Why Students Aren’t Studying

Imagine making a plan to get back in shape, to get your cardio up, to finally commit to getting the results you want at the gym - maybe some of you are already lining up your New Year's Resolutions. And the weekly plan you decide on is to do nothing all week, except for on Thursdays, you’re going to go to the gym for 5 straight hours. That’s the time you’re just going to slay it, right? Hit all six muscle groups - hard - and then recoup the rest of the week.

It’s not likely the regimen any trainer would recommend, and there’s a reason: because it’s insane. It’s not really a plan, and if anyone out there is actually following this routine, it’s much more likely the result of a lack of planning. It’s what you do when you forgot or missed your workouts 3 days in a row, and now you’re feeling guilty about the half-gallon of ice cream you ate last night and you’re trying to ‘get caught up’ all at once - but you’re probably doing more favors for your conscience than your body. Your body won’t thank you. Especially not on Friday.

I’m not a trainer, and I’m not giving anyone workout advice - I’m just teeing up a long-winded analogy. 

When you ask most students - I would guess it’s the majority - how they “study,” most will start to describe what they do during those 5 straight hours on a Thursday night that they spend in preparation for a test on Friday: how they organize their materials or write flashcards, what order they read their notes, highlighting key themes, etc. But that misses the whole point. At that point, you’ve already set yourself at a supreme disadvantage. They’re not describing how they study - they’re describing how they cram.

Look, I’m a realist - there might be a time and a place for cramming. But it’s not a good long term strategy, especially if your primary objective is to create the robust neural connections needed for long-term retention (that is to say, learning), then we need to redefine what ‘studying’ means to you. Just like you can’t sleep extra today so that you can then skip it the rest of the week, you need to distribute your studying across time. Here’s a rhetorical question:

What does ‘studying’ mean?

1. What you do the night before the test.

2. How you conduct yourself every day to ensure that you internalize the information you encounter in your classes. It includes things like (a) taking notes, (b) paying attention, (c) participating in class, and (d) doing homework.

A hip slogan, especially in the special ed community to which I belong, is that “everybody learns differently.” And that’s true, in one sense, but in another, it is just as true to say, “everybody learns the same way.” I don’t think they cancel one another out - we should be able to keep them both.

Everybody learns through repetition. Repetition is how everybody learns.

There are no exceptions. At least, I’ve never encountered one. When you’re exposed to new information, you need to internalize it, integrate it into your knowledge base, connect it with thick threads into the fabric of your neural quilt - and the way you form those kinds of connections is the same way you build up muscle tissue: you need to get those reps.

You need to know what it feels like to reach mastery. Mastery is when you couldn’t forget it if you tried. Mastery is when you’re reciting your lines in your sleep. Mastery is when you know it like you know your home address, when it rolls off your tongue like the lyrics to your favorite song. Mastery is when you could teach it. Mastery is when you can’t wait for the test to be handed out.

Mastery is often confused with two things. Firstly, it’s confused with what I call “Finishing your homework” - especially at the younger ages. I think it’s 9th grade or so when most students actually realize that just finishing the worksheet or answering the questions on the prompt is insufficient.

The second thing that mastery is often confused with is what I call “The Dawning Moment of Comprehension.” Many students will be reading, doing practice problems, when all the sudden, there’s a breakthrough - something clicks. They start to ‘get it.’ They feel a shiver, a glimmer, the sheer electricity of their own brilliance! Feeling so prepared, they then close their books, continue their evening, go to sleep, wake up the next day, and get a 75% on the test. Hence the name: the Dawning; it is only the beginning, the threshold, the first step.

It’s true that the dawning moment of comprehension is a truly lovely feeling, especially after a long, frustrating slog through the quagmire of consternation that usually precedes it. But it is only a trot compared to the glorious gallop of mastery. And to guide your gelding (goodness gracious) on to that goal, you need to “find your number.”

What’s “Your Number”? It’s how many reps you need to achieve mastery of the material. And if you’ve accumulated four weeks’ worth of material, and you’re sitting down to cram for the big Unit Test, that number is likely uncountable and unreachable. But if we’re talking about one day’s worth of material, Your Number is discoverable and achievable.

Reps look different for each subject. In math, it could mean ‘how many practice problems do I need to complete until I can’t miss.” Math is usually pretty straightforward, because in this subject, there are ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answers that are usually checkable, so you know if you’re on the right track or not. In math, if you finish the assignment, but you know you need more reps, there are ways to get them. You can look up extra problems in the book, create new problems for yourself, or use a website like IXL to generate problems of a specific type for you.

But what about reading? This is a critical question with a critical answer - because most students, including high school students, and even many college students, have terrible reading habits. How do I get ‘reps’ with Chapter 3 in my English novel, or with pages 210-224 in my Social Studies textbook? What am I supposed to do, read all fourteen pages over and over ten times?

Actually - yes. You should re-read the text. Let me explain. 

Firstly, most students do not even read the text once. They dig through it to find the answers to the worksheet, or the chapter questions, and once they’ve got ‘em, they move on to their next homework assignment. This is a terrible habit and if you see your student doing it, then you need to teach them to read.

Once you sit down with the text, resolved to actually read it, grab a highlighter and a pencil. On your first way through, highlight the key points. Don’t overdo it - don’t highlight the whole paragraph, because then nothing stands out. Just a few critical words that will later help remind you of what that paragraph was about. If you have any provocative questions, discover a theme that’s appearing or repeating, or make a connection, write it in the margin, right next to the text.

If you always do this when you read, you’ve already improved your comprehension. But you’ve also made your second trip through the text much more efficient. Once you get to the end of the chapter, (you’re going to think I’m insane when I say this, but I’m not, I promise, just try it): go back to the beginning of the text, and re-read it. But this time, just look at your highlights and annotations. Do they capture the central ideas in the text? Did you miss something? Grab it with the highlighter if you did. Did you see something new? Annotate it.

You just finished your second trip through the text. Your retention has gone up 50%, I promise. Do a third trip for another 50% bump, maybe more. Repeat until you feel it - mastery.

Forming these habits is so simple and so complicated. It’s simple, because all you have to do is do them - select the material you need to master, do the reps, feel the good burn, and enjoy the glorious gallop. But what’s so complicated about it is that most students have established routines and rhythms that they don’t want disrupted. It also intersects with the motivation of the student - for many of them, the main purpose of doing homework is to “get my parents off my back so I can get back to Minecraft,” or some such thing. Another confounding variable is that it’s hard to start mastering today’s material when it often sits on top of yesterday’s material, and both days before that, in a long regress, and we certainly don’t have time today to master everything we’ve covered since September, do we?

No, not likely. But I promise that huge gains are made when habits form. If you spend 30 minutes each night after the “homework is completed” just going back in for more reps, opening the math book and doing a few more of the same type of problem, opening the text and poring over your highlights and annotations one or two more times through, I promise two things: 1) you will see almost immediate results - no matter where you are, what grades you get, what your starting point is. And 2) you’ll start to feel it. A little more of the swagger, the confidence, the excitement for tomorrow. A little less of the anxiety and frustration. You’ll know yourself better - you’ll know when you’re not prepared, when you’re not there yet, but you’ll start to learn “Your Number.” You’ll know about how many times you need to do something to get it, and about how long that’ll take. You’ll know when you’re just feeling the dewey butterflies of the dawning moment of comprehension - and you’ll know the deeper pleasures, the delights awaiting you out in the pastures of understanding at high noon.