
Knowing
Affective DomainValuing
Psychomotor Domain Using Motor Skills
Conative Domain
Striving and Activating Volition
Highway to Success sequence will integrate these four domains
of psychological behavior in the classroom.
The Conative Domain:
An Old (but New) Idea
 In the 1700’s Scottish and German Faculty Psychologists
thought that the mind had three faculties: cognition,
knowing; affection, valuing; and conation, striving and
volition. These ideas lasted well into the twentieth century.
 Behavioral psychology, with its emphasis on data derived
from measurable, observable behavior replaced conation as
the preferred approach to understanding motivation.
 MRI research has documented the frontal cortex as the
“center” for the development of striving and volitional skills.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
(MRI)
has become
The Great Discoverer
• MRI research has pinpointed the location in the brain where
the development of goal-oriented skills can be found.
Where are these skills developed?
 In the frontal cortex, right behind the forehead.
 The frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to be
developed.
 Skills developed there are known as the “Executive Function”
of the brain.
 These skills are Processing Skills, and they are related to
Striving & Volition.
What is the Executive Function?
 “Executive Functions can be thought of as a diverse group of
highly specific cognitive processes collected together to
direct perception, emotion, cognition, and motor activity,
including mental functions associated with the ability to
engage in purposeful, organized, strategic, self-regulated,
goal-directed behavior.”*
*McCloskey, G. 2007. “Executive Skills and Learning. Self Regulation
Executive Functions. Definitions, Observed Behaviors, and Potential
Interventions.” in Proceedings, Learning and the Brain Conference, Cambridge,
MA,11/17/2007.
Executive Function Skills
Skills associated with the Executive Function include:
 Setting goals
 Making plans
 Selecting actions
 Holding information in mind
 Monitoring behavior
 Inhibiting inappropriate behavior
 Doing two things at once (Multitasking)
Why should educators understand how
the Executive Function works?
• When young people graduate from high school, they must be
able to set goals, plan, and manage themselves if they are to
move into the world of work or higher education with
success.
• The place to learn these skills is in school.
Executive Function Skills
Related to Academic Achievement
 Decide to do science homework (using an appropriate study

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
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skill) after dinner.
Decide where to do it (at the desk in my room).
Think of it when dinner is over.
Go straight to my room and start.
Do not stop to watch the TV program in the living room.
Remember to feed the fish at 8:30.
Highway to Success:
The Program Sequence/Skills
The Program sequence gives students a chance to develop and
practice Executive Function skills throughout their
educational experience:
Each step in the sequence focuses on core needs:
 Grade 6 Study Skills
 Grade 7 Health Fitness
 Grade 8 Communication Skills
 Grade 9 Organization/Planning Skills
 Grade 10 Executive Function Skills/Process
 Grade 11Managing Time/Stress
 Grade 12 Career Orientation/Leadership
Highway to Success Mechanics
1. Basic Study Skills
2. Assignment Calendar
3. Backward Planning
4. Setting Goals
5. Monitoring Student Progress
1. Basic Study Skills
 Be organized.
 Use time wisely.
 Be prepared for class.
 Listen in class.
 Take good notes.
 Use an outline or mapping technique.
 Study for tests and quizzes.
2. Assignment Calendar
• Every week, students can record assignments in each of their
classes.
• Recording assignments, however, is not enough.
• The fundamental challenge found in H2S is to help students
take charge of their own learning behaviors by completing
each assignment and turning it in on time.
This means that . . .
The teacher’s challenge is to connect with each student to:
• Convey respect and the belief that the student can, in
fact, do the work of learning.
• Indicate a willingness to walk beside the student to
provide support while the student does the hard work
of learning.
3. “Backward Planning”
• Backward planning involves recording due dates (when tests,
quizzes, papers or projects are “due”) on a special calendar so
the student can see how they cluster.
• By seeing how the due dates cluster, students can use time
management skills to “plan backwards” to get everything
done–on time.
4. Setting Goals
• Students set specific goals at the beginning of each nine-week
grading period.
• Goals must be reasonable, feasible, and able to be
accomplished during the grading period.
• The process is monitored by a teacher/coach.
The Teacher as a Coach
• Maturational development (i.e.: students taking personal
responsibility for their own behavior) can not be ordered to
take place from the outside-in. It must be fostered from
inside-out.
• The first, and most important, step is to connect with the
student.
• When students are encouraged by a teacher acting as a coach
to set goals and manage their own behavior, they will rise to
the challenge and do it.
Coaching Assumptions:
 The brain is developmental.
 The last part to develop is the frontal cortex.
 The frontal cortex “houses” the Executive Function.
 Being developmental, each individual is scheduled to develop
Executive Function skills in his/her own timeframe.
 Being developmental, some students develop skills associated
with striving and volition earlier than other students do.
 For those students who need extra help as they develop these
skills, teachers, acting as coaches, can build a scaffold of
support as students wrestle with the essential life task of
metacognition: thinking about their own thinking.
Metacognition:
An “essential ingredient”
 “Thinking about one’s own thinking” requires a monumental
leap in one’s capacity for abstract, focused, preventionoriented thinking about oneself. It not only enables us to
evaluate what we have done in the past but points us to what
we can/should/must do in the future.
 Metacognition “is important enough to stand out as one of the
essential ingredients of any act of skillful thinking.”*
* Swartz, R., Costa, A., Beyer, B. Reagan, R., and Kallich, B. 2008. Thinking-Based
Learning. Activating Students’ Potential. Norwood, MA: Christopher-Gordon Publishers,
p.23.
Options for implementation
 Whole school adoption by providing time for the program by taking 5 minutes from
each classroom period one day a week to create a 35-minute extra class period.
 Whole school adoption by utilizing existing time allocated for homeroom or activities
periods.
 Utilizing the program to address problems associated with the transition from either the
elementary to the middle school or from the middle school to the high school.
 Utilizing through a Learning Support program.
 Integrating into an existing Study Skills class. (Middle school level)
 Incorporating into a 4-year senior portfolio program. (High school level)
 Using the Highway to Success program as a supplement in an existing guidance or
alternative education program
You’re on the Highway to Success:
When students learn how to set goals, plan, and manage
their own behavior, they are well on their way toward leaving
their K-12 experience in basic education as:
Competent, confident, responsible young adults, ready to
become problem-solvers and decision-makers in our society.