Improving Study Skills 1

Improving Study Skills

Frank Savino
Manhattan College
Improving Study Skills 2

Look at the Problem

Think back to when you were in the 7th grade, and think about what type of

student you were. Perhaps school came easy to you, or perhaps it was a struggle. For

many, 7th grade comes along with a higher level of rigor within classes, and may be

frustrating to 7th graders. Over the past school year, I have been tutoring a 7th grade

student with ADD; lets call him Tom. Tom has an excellent memory and is a very bright

student, however his mother worries that he lacks the motivation to study and stay on

top of his work. Many times he has expressed feelings of being overwhelmed, and as a

result it is often tough to get him to agree to study or review for an exam. Although he is

doing well in school, his mother worries that if he doesn’t develop strong study habits

now, his actions will carry over to high school, and possibly even college.

Examine What You Know

Before I started tutoring, Tom’s mother told me that he had trouble staying on top

of his work, and that he often forgot to submit assignments on time. She also warned

me that Tom could be difficult to deal with at times. She explained to me that Tom has

been receiving extra help in school, in the form of an extra study period, in which he is

allowed to do homework, review notes, or study for exams. Whenever I arrive for

tutoring hours, he usually has most, if not all, of his homework complete. In

reading/writing class, he is usually a week ahead of schedule when it comes to his

reading log/blog. His work is, for the most part, correct and he is doing well on his tests

and quizzes. He even started his first year of modified sports, (swimming and track)

which takes up even more of his time. And still time and time again when I arrive his
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work is almost always completed, and all there is left to do is to study for any upcoming

tests and quizzes.

This surprised me at first, since his mother claimed that in the past he struggled

with staying on top of assignments. He resisted studying for tests and quizzes because

he felt that he usually had a pretty good grasp on things. After much convincing and

pleading from his mother and myself, we were usually able to get him to agree to study

for 15-20 minutes. And when we did study, I found that he in fact did have an excellent

grasp on the material. This was not what I expected from a student who had an IEP and

was given an extra period to get his work done. Concepts and lessons seemed to be

coming easily to him. So I sat down and went over everything I knew, and I was able to

draw the following conclusions. The first is that Tom is a student who has a strong

ability to recall facts and definitions. The second is that it can be difficult at times to get

him to study for his classes, and third, he placed a great deal of emphasis on his free

time. So in an attempt to see what others had experienced while attempting to teach

study skills, I began to do some research.

Acquire Knowledge

One of the first papers I came across, was by Tait and Entwhistle, and discussed

how students pursuing higher education often times were unable to adequately prepare.

They note that often times their study skills are ineffective, which is something I believe

is developed before entering into higher education. The paper discusses some ideas for

improving study strategies that I think could easily be applied to the middle school level.

One idea that caught my attention, was the idea of handing out a pamphlet on study

strategies, so that students would be able to reference it when it came time to study.
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Further Tait and Entwhistle believed that a tutor might be needed to help a student

apply those general study strategies to a particular content area, like Math or English

(Tait and Entwhistle, 1996). I had noticed a packet that Tom had on studying, and

thought that I may be able to use this when devising my plan later on. After all, I was

tutoring Tom, so I would be able to help him apply the general ideas within the packet,

to whatever subject area he had to study for. When I went to look at the packet, it had a

few ideas like making flashcards and creating outlines. I finally came across one

suggestion that said to draw diagrams to help solve practice problems. Immediately I

was able to connect this to my ED 403 class, where we had been taught a visualization

strategy called Sketch-Stretch. It involved creating a sketch of what you had previously

read. It was usually used as a post-reading strategy, however I thought that it could be

amended to fit other subjects as well. This helped to keep the ball rolling with my

research, and I continued on to see what was known about this sort of a study strategy.

The second piece of research I found was written by Yi-Chaun Jane Hseih, and

talked about using visualization as a way to engage middle school students in Science.

The study found that students who used visualization as a study strategy performed

better on their test. This was an interesting piece of information, however, the most

interesting thing that the article found, was that those who used computer based

visualization strategies did not see an improvement in their test scores. In fact, these

students tended to do worse than those who didn’t use the strategies at all (Hseih,

2004). Reading this study helped me figure out what direction I wanted to take, but I still

wanted to learn more about what others had found, and so I continued my research.
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The next thing I looked into was the importance of developing study skills. In an

article by David J. Connor, he explains how there are a few things students with

Learning Disabilities and ADD/ADHD can do before college that will help prepare for the

increase in rigor. One that stuck out the most to me was to develop essential skills,

more specifically, effective study skills. Explicitly teaching students to organize their

work, plan ahead, and manage their time in the lower grade levels will transfer over into

their higher levels of education. This only made it clearer that developing Tom’s study

skills was of upmost importance.

