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Connections
Empowering College and Career SuccessSecond Edition| ©2019New Edition Available Paul A. Gore; Wade Leuwerke; A. J. Metz
Built around the most common issues faced in the classroom, LaunchPad for Connections, Second Edition gives students everything they need to prepare for class and exams, including author-developed digital tools linked directly to the eBook, the ACES student self-assessment (taken at the start and end of term), and our acclaimed LearningCurve adaptive quizzing. For instructors, LaunchPad offers everything they need to quickly set up a course, customize the content, prepare presentations and lectures, assign and assess homework, and guide the progress of individual students and the class as a whole.
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Know your strengths, grow with goals
Connections is an innovative program, built from the ground up with a growth-mindset approach to college and career success. Written by counseling psychologists Paul Gore, Wade Leuwerke, and A.J. Metz, Connections shows students from day one how to be learners, whose mindset, drive, and strengths will help them meet any challenge on their way to college, personal, and career success. The expertly designed program is firmly rooted in the most current research in positive psychology, using self-reflection as a tool for goal-setting; goal-setting as a tool for imagining one's potential; and imagining one's potential as the motivation for realizing it. Connections puts students at the center of their own personalized learning path, facilitates their purposeful choice of an academic and career plan, and develops all the skills they need--cognitive and non-cognitive, academic and life--to foster their self-growth and success.
Built around the most common issues faced in the classroom, LaunchPad for Connections, Second Edition gives students everything they need to prepare for class and exams, including author-developed digital tools linked directly to the eBook, the ACES student self-assessment (taken at the start and end of term), and our acclaimed LearningCurve adaptive quizzing. For instructors, LaunchPad offers everything they need to quickly set up a course, customize the content, prepare presentations and lectures, assign and assess homework, and guide the progress of individual students and the class as a whole.
Features
Firmly rooted in the concepts of positive psychology. The text encourages all students to develop their strengths, celebrate progress, and use setbacks as opportunities for growth. Positive psychology concepts are introduced in Chapter 1 and referenced continuously throughout.
Balanced and holistic coverage of important college success topics. Connections, Second Edition begins with a look at the foundational skills and mind-sets necessary for college success (critical thinking, goal setting, decision making, motivation, personal responsibility, learning, and time management), before providing comprehensive, balanced coverage of both academic and life skills. This holistic approach emphasizes the importance of both cognitive and noncognitive skills.
Integrates ACES prompts throughout the text. Starting on the first day of class, Connections, Second Edition helps students develop a thoughtful, strengths-based understanding of themselves through ACES (Academic and Career Excellence System), an online self-assessment that gives students, instructors, and administrators the data they need to succeed.
- Students take ACES at the start of their college success course to get a snapshot of their attitudes, skills, habits, and opportunities for improvement.
- Throughout the book, students have the opportunity to reflect on their ACES results and use text content to develop and strengthen their skills in each area. This enables Connections and ACES to work together as a unified system.
- New to the Second Edition, students can also take ACES a second time at the end of the term. By comparing these new results with their earlier ACES scores, they’re able to celebrate areas of improvement and identify areas for future growth.
ACES is available within LaunchPad for Connections, Second Edition, which can be packaged with the text or purchased on its own.
Prominent and practical coverage of critical thinking and goal setting.
- Chapter 2, Thinking Critically and Setting Goals, presents these essential skills up front in one cohesive chapter.
- Self-assessments and activities throughout the text encourage students to think critically about their work and themselves.
- Included at the end of Chapters 2-14, the Personal Success Plan (PSP) provides students with a structured platform for SMART goal setting and action planning. It encourages students to think metacognitively about the skills they develop as they set and achieve goals, and to consider how those skills might be useful in a future career.
A strong emphasis on college and career connections. A discrete section at the end of each chapter illustrates how chapter topics apply to the world of work; Chapter 13 on academic and career planning helps students begin creating their own personal roadmaps to success; "College Success = Career Success" activities at the end of each chapter further emphasizes the college/career connection; and an in-depth appendix focuses on conducting a job search.
Clear connections to students' academic and life plans.
- "Connect" prompts. Integrated throughout each chapter, these brief exercises encourage students to think about how the chapter’s ideas connect to their personal experiences, current coursework, career goals, and available resources.
