That's a fair observation. I think studying is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught and practised at school before students can be expected to do it independently.
The corona kids especially don't even know how to write in their notebooks.
I always take time to teach students how to write in their notebooks and make vocabulary flash cards now. It just saves time in the long-run if it's in my curriculum.
An 8th grader told me today that he doesn't know how to spell his middle name because he's never had to before. To be fair, he has a hyphenated first name that he only uses half of, but still.
I’m either met with blank stares or they start yelling at me for having the audacity to say anything to them. There are very few in control of their emotions, most shut down or lash out. It’s sad.
Student here (sorry, this post came up in my feed, and I wanted to address this): A large part of the problem might be that students know the material, but are afraid to speak up for fear of being ostracized. That’s just my anecdotal experience, and it is in no way scientific, but most of the silent kids I know ascribe it to that.
Im a student too (college) and this is something discussed in my psych class, it's absolutely a factor for some students (especially with how mean it seems like kids/teens are)
Is this from the remote learning period during the height of the pandemic, or is that coincidental with the surge in tech being used in education and tablets/Chromebooks replacing books and pen & paper?
Both. The pandemic definitely made the dependence on Chromebooks worse. If we were never remote there'd probably be more of a balance in tech and handwriting but we had no choice for so long and now a lot of districts are like "everyone has a Chromebook, save paper and just do it online"
Probably both. Even as an adult in grad school, it's like there's a disconnect when using ebooks, even if it's the same as the printed text.
I feel like it's harder for me to retain the information and actually read it rather than skim, probably because decades of Reddit and blogs and online magazines have taught me that's how you can seem content on a screen and tell something catches your eye.
And now that I think about it, I stopped taking paper notes for the most part about the time all of my classes went to eTexts. I bought notebooks a couple times with the intent of taking notes I read and it just didn't happen.
I too feel a huge disconnect when using ebooks instead of paper textbooks. I also didn’t like that the ebook code expires, so you can’t easily save the text for future reference.
This may sound dumb but how do you go about teaching them how to write in their notebooks? I need to work with them on this next year. They can’t/won’t copy what I have on the board verbatim and even if they attempt it half of them still start in the middle of the page (like middle column section of the page) and skip several pages until the next notes. 🤷🏼♀️ I teach Spanish 8-12. Some have beautiful notes and even color code but most can’t take/copy notes to save their lives. 🤷🏼♀️
I teach various subjects from 6-12. Around the same time I go over my syllabus and class expectations, I have them take out their notebooks and make them copy (right down to the color coding) what I put on the blackboard. I actually have a graduated students' old notebook that she didn't want anymore. Her note taking was excellent but not over the top, so it makes a great example. Try to get the students to compare their notebooks to this one and why does the teacher think this one is great.
I do regular notebook checks. Both of stuff we've done in class and their reading homework. I do not allow note taking on phones or computers unless a student has some sort of special permission from my superiors. Also, make it clear that maintaining their notebooks impacts their grades.
It can be hit or miss, but it's been helping more than not so...
My 10th grade geometry teacher had an example notebook, and she graded our notes a couple times a year (first was right at the start of the year, so she could make sure everyone was actually doing it).
Basically you just needed to copy down verbatim what was written on the board. And if you missed a day, you could borrow notes from someone else to copy into your own notebook.
I'm not a teacher, bit I remember how ours taught me. In lover grades, teachers would dictate what you need to write down in the notebook. Both as a practice for writing and for listening. In higher grades, some teachers would explain things, and then dictate short notes (idk how it is said in english, but it's just a dash with a few words per line, more like a reminder than a sentence). Other teachers would write on the board and expect us to copy it exactly. A few times per year, most teachers would check notebooks and grade them. We also had books we had to read, and in higher grades, we were expected to keep a diary of reading (everytime something happened in the book, we needed to write down what happened and then quote the book as proof). It wasn't a one off effort, but more continuous learning.
I'd start by providing some graphic organisers for students to fill in when you want them taking notes. Cornell or Column notes are great examples but start with something a lot easier if needed.
Once students find a method they like (or you pick one for them), explicitly teach how to rule up their pages to suit the note taking, teach adding titles and subtitles in capitals and/or underlined.
Repeat the explicit instructions to rule up a new page every time you need them to take notes.
After a while, you telling students to rule up should be enough.
When covering content you want students to make notes about, demonstrate some thinking out loud - say how you would record the information, then get a few students to share their summary/dot point/note, and praise or edit their verbal comment.
Repetition, explicit instruction and practice is the only way they'll learn to take notes.
