This article is concerned with the averaging principle and its extensions
for stochastic dynamical systems with fast and slow degrees of
freedom. It is demonstrated how the \conventional" averaging principle
results from asymptotic multiscale analysis, how one can construct
an indicator for its (in-)appropriateness, and how, if inappropriate, it
may be extended into an improved approximation. The conventional
scheme contains averages over the entire accessible state space of the
fast degrees of freedom and may thus fail if these fast degrees of freedom
exhibit long-term (auto-)correlations. In contrast, the improved
scheme combines several conditional averages with a Markov jump process
that is designed to represent the
ipping process between the
conditional averages and thus incorporates the important long-term
correlations. All important steps of the derivation are illustrated by
numerical experiments. Application to problems from molecular dynamics
is discussed.