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The Study Gurus
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5 Simple Tips for Better Grades at High School
Dec 2nd
Photo credit: Max and Dee (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Even though your teen is out of diapers you still have a huge influence on them.
They still look up to you and want to make you proud.
Your support throughout their high school years will have an enormously positive effect on their grades and attitude towards school and studying.
It can be difficult to know just exactly how you can help your teen with their studies. After all, it’s probably been a while since you’ve opened a math or chemistry book!
So here are 5 practical things you can do with your teen to help them reach their academic potential at high school.
1. Figure out their learning style
Despite what many people think, anyone can learn how to study effectively. To do so, your teen simply needs to figure out what study habits and techniques work for THEM.
Part of learning how to study as effectively as possible involves figuring what your predominant learning style is. Once your teen knows what theirs is, they can integrate study techniques associated with this style into the way they study.
Never again will they have to be frustrated by not knowing what to do when they sit down to study.
Take our 5-minute Learning Styles Quiz here!
2. Make a weekly timetable
The most common topics parents ask us about are motivation and time management.
How can I get my teen to do school work regularly? How can our family fit everything in during the school week?
Sound familiar?
There’s something wonderfully powerful about scheduling study time in advance. So our answer is to draw up a timetable of your teen’s normal school week and let them assign the times when they’re going to complete homework and/or study.
3. Figure out some ‘Reasons Why’
There’s one very consistent difference between motivated teens, and not so motivated teens…
Motivated students have personal reasons WHY it’s important to do well at school.
Motivated students all have some idea as to what they want to do when they leave school. Either they have a career in mind, or a college they want to go to, or they simply know it’s important to keep their options open by getting great grades.
Unmotivated students who aren’t feeling driven to do well should think about THEIR future.
What are they interested in? What can they see themselves doing in 5-10 years time? Do they want to work at the supermarket for the rest of their days or would they like to get a good education and have the world as their oyster?
Have a chat with your teen about what reasons will motivate them to get off the couch and over to their desk.
4. Goal Grades
Another great motivator for any student is for them to decide what grades they want to aim for this year. This will give your teen a target to work towards – something to keep focused on.
Secondly, when they achieve their goal grades they’ll be so chuffed with themselves it will spur them on massively to keep giving school their best shot. There’s nothing like the sense of accomplishment and reward that comes with achieving goals.
5. Study with them
Studying can be a chore. Especially when exams are looming!
But it doesn’t have to be a total slog 100% of the time. You can help your teen study effectively and make it more enjoyable by getting involved.
Flash cards are a fabulous tool you can use with your teen, and they’re incredible simple to make!
We also found it really helpful to have our parents ask us questions from our study notes when studying for exams. It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand the content of what your teen has been studying – just you asking questions from their notes will massively help their recall.
If you can talk about the real life relevance of what they’re learning it will show them WHY what they’re learning is important. This plays a huge part in keeping your teen interested in their school work. So sit down and have a chat about what they’re learning and why they’re learning it.
You know your teen better than anyone, so you may find that there are tons of other things you can do at home to help them enjoy what they’re leaning and improve their memory retention. If you have created any family study games in your household we’d love to hear about them in the comments below!
The Study Gurus are Clare McIlwraith and Chris Whittington. Their aim is to show parents how they can help their children reach their academic potential. They’re sharing their years of studying and tutoring experience at www.thestudygurus.com.
5 Ways to Help Your Teen Get Great Marks at High School
Aug 2nd
Studying is usually defined by the same, old, boring methods – reading, writing study notes, and rote learning.
While these tasks should take up the bulk of your teen’s studying time, there are certainly other less well-known methods that effective studiers use to make sure they get the grades they’re aiming for.
The five methods below are all things YOU can encourage them to do and help them with, and will contribute massively to your teen’s studying success.
1. Help them make a study timetable
Your teen’s study timetable only needs to be very simple, yet the benefits of having one (and using it!) are huge:
- Your teen is much more likely to complete the study they need to if it’s planned in advance and written down. A timetable achieves both these things immediately.
- By marking out when they will study each subject, your teen will ensure they study everything they need to in time for each exam.
- Quite simply, having a study timetable = more study done
Making and sticking to a timetable is Organization 101, and being organized does absolute wonders for stress levels. By helping your teen get organized, you’re helping to keep their stress levels down… something the whole family will benefit from!
2. Implement incentives where appropriate
Many teenagers need a good kick up the bum leading up to exams. If this sounds familiar then we suggest using a few simple incentives to give them the boost they need.