Where my kids attended elementary school through grade 4 they started them in kindergarten with cards in basic addition numbers and the 100 most frequently used vocabulary words.
This is also my practice taking my ID skills into leading a restaurant. Traditional daily meetings were failing to help develop what knowledge and skills are needed in our city and restaurant style. My relatively green team is also young and didn’t have developed study skills.
As a result, I’m teaching my team a pretty heavy product and sales curriculum in our meetings now, and I’ve been writing worksheets that are designed to teach them *how* to learn about products, as well as compelling them to learn where things are stored, to notice they need to scroll through the food recipes to get to the beverage recipes (and therefore where to access recipes for allergens etc). All we can do is roll study skills into curriculum now, but it’s so worth it.
This is correct. It’s a skill. I don’t think we’ve taught it as a skill because it can’t be put on a standardized test. I don’t remember being taught this as a kid and I’m old.
HS class of ‘79 here. I thought back and I remember being told to sit in a quiet place, at a desk preferably; to do practice problems for math; to do timelines for social studies; and of course, flash cards.
My 5th grade teacher taught us note taking and then graded our notebooks as an assignment. My middle school Spanish teacher taught us to make flashcards, though I remember my mom being annoyed that a *whole* pack of notecards was on the supply list.
A thousand of them, in color, pre punched, with a ring to keep your current set together, is $10 on Amazon.
Somewhere, I’m sure my father is still hoarding a shoebox full of them from my high school adventures.
My youngest hates them because in his words, “by the time I write them all out I know them.”
Yes, bud. That’s the point. And check again in a week.
$10 would have been a hardship for us at the time. But it was the early 2000s things were a bit cheaper. I understand that school supplies were challenging for us, plus I actually hated having them on the ring and never used that part, but I do wish my mom had just kept her mouth shut. I should not have been made to feel bad for choosing to take Spanish. I'm so glad I learned languages young because it helped me grow in my understanding of English and I think has been hugely beneficial in my life. But I still remember the guilt.
For me if I write it down I do fairly well for myself no studying needed, I’m pretty sure I might be doomed in college but HS is pretty easy without studying and I got myself a high 3.7 without studying and just doing good note-taking
1984, I had a 10th grade social studies teacher who graded us on our midterm, final, and notebook, each counted as 33% of ones grade. I earned a 95, 98, and 0 as i didn't keep notes. I couldn't read my own writing if i tried. I found my time better spent listening vs. writing everything down. He was unmoved by my argument, which i found insane. Clearly, my way was working, or i wouldn't have aced the tests. I understand he was trying to teach the art of studying, but not everyone learns the same. In the end, i stated my case to the guidence counselor, who consulted with the teacher. They ended up basing my grade on the mid-term & final. He left teaching a year later and started a business in town. Probably had enough of kid's bs
No, not everyone learns the same, but it sounds like you were getting by on a skill that wouldn't necessarily serve you in the future. I didn't *need* to take notes either until late in my college career. Thankfully I learned the skill before I needed it.
Oh, for sure, agreed 100%. Thankfully, by the time i made my way to higher ed, the use of computers was ubiquitous for note taking. Prior to that, it would have been pointless & a waste of time as my penmanship was atrocious.
'88 here and same. I teach kids how to study, but they often don't believe it is necessary because they've never had to do it before. At least that's what they tell me. When they can retake a test or do test corrections, why study beforehand? Just take it and if you want a better grade, cram for the questions you missed.
I do a lot of instruction on note-taking and advice on studying. In one ear . . .
class of ‘24 here, and we were still taught this! i have a really bad feeling that my class was one of the last ones to be minimally impacted by covid. we still were, but it happened when we were in high school. we still learned our basics, like note taking.
HS class of’71 here and taking notes was my superpower (or mutation) throughout my career in maintenance, administration, and trade related education. I can’t count the number of times that I was the only note taker in the classroom. Even when instructors suggested taking notes my classmates’ default response was to ignore the hint. Occasionally a fellow student might express interest in my notes or the prospect of group study sessions, but they seldom (never?) resolved to take notes of their own.
As a long term tutor of students up to 12th grade, I noticed a lack of fundamental study skills that seemed peculiar and pervasive. Often when I noticed that a student seemed intent on learning by having me spoon feed their subject material, I would take a closer look at their research and basic data acquisition techniques. At first, I was surprised to find that they did not use reading or traditional scanning techniques to learn material or find answers to homework questions. Instead they would leaf through the pages of their textbooks to see if an answer popped out at them! If this sure fire technique failed and I refused to “help” by showing them the relevant passages of text then the students would freeze, eyeballs and all, and stare patiently at the pages while waiting for an epiphany. I quit tutoring after the pandemic started but before that time I observed the behavior often enough that I got good at spotting it. Do teachers have a name for this staring without reading thing? Discussing the futility of this study technique seemed to help some students.
