Introduction
Design of the Lessons
Each study lesson you complete is organized in the way I have described below. The exam tips lessons (5 and 10) don’t follow this structure. Instead, they are designed to inform you about and prepare you for the course exams.
A lesson title will give you the major idea on which to focus.
A set of objectives will provide you with a framework for your study of the chapter(s) included in each lesson. These objectives will give you the basis of what you are to understand as you complete the reading and activities in the lesson.
Your textbook will be your primary resource. It is especially important that you complete each reading assignment from the textbook. Browse through the “Student Guide” section on pages xviii–xx to see how the authors have arranged the main headings for the chapter, the section reviews, and, particularly, the study guide with its key terms and numerous review questions.
The discussion will give you a secondary resource covering what I think are important topics in the lesson. The discussion will serve as an additional resource to you as you learn the concepts by helping you understand the topics more thoroughly than just reading the textbook by itself. In the discussion sections, I will try to give you additional examples and explain material in a different way.
You will take a quiz (or two) in each lesson. A practice quiz is provided in the lesson discussion to help you determine if you have understood the topics in the lesson before taking the quiz for a grade.
You will also complete a lesson assignment consisting of questions from the textbook and/or a lab. Following are some guidelines you should follow for each assignment.
- For each lesson assignment, complete all the questions, submitting the written and lab assignments together at the same time in one Word document. If there is a question you do not understand, do not leave it blank. Explain or describe to your instructor what your difficulty was or how the question was confusing to you so that as your assignment is graded, your instructor will be able to provide an explanation that hopefully will help you. Unanswered questions can substantially lower your grade. The best action to take is to ask your question of the instructor before submitting your lesson assignment for grading.
- Correct spelling and grammar are also important. Answer in your own words and as completely as you can. It is much better, in a course such as this one, to give more detail than might be necessary to answer a question than it is to leave something out. This is especially true on all the questions involving calculations. Be sure to show your work.
- The number of points each question is worth will vary with each lesson, according to the number of questions in the lesson or lab and the amount of thought or work required for answering a particular question. The grading scale for the lessons and exams is given in the section “Grading Standards.”
The lab assignments will consist of laboratory exercises that pertain to the lesson content yet are safe enough to complete on your own. The lab assignments are assigned in conjunction with several of the lesson assignments of which they are a part.