But, they need to be the right kind of incentives…
Harvard Educational Professors have shown that incentives based on a child’s inputs [work done] are far more effective than those based on their outputs [grades].
This means you should base your incentives on the number of hours of study done, rather than the grades your teen ends up getting.
3. Introduce them to handy websites.
The web is a goldmine of fabulous free resources designed specifically for high school exam study, of any schooling system.
To get you started here are a few of our personal favorites:
- Khan Academy: This site has thousands of free videos covering everything from math to chemistry to finance at a level that’s perfect for high school students.
It also has a ‘Practice’ section that acts as a personal math tutor. All free! - GCSE Bitesize: Based on the British curriculum, but a fantastic website bursting with resources for any high school student anywhere.
- YouTube: Yes, it is one of the best tools for procrastinating, but if your teen can resist their browsing urges, YouTube probably has at least 10 videos explaining any topic they could ever need to master.
4. Past exam papers
We credit a lot of our own exam success to studying from past exams. Not every teacher will provide them, but it never hurts to ask.
They’re a wonderful study tool because:
- The questions and format of the exams this year will probably be very similar to those in previous years.
- They’ll give your teen the best idea of what to expect in the exam, and they’ll want to avoid any nasty surprises!
- Going over past exams will very quickly show your teen what they need to brush up on.
5. Test them
A great tool for studying is getting someone to test your knowledge.
As a parent, you may not know what protein synthesis or differentiation is, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help your teen memorize those definitions.
As long as you can read, you can ask questions from their study notes. Flash cards could also fit in very well here.
As you can see, just because your teen is growing up and studying for subjects you haven’t thought about for 30 odd years, it doesn’t mean you have to be a spectator of their success.
Behind every successful high school student are very proud and supportive parents. We hope that the tips we’ve outlined here help you help your teen reach the level of academic achievement you know they’re capable of.
It’ll be YOU they thank first at their high school graduation.
The Study Gurus are Clare McIlwraith and Chris Whittington. Their aim is to show parents how they can help their children reach their academic potential. They’re sharing their years of studying and tutoring experience at www.thestudygurus.com.
How To Help Your Teen Hack Summer School
Jun 3rd
Summer school isn't a walk in the park!
The irony is of course, is that summer school is anything but relaxing.
If your teen is about to embark on Summer School or a summer course, they may be about to have this realisation.
The whole point of summer school is to cram in a lot of work into a small amount of time. This will mean your teen won’t have the luxury of procrastinating nearly as much as they might do during the normal school year.
If this is something you believe your teen might find a problem, here are a few things you can do to help them squash their summer school procrastination.
1. Make sure they’re prepared for the intense workload before their courses start.
Forewarned is forearmed. Many summer school students don’t realise they don’t have the luxury of excess time until their half way through. And by this stage it can be very overwhelming to get back on top of things.
We suggest that you have a chat with your teen before they get started to make sure they realize what the work load is going to be like. They’re going to have to start with a hiss and a roar and won’t be able to take their foot off the gas.
2. Help them prepare a timetable for Summer School before it starts.
Working to a timetable is something that we advocate during the normal school year, and particularly when exams are looming.
Having a weekly timetable – and more importantly sticking to it – is possibly going to be even more important for your teen’s success at summer school.
It’s really simple – having a timetable makes students much more likely to stick to a regular study schedule. And this is obviously a pivotal part of doing well at summer school, because again, your teen doesn’t have any time to waste.
Your teen should plan out their weeks – noting down specific times when they’re going to study for a particular subject, complete assignments, and prepare for their exams.
3. Help them keep their spirits up!
From what we’ve described here about summer school, anyone who didn’t know better might think we’ve described a setting of boot camp!
As it would be with boot camp (not that we’d know), striking success at summer school will ultimately come down to how well your teen can find the balance of working really hard, without burning out.
Summer school can be really intense and really stressful, and stress isn’t something you want your teen to feel for the entire duration. It’s counterproductive.
But you can help them keep things in perspective when they’re freaking out, suggest fun or stress-reducing things they can do in their down time so they don’t go insane.
Plus, it’s important that you’ll just be there for general help and support. If your teen wants to ace their summer school exams, they’re going to need it!
Overall your teen should probably be looking at summer school as a trade off – it’s a lot of work and it’s pretty intense – but they will come out having done something really great and have gotten extra credits towards their academic career.
The trick to the success is simply to be organised, efficient, and to stay positive about it.
And with your help – they will be able to do these things much more effectively.