Becoming a Strategic Thinker Developing Skills for Success

This book addresses the biggest issues facing those readers who are in a learning environment today: dealing with the flood of information in all courses and in the culture in general, and learning the most important information to do well in their endeavors. It shows readers how to becomestrategic thinkers, thereby enhancing efficiency in decision-making about accessing and processing information.The goal of this book is to help you understand how you canthink better, and the topics covered will help you reach that goal. It covers the eight skills necessary to become a strategic thinker: analysis, evaluation, induction, deduction, grouping, synthesis, abstracting, and persuasive expression.A book for anyone who wants to learn to better organize their thoughts and develop more efficient problem-solving techniques.

Have any of the following things ever happened to you? You are in a course and nothing seems to make sense to you. You just can't seem to get started learning the material. You spend many hours reading an assigned book or article, yet when you finish it you can't remember much of anything important that you just read. You study much more than other students, yet you earn lower grades than they do. When you hand in an exam, you are confident that you knew all the material that was tested, and you are convinced you have earned a good grade. But when you get the graded exam back, you see that points are marked off, and you did not do nearly as well as you expected. When your professor goes over the answers you wrote on a test, you are frustrated because you feel you knew the material but were not able to express it well in your answers.We all have experienced these things from time to time. Education is a continuing challenge, and at times students may get frustrated that they are not learning much, especially when they are working hard. If these experiences happen more than you would like them to, then you need to take some steps so that they won't continue to occur in the future. The best way to position yourself so that you will encounter more rewarding experiences instead of frustrating ones is to become astrategic thinker.Strategic thinkers are people who are able to make good decisions quickly about which information is most important and which can be ignored. They are able to catalog information in their mind effectively so they can retrieve it when they need it. Strategic thinkers are able to see the big picture--about the world, their place in it, and how education will improve their place. With all this as context, they know how to transform information into knowledge effectively and efficiently.This book is not going to teach you how to think. You already know how to do that. You have made many good decisions and accomplished much already. You have significant abilities or you would not be in college. But you can always get better--if you did not believe that you could strengthen your abilities even more, then you would not have made the sacrifice to enroll in college.My goal with this book is to help you understand howyou canthink betterby becoming a strategic thinker.You will strengthen your ability to reason moreeffectivelyfor yourself and depend less on the media and other people telling you what to think. You will learn to think moreefficientlyso that you can get greater rewards for the same amount of effort you have been putting into your courses. By becoming a strategic thinker, you will be able to solve problems in course assignments as well as in life more quickly and with more confidence. HOW TO BECOME A STRATEGIC THINKERIn order to become a strategic thinker, you need two things. First, you need someguidance;second, you needcommitmentto working on exercises that will strengthen your skills and build up your knowledge structures. This book will help you with both of these tasks.In the chapters ahead, you will develop a set of eight skills that are the core tools for strategic thinking. In Chapter 1, you will see how strategic thinking is a powerful way to meet the challenges presented by the flood of information in our culture and in higher education. In Chapter 2, you will see that there is a core set of eight skills that strategic thinkers use as their primary tools when they encounter information and try to make sense of it. You will also learn how these skills are used to build knowledge structures. In Chapter 3, you will find out what your current knowledge style is and learn how to work from your basic knowledge style to become more of a strategic thinker.The next eight chapters present each of the eight skills of stra