Chapter I
INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study
Our character is a collection of our habits, and habits have a powerful role in our lives. Habits consist of knowledge, skill, and desire. Knowledge allows us to know what to do, skill gives us the ability to know how to do it, and desire is the motivation to do a certaintask (Covey, 1990). Habits are routines of behaviour that are repeated regularly and tend to occur subconsciously. Habitual behaviour often goes unnoticed in persons exhibiting it, because a person does not need to engage in self-analysis when undertaking routine tasks.
Study skills include how a person studies, as well as the particular resources a person uses. They are intentional use of one or more cognitive processes to accomplish a particular task. Good study skills include note-taking, reading, summarizing, organizing, identifying important information, and meaningful learning and elaboration (Ormrod, 2008).They are generally critical to success in school, are considered essential for acquiring good grades, and are useful for learning throughout one's life. Study skills are the methods of researching and learning that are used to absorb educational information.

It has been widely accepted in modern times that college is a time to learn, experiment, and grow. Academic performance is the commonly used gauge with which to determine whether or not a student has indeed learned what he has been taught. It is the ability of the student to apply academic skills in a variety of ways or settings. Through testing and assignments, the student proves to his professor that he has absorbed the material given to him. The level to which the student has understood the material is given in the form of the grade, which in combination with the rest of the student’s classes determines his grade point average (http://clearinghouse.missouriwestern.edu/