Devise the Plan

I thought about how to challenge Tom, and struggled for a long time to come up

with a way to do so. Should I try to implement the challenges within our time together,

while studying for tests, or would it be better to try and get him to participate in other

projects and activities that were not assigned by the teacher? At first, I brought up the

idea of doing our own experiments, which he immediately shot down. I thought that he

would have been excited for such projects since he was so interested in building his go-

kart, however that was not the case. He wanted to “enjoy his free time”, and “relax” after

a long day of school and athletics. It didn’t make sense to me at first but the more I

thought about it the more I realized that this was a student who was resistant to

accepting my help in the first place, and that he put a huge emphasis on enjoying his

free time. Trying to get him to agree to what he would have perceived as extra work

would only frustrate him. One of the main reasons he got all of his homework done
Improving Study Skills 6

during school hours was so that he would be able to relax at night (usually in the form of

playing video games).

So instead of coming up with projects in order to increase interest and

motivation, I decided that I would try to implement a strategy that I could use within our

allotted time together. My hope was that I could create a useful study strategy that he

would be able to take with him into high school and beyond.

Visualization was a topic that we spent some time going over in my ED 403

class; I thought that it would be a perfect strategy to implement when helping Tom study

for an upcoming exam on simple machines in his science class. I also felt that the

evidence put forth by Cifuentes about visualization supported such an idea.

I knew from prior experience that Tom’s teacher would usually hand out a review

sheet before an exam, and thought that I would be able to use it as a starting point. For

anyone looking to repeat such a process, if your student does not have a list of terms, it

may be a good idea to review class notes in order to select the terms that are of

importance.

My plan was to go through each of the simple machines with Tom, and use a

strategy called Sketch-Stretch. This is often a strategy used for summarizing text, and

involves having students sketch out what it is they had just read. At first I thought that I

could have Tom read the definitions of each machine, but I thought that I could improve

the strategy and increase his engagement if I quizzed him on the definitions instead. So

it would go something like this: I would ask Tom for the definition of a simple machine,

and he would explain it to me in his own words. If he got the definition correct, I would
Improving Study Skills 7

have him stop for 10 seconds in order to try to picture the object in his head. Then, I

would ask him to draw a picture (to the best of his ability) that illustrates the important

features of each machine.

Another reason that I thought that this strategy would work is because when

building his go-kart, he had made use of simple machines such as screws, wheel and

axel, etc. I thought that since he was familiar with these objects that he would

Execute the Plan

It was finally time to study for the upcoming exam, and I was nervous to begin my

plan. Tom is often combative when it comes to trying to get him to study, and I was

afraid that introducing a new strategy would only make things worse. He had made it

clear through my time working with him that he believed he knew what worked best

when it came to his studying. Nevertheless I stayed positive, but when I began to

explain what I wanted to try to do, Tom resisted. He claimed that he already had a grasp

on the material, and simply wanted to quickly review the definitions and be done. After

some arguing, and pleading, I got him to agree to use the modified Sketch-Stretch

strategy for the simple machines that he thought were most important. The one’s he

selected were wheel and axel, pulley, screw, wedge tool, and inclined plane. We began

the process and although he had agreed, I noticed that he was rushing through his

sketches. I asked him to take his time and to really take his time and consider the object

in his mind from all angles. He slowed down a bit for the next one, but still seemed to be

in a rush.
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Once we had gone through the terms, I asked him to review his sketches and

point out any important features of each simple machine. This part was not described

when I devised a plan, but I felt that Tom had rushed through things too quickly and so I

wanted him to take some more time visualizing and examining each of the machines.

Lastly, I wanted to get some feedback, so I asked Tom what he thought of the

new strategy. He told me that he thought it was pointless because they wouldn’t have to

draw the machines on the exam. Next, I asked him if he thought that this strategy could

be used in any other content areas. He conceded that it may be helpful to sketch graphs

and figures in math, and maybe in other science topics. I followed up by asking him if he

could ever see himself using the strategy on his own, to which he responded with a

sarcastic “no”.

So between his rushing through studying, and his responses to my follow up

questions, it seemed that Tom was not a fan of the Sketch and Stretch. But was it

effective. In order to find that out, I had to wait until the week after when the test would

be returned. When I finally did get a chance to look at the graded exam, it turned out

that Tom actually ended up getting an B+, which is a pretty good grade; however I’m not

convinced that it was my sketch-stretch strategy that did the trick. Tom had rushed

through a majority of the time we studied together, and perhaps he would have done

just as well without my devised strategy. I think that if I were to do an experiment like

this again, that I would try to it with a topic that Tom did not have as much prior

knowledge on, so that he would have to take things more seriously. Also, I would

probably try to incorporate some sort of pre-test, so that I could examine the

improvement from the pre-test to the in-class exam.

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Bibliography

Tait, H., & Entwistle, N. (1996). Identifying Students at Risk through Ineffective Study

Strategies. Higher Education, 31(1), 97-116. Retrieved from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3447710

Cifuentes, L., & Hsieh, Y. C. J. (2004). Visualization for middle school students’

engagement in science

learning. Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching, 23(2),

109-137.

Connor, D. J. (2012). Helping students with disabilities transition to college: 21 tips for

students with LD and/or ADD/ADHD. Teaching Exceptional Children, 44(5),

16 -25.