Study skills for middle school and beyond
"Did you do your homework?"
Parents need to ask more questions than this one, teachers advise. How much should you help with homework? Monitor homework but remember it's your child's homework, not yours. You can help by asking questions that help guide your child to his own solutions. Some examples:
- What information do you need to do this assignment?
- Where are you going to look for it?
- Where do you think you should begin?
- What do you need to do next?
- Can you describe how you're going to solve this problem?
- How did you solve this problem?
- What did you try that didn't work?
- Why does this answer seem right to you?
- Tell me more about this part?
Studying for tests
Studying for tests is a skill. For struggling students, it's a mystery.
"Unsuccessful test takers don't know where the questions come from," says Jim Burke, a California high school English teacher and the author of a number of books about teaching and learning. "The kids who don't succeed tend to think the others are lucky."
Parents can help their children manage their time and attention — which means turning of the cell phone, the TV and the iPod, says Burke.
Some tips to remember in helping your child:
Rereading isn't the same as learning.
"Reviewing alone is not enough, says Kipnis, the UPenn student, reflecting on what she has learned along the way. "Thinking of potential essay questions and outlining them or working out the challenging math problems helps me learn how to apply the material so that I do not blank when I see the questions on the test."
"For math and sciences, a big problem that I had was that I would spend a lot of time reviewing the concepts, but I wouldn't learn them because I was not practicing applying the concepts," she says. "I was the most productive when I created sheets with tons of practice problems and just practiced applying the concept in many different ways."
There are other ways your student can practice this kind of active learning - highlighting his notes, using Post-its to mark key textbook passages, making study cards, and mapping and diagramming concepts.
People are productive at different times of day.
Some people focus better in the morning, others at night. Help your child find the times that his efforts will be most effective.
Sometimes we just have to memorize.
You may have used a mnemonic like Roy G. Biv to remember the colors of the rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) or My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas to remember the correct order of the planets, back when Pluto was still considered the ninth one. Inventing your own silly mnemonic together works just as well and can lighten up a study session.
