As students progress through their academic careers, the expectations around their study skills steadily increase from using a teacher’s study guide for a unit test and writing down what’s on the board to ongoing review of material in preparation for cumulative exams and developing individualized note-taking strategies that might vary by course. There’s a steep learning curve, and few schools explicitly teach these skills.
For students with executive functioning challenges, learning how to study is further complicated by likely struggles with prioritizing information, maintaining focus, planning, and time management. Demystifying what it means to study and how our brains retain information can lead to greater success for all students and empower students with learning difficulties to find strategies that work best for them.
What is studying?
In the simplest sense, studying is the act of teaching ourselves information. It’s also helpful to think of studying in terms of memory. When we’ve studied well, we’ve taken information from short term to long-term memory. Here, point out to your child that our brains are almost always in “forgetting mode” because most of what happens during the day doesn’t need to be in our long-term memory. It really is important for our brains to let go of lots of information precisely so that they can work efficiently when we need them to. What did you eat for breakfast last Monday? Who cares! To that end, studying needs to be a conscious choice to shift our brains into “remembering mode.”
Scientists tell us that for most of us, we need to see a piece of information four times in order to remember it. We also need to sleep between those exposures, because it’s while we’re asleep that our brains move information from the hippocampus (where short term and working memory reside) to the cortex (where long term memory lives).
As far as what makes a good study strategy, there are two important ideas that science has given us: recall is superior to review and we tend to remember information that we connect to what we already know. All this means that successful study plans…
- …expose learners to information four or more times
- …respect our sleep schedules and are spread out over multiple days
- …ask us to speak, to move, or to make something
- …make explicit connections to prior knowledge
Ongoing Routines
For subject areas that are particularly challenging for students, the best approach to studying is to establish a routine that leads to multiple exposures to course material. Here’s how that might look:
- Exposure 1: Take notes during class. A good entry level method is to write down the three most important ideas each class. For more advanced note-takers, the Cornell Method is well proven.
- Exposure 2: On the day that material is delivered, identify key words or concepts and write down any questions for clarification. For Cornell Notes, complete the left-hand column.
- Exposure 3: The day after material is delivered, synthesize information. This might mean summarizing notes in 1-2 sentences or writing possible test questions.
- Exposure 4: Once a week, create a one page summary of all of your notes for the class. Depending on the class, this might mean a mind-map, a timeline, or a simple outline.
Doing the above throughout the school year means that when it’s time to prepare for a test, your child will already have learned most of the information, and test preparation should be a relatively low-stress process.
If you’d like personalized support for your child to develop an ongoing study routine, our executive functioning coaches can help! Contact us or reach out to your director to set up a strategy session.
This post, written by Private Prep Director of Executive Functioning Jenna Prada, was originally published on SmartKids, a hub dedicated to supporting the parents of children with learning disabilities.
