The Art of Studying

Many students struggle, along with transitioning between high school and college, with the art of studying.  In many elementary and middle school classrooms students take notes from an overhead or PowerPoint and then are assessed over the material covered in a given, and relatively short, time period.  In reality to best prepare students for real life, they need to learn the art of studying, or retaining large amounts of information over a longer period of time, at a much younger age in order to be successful on the ACT, SAT, in college, and in their chosen career field.   A debate that many educators find themselves involved with over this topic, is what kind of student we should produce at the primary education level- happy students with friends and limited knowledge, or a student that may be socially challenged, but extremely educated.  As a parent it is inevitably up to you what type of morals and expectations you instill within your child. 

If you desire a child that is extremely successful career-wise, it would be smart to help your child develop appropriate study habits at an early age.  By doing so, you will need to also find techniques that work best for your child.  Helping your child now will amount to greater success in the classroom, which could also lead to more money in your pocket, as the Tennessee Hope Scholarship Program becomes more competitive in the coming years, limiting the number of students that can benefit from it.  Georgia's seniors can attest to the side effects of providing a free education to incoming B average college students and the extremely competitiveness that it created now that the lottery has been in Georgia for nearly seventeen years.

To tackle the art of studying with your child, you will need to understand the nature of the subjects the students are taking.  Studying math and English takes a much deeper understanding of the concepts being taught, than say social studies or science.  When studying social studies and science, students can read and reread information to retain what they need to learn.  If concepts are challenging, some students might benefit from creating practice quizzes/tests on the computer at sights such as quia.com, or making notecards to aid their memorization.  Unfortunately, math and English are much more difficult to truly understand.  Both of these classes require that students learn the material, and then be able to apply what they know.  It is one thing to know what a variable is in math, but a student today must know how to solve for a variable to excel on an assessment.

In Tennessee it appears that the TCAP (Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program) test will be moving towards CRA (Constructed Response Assessment) testing, so that our state can become more competitive with states such as Massachusetts in the quality of the students we are producing.  In doing so, students will no longer be able to choose a letter as an answer.  CRA testing, which is still a few years away from implementation in Tennessee, will require students to solve the answer using complete sentences, and show all work required to find the answers.  If students struggle at mastering the basic concepts of mathematics for example, they will also struggle at showing their work on tests such as these.

This article is not meant to scare you, but it will hopefully bring insight into how the education of a child is truly the combined efforts of the teacher (teaching the concepts), the student (learning the concepts), and the parents (reinforcing the concepts) in the state of Tennessee.