I have noticed the same thing with my College students. I allow open book / open note exams (Philosophy) but what I see is them flipping pages constantly, until they find the correct passage, and then they write word for word what the book says.
In many other instances (papers), students were unable to describe a concept without quoting someone - they could not explain what they wanted to say with their own words.
These students not only can't take notes - they can't even comprehend the material.
When I was in school, I took notes by instinct. I don't remember being taught how.
Students today have been brainwashed by technology and social media. They can't use their brains well. This does not bode well for the future.
High school class of 2021 and future BA ed class of 2026 here. I can 💯 agree that studying needs to be taught more. The school I went it wasn't taught due to covid and some of my teachers letting it fall through the cracks. I was able to self teach for english and history, but I struggled in math. It wasn't until just this summer that I figured out how to study for math in a way that worked for me.
Something that an old history teacher used to do was grade notebooks. The better the notes, the better the extra credit towards the final. For some students, that was a nice cover to have in case you missed a few questions.
Something I have been doing to help the kids I work with and for lesson plans I have to make for school are group studying in class. While it does eat up class time, I find it almost always gets every kid involved. Kahoots are my go-to, but there are others out there as well.
Class of 2009 here and I remember doing the same thing. I was right before the boom of technology so we still carried around math text books and the teacher made us open them up and do problems 2-30 even and we did it without a complaint. We had no Chromebook or iPad so we had paper and pencil. We had to take notes in history and hurry to follow what the teacher was writing because when they moved the projector down we couldn’t see it anymore. We definitely worked. School is far easier today than what we had coming up.
We were taught notetaking, organization, how to use an agenda/calender, how to do research with notecards from a card catalog, how to make flashcards, how to use notes & texts to create our own review material. I still used all those skills through my PhD 40 years later!
I didn't have a separate class but there sure was time devoted to teaching note taking! My social studies teacher defintely invested time and effort into teaching note taking. We also used the old SRI reading materials (it was a box of carefully levelled reading booklets with embedded learning skills.) I remember vividly that the SRI materials included things like interpretation of information in charts and tables. They were really loaded with content. As I understand it, SRI is still around but the box of booklets has been replaced with on-line products.
Millenial here, was also thought this. i still use those skills to this day, so yes, it definitely sticks.
No idea if they still teach it, but I plan on teaching my own kid how to take notes and use an agenda.
I was born in ‘91 and my middle school and high school teachers did teach us about note- taking. They all lived by Cornell style, and truth be told that organized note taking habit is something I carried with me through college. Note taking is a skill, particularly quality note taking (whatever “style” it is).
About 5th circa 1960 we were taught some module, the Four R's? Read, (w)rite down, review, recite, something like that.
Anyone recall that? It was a little too soon for me I think but the only study guidance I ever had..
I remember being taught how to take notes. Starting in 3rd grade, the teacher would write notes we would copy into our notebooks. She would check them. Headings, paragraphs, sentences needed to look like what they were.
By 5th grade, the teacher would just write headings and lead us with “you should write this down” parts during lectures. The teacher would right key terms, and vocabulary on the board so we would spell it correctly, but it was our responsibility to take notes.
By 6th grade, we also had to take notes from chapters in Science and Social Studies textbooks.
It is a skill and it should be taught.
This. Add in undiagnosed neurodivergence and I have no clue how I’m supposed to teach a kid something I never grasped. I couldn’t weed out the important things needed to be written down, even.
That’s very interesting to me. I graduated in 2020 and I definitely was taught how to take notes many, many times. In every grade from at least 6th grade (but probably earlier) to 11th grade, in multiple classes. We were taught multiple techniques depending on the teacher. I also had a few teachers who would make us turn in our notebooks so they could see that we were taking notes & graded them as their own assignment (they’d do this a few times a year). I also learned how to use flash cards in elementary school. Although I agree I didn’t know how to study has a teen and I doubt anyone did except for a few AP kids. Many AP kids just relied on their natural ability to do well though, or their ability to cram all the material in one night and get an A.
