Presentation Topics

TITLE: HOW TO BECOME EXTRAORDINARY: SECRETS TO SUCCESS

How do Olympic athletes, champion chess players, professional musicians, politicians, and business tycoons become so good? It's not by birth; it's by hard work and dedication. Learn how to achieve extraordinary talent and success, no matter what your age. This presentation explores the lives of extraordinary people.

Upon completion of this presentation, participants will be able to:
Explain what makes an extraordinary person.

Derive a plan for improving one’s talents.

Presenter Qualifications: Dr. Kiewra is an expert on talent and expertise. He has interviewed dozens of extraordinary people to uncover their keys to success. His interviewee list includes: Olympic gold medalists, famous musicians, chess grandmasters, NCAA athletic and coaching champions, National Spelling Bee winners, productive research scientists, world champion baton twirlers, rodeo champions, and more. Dr. Kiewra has published about a dozen articles on this topic.

SUCCESS AT EVERY LEVEL: As in any learning situation, critical information must be Selected, Organized, Associated, and Regulated. By engaging these four processes, people soar to success. Anyone involved in teaching or learning can and should apply SOAR strategies. Cues, for instance, can indicate what information should be selected. be selected. Hierarchies and matrices can represent information in ways that reveal veiled associations. The use of self-testing techniques can help regulate one's understanding and mastery. The SOAR processes are described in this presentation.

The following learning objectives will be accomplished at the conclusion of the presentation:

Create a lesson based on SOAR processes to teach others.

Learn new information using SOAR methods.

The SOAR Method was developed by Dr. Kiewra. Against established methods and preferred methods, he has published four articles demonstrating its superiority. Learning from oral presentations, text presentations, and computer presentations has proven effective with the SOAR method. In addition to two books, Dr. Kiewra has spoken dozens of times about the SOAR method, including in China and Germany.

TITLE: DIFS—DO IT FOR SUCCESS

Description: Success in any job or endeavor requires skill and will. In another presentation, we covered the SOAR strategies. Motivation is the key to willpower. The acronym DIFS refers to the four components of motivation: Desire, Intention, Focus, and Sustainment. When you DO IT FOR SUCCESS, you can remember that DIFS makes the difference. In this presentation, the four components of DIFS are outlined.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants will be able to:

How can desire, intention, focus, and sustainability be increased?
Use DIFS motivation to achieve a professional or personal goal in your own life.

The DIFS motivation method was developed by Dr. Kiewra. In two of his books, a chapter about DIFS has been written for students and a chapter for educators. In his university classes, he teaches the DIFS method to hundreds of college and graduate students each year.

TITLE: HOW TO WRITE RIGHT

You can tell a lot about yourself by the way you write. Most correspondence and professional writing is weak and gives the impression of incompetence. It's never too late to improve one's writing, though, as good writers are made, not born. We will examine and repair the common writing pitfalls that plague many writers, such as inappropriate commas, sentence fragments, poor word choice, inactive voice, and lack of subject-verb agreement, among others.

Upon completing this presentation, participants will be able to:
Correct writing errors.

Improve your writing skills.

Dr. Kiewra failed the college English Writing Exam three times. When his advisor provided detailed, corrective feedback about Dr. Kiewra's writing during graduate school, he only learned how to write. He has since authored or edited more than 100 articles and books, served on editorial boards for more than a dozen professional journals, and served on a major scientific journal's editorial board. Many of his graduate students have consulted him about their writing since then.

TITLE: TIME IS ON YOUR SIDE: OH, YES IT IS

Money is time. We value, earn, and waste both. Therefore, the principles of time management are aligned with those of money management. Participants learn how to (a) invest time, (b) invest in time, (c) invest early, (d) invest daily, (e) invest wisely, (f) monitor time investments, and (g) enjoy time investments. Time-management practices of those who have accomplished extraordinary things are also shared with participants.

Upon completing this presentation, participants will be able to:

Errors in time management should be identified and corrected.
Create a personal time-management plan

Qualifications: Dr. Kiewra has researched time-management plans of highly successful people and written about them. He has also presented on the topic in many textbook chapters. In addition, he and his graduate teaching assistants emphasize the importance of time management in the success course they teach to hundreds of university students every year.

TITLE: MEMORY MASTERY

Description: If you are like most people, you have memory problems that range from, “Where did I leave my keys?” to embarrassing introductions, “I’d like to introduce you to…um…ah…oh yeah, my Mom.” These memory snafus probably extend to the workplace where you forget important people, facts, and figures. This presentation provides a simple overview of how the memory system operates and offers powerful strategies for acquiring, maintaining, and retrieving information, based, in part, on the techniques of those with legendary memories.

Presenter Qualifications: Dr. Kiewra was trained in the area of cognitive psychology and has never forgotten the names of his parents or children. He has written chapters about memory techniques for his teaching and learning books and has delivered dozens of presentations on information processing and memory.

TITLE: HOW TO RECORD USEFUL NOTES

In this presentation, I describe my background as a note-taking researcher, document the importance of note-taking, identify common note-taking problems, and offer practical, research-based solutions for improving note-taking from oral and written presentations.

Learning Objectives: