Help me help this kid get a 3.5 GPA

May 10, 2007 9:09 AM

How do I teach study skills to an eighth grader?

So I've been asked to tutor an eighth grade student who has been underachieving. He seems eager to learn, but the study skills textbook I've been given to work from isn't that great. It's geared toward high school and college-age students, and deals with stuff like essays and big projects, neither of which he's really done yet. What I'd really like to teach him is how to take notes and study for tests. Things like: During a lecture, how do you figure out something is important, and needs to be written down? What are good notes? How do you know what to study for a test?

I've never been that organized myself. So MeFites, I'll put it to you. What are some good, simple bits of studying advice you picked up that you'd pass on to an eighth grader? What are some good habits he should learn?

posted by Kronoss to education (6 comments total)

I made it all the way to college without decent studying skills - but it caught up to me there. What ultimately worked for me was taking the material I needed to know for a test and reducing it to 1 sheet of paper. That forced me to focus on the important stuff. Then I would make sure I had everything on my one sheet covered well.

During a lecture - write everything down because you don't really have time to analyze it as you take notes. As the test approaches it usually becomes clearer what matters and what is fluff. many instructors more or less tell you what is important too. Then when preparing for a test summarize down to one sheet and use that to focus your test prep time.

Of course, this assumes that kids today still take notes on paper ;)
posted by COD at 9:30 AM on May 10, 2007

Here are some odds and ends I could think of--not a coherent study plan, just a few things that might be useful:

1. For learning things like definitions, identifications, foreign-language vocab: the kid should make his own flash cards (do NOT purchase pre-made ones! they defeat half the point), then use them to review.

2. For reading comprehension: he should write an outline, precis, or summary (and have you look it over to see whether it matches up with the text reasonably well). Many grade-school textbooks have "comprehension questions" at the end of each chapter; have him write answers to those.

3. Make sure he has a good dictionary available and have him get in the habit of looking up words he doesn't know. If the dictionary definition doesn't clear things up, he should ask you or a teacher for help understanding the unfamiliar word.

4. COD's idea of condensing test material onto one sheet of paper is a good one. I'm not sure if the following might be too advanced for an eighth grader, but another way to think about what's important out of the material is to make up your own test; ask the kid what he thinks the teacher will put on the test. It may not have occurred to him to think about the material this way. (Pose the question as a "mission" for review--"review your materials for half an hour, and while you're doing that, write down five things you think the teacher would be most likely to ask on the test"--rather than as something for him to answer off the top of his head.)

5. The best way to master material is to teach it to someone else. In seventh and eighth grade, I used to "teach" various subjects to the family dog. This is very different from having a tutor ask you review questions when you know that the tutor knows the answer.

6. For notetaking: I don't have a lot of bright ideas, but for starters, anything that the teacher writes or draws on the chalk board, he should probably copy down in his notebook.
posted by Orinda at 1:45 PM on May 10, 2007

First sell the kid the idea. Persuade them that study skills will make learning more fun as well as more effective. Get them to think about directions in which improvement would be good.

Talk about sharing time between subjects sensibly -- it is easy for a student to give too little time to subjects they dislike.

Encourage them to read around the subject -- reading about the same topic in different places tends to be more effective than re-reading set books.
posted by Idcoytco at 2:10 PM on May 10, 2007

If the teacher writes it on the board, it's probably worth writing down.
If the teacher asks a question of the class, the question and the answer are probably worth writing down.
When I study for tests, I think of (or look up in the book) questions that will be similar to the ones on the test and write down both the question and the answer.
posted by martinX's bellbottoms at 2:14 PM on May 10, 2007

Teach him how to use a dictionary, sit down and read the front matter with him, so he knows how to find the most relevant definition. Make sure he understands the pronunciation key in a dictionary he is comfortable with.

Teach him effective highlighting - at the eighth grade level I'd say that would be one sentence per page, and explain that he doesn't need to highlight words in bold because they're already "highlighted," so his eye will move to them when he reviews the text. While he's learning how to highlight, tell him that marginalia is even more important than color. Even underlining a passage and putting an exclamation point, a question mark or a smiley face will engage his mind in the material in ways that highlighter doesn't. Ditto writing one page summaries of his readings.

Bonus points for teaching him to seek out his peers and discuss the readings iwth them, and double bonus points if he'll voluntarily go see his teachers when there is something in the reading that confuses or intrigues him.
posted by bilabial at 5:41 PM on May 10, 2007

This may be self-serving, but get my book, What Smart Students Know (see the reviews on Amazon).

Don't call them "study skills" since the verb "to study" means, for virtually all students, simply rereading their notes. Alas, rereading notes does little or nothing to engage the kind of USE of the information that one will need to understand questions and formulate coherent answers on either papers or exams.

A good beginning would be to eliminate the word "study" entirely from your son's vocabulary and substitute words like "rehearse" or "master". Notice the difference in the phrases "master the pythagorean theorem" or "rehearse the pythagorean theorem", which get to the heart of the challenge, versus the phrase "study the pythagorean theorem", which tells the student nothing. You DON'T study for tests, you REHEARSE for them. I promise that this simple semantic shift will open vistas for your son.

By the way, highlighting is a pure waste of time. Better to annotate one's book in the margins with a pen (what one comment referred to aptly as "marginalia", though of course I wouldn't use that word with a teenager. Often what is important (i.e., worth highlighting) does not become apparent until one has digested the material for some time. Highlighting is lazy non-reading: "Maybe this stuff will be important. I'd better highlight it."

Also worth mentioning is that the way one rehearses/masters a discipline varies from subject to subject.

Finally, let your son know that these are skills are not "natural," but that they can be mastered like any other skill (playing the piano, shooting hoops).
posted by adamrobinson at 10:05 PM on May 10, 2007