- Voices of Experience narratives. Each chapter includes two Voices of Experience narratives—one from a student and one from an employee or employer. These first-person stories show the real-world effects of chapter concepts in the lives of college students and graduates.
A strong foundation in research. Research backs the authors’ guidance to students throughout the book, and the Spotlight on Research feature introduces original research to students in an accessible way.
Chapter Activities that reinforce key themes, prompt self-reflection, and strengthen skills. Each chapter concludes with four activities that instructors can assign as homework or use to prompt class discussion and student engagement.
- The Journal Entry encourages written reflection on a wide array of topics.
- Adopting a Success Attitude focuses on positive psychology concepts.
- Applying Your Skills helps students apply the skills they’ve learned in the chapter.
- College Success = Career Success helps students connect what they’re learning in college with skills they’ll need in their careers.
LaunchPad for Connections (available to be packaged with the text) drives student reflection and goal-setting with a powerful, state-of-the-art student self-assessment called ACES (Academic and Career Excellence System). ACES delivers a norm-referenced report in 12 key areas impactful for college success, so that students can see a realistic picture of their starting point, capitalize on their strengths, and set goals to improve in their growth areas. LaunchPad also features LearningCurve adaptive quizzing, a formative assessment that helps build confidence and mastery of the skills for success, as well as video case studies, which provide positive modeling for building self-efficacy.
A complete package of instructor and student support materials. Instructor resources include an Instructor's Manual, a Computerized Test Bank, lecture slides, classroom response questions, and an Instructor's Annotated Edition featuring suggestions for activities, discussion prompts, writing prompts, and further reading materials.
New to This Edition
ACES Progress Report. In addition to taking ACES at the beginning of the term, students can now take ACES a second time at the end of the term. By comparing these new results with their earlier ACES scores, they’re able to celebrate areas of improvement and identify areas for future growth. A new section in Chapter 14 helps students reflect on their scores, process the change that has occurred during the term, and think metacognitively about how different factors in their lives—including their decisions, actions, and experiences—have influenced their outcomes. A new capstone activity on LaunchPad further encourages this reflection and metacognition.
Greater focus on pairing information with action. Because information paired with action is what leads to positive change in students’ lives, a new ACES + Action feature appears at the beginning of Chapters 2-13, immediately after the “ACES Reflection” prompt. ACES + Action spotlights three active learning strategies related to the chapter topic that students can try right away to strengthen skills and apply their learning.
Even more goal-setting guidance for students. In this Second Edition, the authors have tweaked the steps of the Personal Success Plan (PSP) to provide even more guidance: Suggested goals are included in Step 1 to serve as inspiration and scaffolding for students, who tend to struggle with generating goals of their own; students then transform the general goal they’ve selected into a personally meaningful SMART goal in Step 2.
Updated Spotlight on Research boxes with refreshed visuals. New and updated Spotlight on Research topics in the Second Edition include “Behaviors and Attitudes Drive Your Success” (Chapter 1), “Grit Leads to Success” (Chapter 3), “Time Management: It Works!” (Chapter 4), “Longer Course? More Time for Distributed Learning” (Chapter 5), “Get Informed about Money” (Chapter 12), and “Understand Yourself Through Campus Engagement” (Chapter 13). Many of the charts and graphs accompanying the Spotlights have also been updated, and they are larger and more colorful in order to better illustrate key research results.
New Voices of Experience: Employers. The Second Edition includes a new category of Voices of Experience stories to further strengthen the text’s emphasis on the college/work connection: first-person profiles from employers who are directly responsible for making hiring decisions and helping employees build successful careers (see Chapters 1, 6, and 11). In a concrete and applied way, these profiles illustrate how students can use the skills spotlighted in the chapter to get a job and excel in a work environment.
New, updated, and reorganized text content.
- This Second Edition includes new and updated content on a variety of topics, including metacognition, multicultural competence and social justice, attribution theory, purpose, college expectations, managing student loans, self-care, and discerning the reliability of online sources.
- The chapter on organization and time management has moved from 5 to 4 in the new edition, since many instructors prefer to teach these foundational concepts early in the term.
