WRKlemm Smashwords Amazon Category:  Education/Training Publisher: Benecton Press ISBN-10:  B004XRCF04 Type: Non-Fiction Copyright: 2010 ISBN-13: 9781452462172 Price: $2.99 (eBook) 20 practical ways to improve learning and memory capability. Oriented toward college students and adult learners.  All 5 star reviews. Only a few books can change a person's future. This is one of them - after all, it took 60 years to write.   This new e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort, explains the learning tips and tricks that I used to become valedictorian, when my high school teacher said my IQ did not justify the high grades I was making. It was also predicted I "would have trouble with college." Really? I went on to be an Honors student in three universities -- including graduating with a D.V.M. degree, and securing a PhD in two-and-a-half years. It was not that I was so smart - I studied smart.    In this new book, I share what I have learned about student learning over 47 years as a professor. I believe that poor learning skills are what hold back most students from superior achievement. This book can change a person's life, as my own experiences with learning how to learn have changed my life.   The ideas in the book will also help working professionals who want to become more competent and competitive.   The book presents 20 key ideas, in breezy, bang-bang-bang style. Access to information can be found at http://thankyoubrain.com. All e-reader formats are supported, including pdf for reading on computers.  It only costs $2.49.    Excerpt One-try Learning You are smarter than a rat. Right? Hmmmm ..., consider this: A rat can learn a lot of things with just the first attempt. For example, put a rat or mouse in a tub of water and it will swim around desperately hoping to find some escape. If there is a platform at one end it can climb up on, the rat, once it sees it, swims immediately to the platform and climbs up on it. If there is some kind of indicator of where the platform is, such as a light above it, and you fill the tub with a milky liquid where the platform cannot be seen, an untrained rat swims around until it accidentally finds the platform. Take the rat out, put it in the home cage, and re-test the next day, and the rat swims immediately to where the light and the safe platform are. Learning has occurred in just one try. In all such learning situations there is one huge caveat. That deals with what happens immediately after the one-try learning. If some new learning situation occurs at that time, the learning will be disrupted and not formed into a lasting memory. For example, the water maze-trained rat will not form a memory if immediately after the learning the investigator puts the rat in another learning situation or even in just some distracting situation, such as putting the rat into a cage with strange rats rather than returning it to the home cage. Re-testing the next day will indicate that the rat never learned. Actually, it just forgot because new stimuli immediately after learning interfere with forming a lasting memory. This is the most common explanation of failure for humans to remember new learned events. After all learning events, a certain amount of uninterrupted time is needed to “consolidate” the short-term memory into a more lasting one. The rat learning example serves to illustrate several basic principles of learning, which I can consolidate with the simple acronym, “ACCURATE.” “ACCURATE” Memory A: is for awareness or attention. In each of rat one-try learning situations, the rat has to be aware of what is going on. In the swim maze, the rat has to pay attention to the fact that there was something different about the place where the safe platform was. C: is for cues or clues. The light above the platform was a cue the rat could use in its learning. C: is for contingency. What happened depended on, or was contingent upon, something else. Moreover, the contingency event has to be closely spaced in time. Finding the safe island in the tub depending on seeing where the light was. U: unlearned or unconditioned. Swimming is hard work for a rat and it knew how to swim around to find an escape. R: is for reinforcement. There was consequence for action — finding safety prevented drowning from exhaustion. Finding a safe platform is a positive reinforcer, as the rat can rest and feel safe. The point is that reinforced behavior tends to get repeated—that is learned. To prevent negative reinforcement. the rat learns to do what it takes to avoid it. To learn positive reinforcement, the rat learns actions that make it happen., A: is for association. A main reason the rat learned in just one try is that a strong association existed between what the rat normally wants to do and the new behavior to be learned. T: is for time. Though not pointed out in the original versions of the example, a certain amount of uninterrupted time had to elapse between the one-try learning event and when the rat was later tested. In experimental situations, researchers have shown upon retention testing the next day that a rat will not have learned if some distraction occurs too soon after the initial one-try learning event. E: is for emotion. Emotion is not absolutely essential for remembering. But in the example used, and in one-try learning events in general, emotion is a magnifier for memory formation. A rat exhausted from swimming to keep from drowning must certainly feel a great sigh of relieve at finding a safe haven. And so it is for one-try learning in humans — or any kind of learning, for that matter. If the learning environment is ACCURATE, the memory will likewise be accurate.

John Cook review at Amazon
There is so much information available these days you doubt which books you should read.This book is one that you should read as early as possible.
Learning how to succesfully learn and memorize what you have learnt are essential skills.Better grades gives you a simple ,easy to understand roadmap that you can use over and over again throughout your life.
The return on investment of time,money and effort will pay handsomely in future years.
Many students take little time or thought to how they learn and study.Better grades shows that rote learning is not the most succesful method.
Better Grades offers you the roadmap to succesful learning with key points which include memory mapping to facilitate memory and taking a window of time for learning consolidation.
Easy to understand and implement and well worth your investment in your success.

Alex Lopez review at Smashwords
Surprised at how well it captures the readers emotions and manages to keep the reader interested in the book. Keeping in thought that you're usually reading this book to improve your focus and concentration this book manages to keep you entertained and several of the teaching methods including the pictures make this a gem to any student or worker.

Recommended, this book is worth more than 0.99 and is priceless.

Sharon Mitchell review at Smashwords
Excellent book! Dr. Klemm's style is reading, lively and interesting throughout. While other reviewers have recommended this book for college and high school students, I'd add teachers to the list. If educators knew more about these strategies, they could help their students acquire the skills to raise their grades without as much extra effort as they might think. Also, Dr. Klemm's book puts into plain language the current research into brain-based learning that educators are trying to put into practice.

This book will not only help students, but adults in their workplace as they try to keep pace with advancements in their field.