Learning Success Center
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Your PrepStep Account
This resource is available for free to all members of the Jefferson State Community College. For assistance in setting up your free account, use the link above!
Why do you have to register?
- Users have access to a variety of educational resources from our interactive, online learning platforms.
- Users must create personal accounts in order to save their work in progress, store score reports, and revisit any practice tests, tutorials, or eBooks.
- Registration only requires a valid email address and a password.
- Your email address will become your username and will be used for password reset, if needed.
Smarthinking
Smarthinking is available to all Jefferson State English and Math students. View the brochure for additional information.
Smarthinking's tutors work with students online using a virtual whiteboard. Students can also submit questions offline at anytime and a tutor will respond within 24 hours.
Reading Skills Review
In college, it’s crucial that you know how to uncover the facts and opinions presented in the material you read for class — and how to form your own opinions about it. Follow the following four steps to gain the strategies and skills you need to become a better reader:
- Start off with Reading Skills Tutorial 1. First, take the pre-test, which will show where your strengths and weaknesses lie when it comes to reading. Work your way through the tutorial for a full skills tune-up, or pick and choose the lessons based on the weak points identified in your pretest results. When you’re finished, take the post-test, which will show you how far you’ve come. You’ll also receive a study plan that guides you back to the topics where you might still need work.
- Strengthen your skills with practice sets based on three common types of reading material: informational (newspaper articles, news reports, and other fact-based writing), literary (novels, short stories, autobiographies, and more), and persuasive (opinion pieces, political writing, and other material that tries to convince you of certain a point of view). Make sure to review the answer explanations to the questions you got wrong or weren’t sure about — often you’ll learn the most by seeing why an answer is right or wrong.
- Next, tackle Reading Skills Tutorial 2, which includes slightly more challenging passages. By the end, you should have a good grasp of the core reading skills needed at the college level.
- Finally, download one or more reading skills eBooks for additional tips, guidance, and practice questions, or use the books and texts from your classes to practice your new skills. You’ll be surprised by how much more you understand, remember — and enjoy — what you read.
- Core English Skills Review [PrepStep]PrepSTEP™ is a dynamic online learning platform that is packed with powerful resources for self-guided skill building, supplemental development materials to help you strengthen your core English skills.
Recommended resources for boosting reading skills
- Words: The Foundation of LiteracyFor teachers, administrators, and education students, a fresh, inspiring reminder of why studying language—from word origins to word structure—is such a vital first step in the development of students'vocabulary, literacy, writing skills, and overall ability to learn..
- Dictionaries & ThesauriImprove your vocabulary with online dictionaries and thesauri from Credo Reference Online. Special topics from contemporary English usage and style to slang and rhyming.
- Academic WritingHow do I improve my essay writing skills? Where can I learn quickly how to improve my speech writing? How does writing for the web differ from conventional writing? Are there some categories of mistakes that people commonly make in attempting to write good prose? How can I be persuasive in my writing style? How did language evolve? What is ‘genre theory'? How do I become creative in my prose writing? These and other curious and relevant questions are answered in Academic Writing.
Streaming Video to Improve Reading Skills
- Reading ImprovementReading rate and comprehension can mean the difference between success and failure to students. Three strategies for improving both are presented in this program.
- Reading EssentialsWith simple methods for tackling an immense volume of content, this program helps students manage workplace reading tasks quickly and efficiently without overlooking important information. art of the series Communication Essentials.
- Why Reading MattersHuman beings were never born to read. This program seeks to understand how the brain, which has evolved no hardwired “reading center,” made the leap to literacy; why reading well-crafted writing is so profoundly important to intellectual and emotional development; and whether the Internet, with its blogs and videos and games, is placing novels—a prime type of reading material for nurturing the capacity for empathy—at risk.
- Last Updated: May 24, 2023 10:07 AM
- URL: https://library.jeffersonstate.edu/LSC
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