- A fully revised learning chapter (now Chapter 5, Understanding Learning) includes a new section that introduces learning science and presents five evidence-based learning strategies that are useful for all learners. Students then think metacognitively about their own preferences for learning and discover techniques for excelling as multimodal learners in all environments—even those that don’t match their preferences.
- Chapter 13 now introduces career planning before academic planning to better reflect the sequencing in which this material is presented in many classrooms.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Building a Foundation for SuccessChapter 2: Thinking Critically and Setting Goals
Chapter 3: Motivation, Decision Making, and Personal Responsibility
Chapter 4: Organization and Time Management
Chapter 5: Understanding Learning
Chapter 6: Reading for College Success
Chapter 7: Taking Effective Notes
Chapter 8: Memory and Studying
Chapter 9: Performing Well on Exams
Chapter 10: Information Literacy and Communication
Chapter 11: Connecting With Others
Chapter 12: Personal and Financial Health
Chapter 13: Academic and Career Planning
Chapter 14: Celebrating Your Success and Connecting to Your Future
Appendix: Your Career Search
Authors

Paul A. Gore
Paul A. Gore
Paul’s efforts to promote college and career readiness, high school and college student persistence, and academic success are informed by more than twenty-five years of research, program development, implementation, evaluation, consulting, and teaching. Paul currently serves as the vice president of academic affairs and provost at Bellarmine University in Kentucky. Paul earned his Ph.D. in counseling psychology, with an emphasis in student career development, academic success, and transition, from Loyola University–Chicago. He has held academic and administrative responsibilities at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, ACT, Inc., the University of Utah, and Xavier University.
Paul’s work focuses on noncognitive and motivational determinants of academic and career success. In particular, he is interested in how secondary and postsecondary institutions use data describing the noncognitive strengths and weaknesses of their students to promote transition, engagement, student success, and retention. He regularly consults with secondary and postsecondary institutions in the United States and abroad on developing and evaluating student academic and career success programs.
Paul has authored more than fifty peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He is the past chair of the Society for Vocational Psychology and served as an advisory board member and journal editor for the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and was the recipient of a 2013–2014 American Council on Education Emerging Leadership fellowship.

Wade Leuwerke
Dr. Wade C. Leuwerke
Wade is a professor of counseling at Drake University. He earned his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. Wade has authored more than ninety journal articles and book chapters, as well as national and international conference presentations. One of his areas of research is the assessment and development of student and employee social and emotional skills. He has co-created several social and emotional assessment tools, including the Academic and Career Excellence System (ACES), that help secondary and postsecondary students to identify and build their skills. He works with faculty and advisers at the college level and school counselors at the high school level to integrate social and emotional data into their work with students.
Wade has experience examining school counselors’ roles and working with professional school counselors to positively impact students’ academic development, career and college exploration, and the acquisition of personal and social skills that will prepare them for college and life beyond. He has worked with dozens of secondary and postsecondary institutions on a range of factors related to student success and persistence, including evaluating institutional practices, using data to drive student interventions, creating individualized student success plans, training, strategic planning, allocating resources, and collaborating to promote student success.

A. J. Metz
Dr. A.J. Metz
A.J. is a tenured faculty member and serves as associate chair of the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Utah. She directs the master’s program in school counseling and the Positive Psychology Certificate Program. She also coordinates the Strategies for College Success courses in which ACES and the Connections textbook are used.
A.J. earned an M.Ed. in vocational rehabilitation counseling and a Ph.D. in urban education (specialization in counseling psychology) from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She studies the cognitive and noncognitive factors related to academic success, career readiness, and retention in underrepresented and underserved student populations such as first-generation college students, women in STEM, college student athletes, and college student veterans.
A.J. has extensive teaching, counseling, and career advising experience in high schools, community colleges, and four-year public and private institutions of higher education. Her passion for teaching motivates her to experiment with innovative teaching methods and to develop new and engaging activities and instructional materials. She has received the University of Utah’s Early Career Teaching Award, the College of Education Teaching Award, and the Celebrate U – Showcase of Extraordinary Faculty Achievement award. She is the past president of the Utah Psychological Association and serves on multiple state-level task forces and advisory councils promoting school based mental health services, college access and equity, and career readiness.
Instructor Resources
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Paul A. Gore; Wade Leuwerke; A. J. Metz | Second Edition | ©2019 | ISBN:9781319131890
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