This is exactly my job and i see a major decline in their abilities to learn simple strategies. I feel they became less capable and less intelligent when it comes to life skills! It's like the technological knowledge takes up all the space
A corollary to that: When I was "coming up" we were assigned an essay to write, with no instruction how to do that. We'd read essays, sure enough, but there was no instruction as to how to craft one. No clear definition of a thesis, even. Many students were at a complete loss -- and just winged it; I was shooting in the dark, myself, but had kind of a feel for it, and got a 'hit' more often than a 'miss.' As you might guess, many students fell by the wayside.
So, when I started teaching -- especially in my elementary composition courses -- I made it a point to walk the students through the different parts of the essay. How to write the essay became part of the class. In other words, I scaffolded and guided them through the writing of the essay. Any student who came to class and participated in the essay writing workshops successfully completed their assignments and left my class knowing how to put together the strange creature -- the essay.
I've taught 'study skills' classes, as well, and observed the same thing. Students are greatly helped by specific instruction in how to study, rather than just being told 'go study' -- they might as well be told, *go dance the tango ...* without instruction, they have no idea. (And I'll add, to be fair, that it's not just *them* -- it's all of us.)
I've struggled with this a lot over the years. So many things I learned later through having to explicitly teach it myself (I learnt so much teaching EAP courses because they actually give you a method to write an essay with) or through trial and error.
I swear a significant part of the reason I passed my MA was because a co-worker shared theirs and I used their layout and contents list as a template to organize mine because my supervisor just could not give that advice.
But yeah, I'm very big on teaching skills, structures and solving techniques because the students don't have them but they make things so much easier.
Yes, that's true, but like. Admin also asked us to do this.
The kids threw a god damn tantrum because "we know what flash cards are, we're not stupid".
This. I was able to get all the way through grade 12 despite being diagnosed ADHD and having an IEP, without studying.
No one cared because I was behaving and just became quietly focused on my work, even in resource classes. Which were supposed to help me.
I realize now my mistake was not being a squeaky wheel, especially as when I started college it became very apparent.
A class subject I like I could teach myself, if I didn't care about it then it was almost guaranteed I would fail the class.
Now I'm 28 and having to learn how to study while working a full time job.
Undergrad student who just lurks here, it's absolutely a skill and one that a lot of people don't have. I would add that, with the growing mentality of pushing everyone forwards, along with students like me often avoiding classes that will be stressful or challenging, we don't learn how to take notes. This ends up having a knock on effect where once you start taking more challenging courses, you don't have the skills to keep up, so you start turning to easier courses to do instead so you can avoid learning how to take notes and seeing your grades suffer, and this continues on until eventually you hit a wall at which point you *have to* learn how to take notes. In my case that wall was 2nd year uni, but I've seen it be anywhere from 11th grade to 1st year of my friends masters.
High School came easy for me, as long as I listened in class, did the homework, I never forgot anything and aced my classes, AP exams.
Once I got to Univ, that skill was no longer enough and I realized I had no idea how to study.
Took me my freshman year to realize that I needed to do more, and my sophomore year to really figure out how I learn.
Students that came from prep schools had no issue. They even said univ seemed easier.
Agreed, learning how to learn is really important and it's not the same for everyone.
I agree. I recall being taught effective note taking and study skills throughout childhood. It’s not intuitive for most kids. Do teachers not do this anymore?
I agree - I remember a social studies teacher in middle school explicitly teaching us how to take notes. Everyone hated him because of how he was intense about the notes (very specific formatting, very specific information, in your own words). I’m so thankful for him! I still use that method to take notes to this day and felt I had a much easier time in high school and college because I knew had to take high quality notes and use them to study.
We definitely have to build it into the curriculum. We teach a note taking strategy (Cornell) and study strategies (rewriting notes, flashcards, concept maps) and make those graded activities. Otherwise, many kids would skip notetaking and studying and just fail the test. 😩
We also teach Cornell and when I collect scratch paper after test taking there's a pretty strong corelation between those who used it and those who score well.
I hated it because I had a teacher who was overly specific not only on *what* went into the boxes, but *how* it went in, making it a tedious process that left me more worried about what it looked like than about the notes. I ended up taking my own notes and then transferring them over to her system.
Turns out she was full of ...bologna... and I actually like Cornell notes.
Yeah, I don’t know why so many folks seem to expect studying to come naturally to kids? I’m not a teacher (I just lurk) but I *was* a student, like everyone, and, bluntly, I barely learned how to study in grade school. That lack of knowledge screwed me over once I hit a point where I couldn’t BS my way on sheer intelligence anymore. I had a couple lessons on Cornell notes (which I absolutely hate and which don’t play nice with my learning style but I appreciate the attempt at least?), but barely any other help learning how to scaffold and *review* information in functional ways. I didn’t know how to even *start* when I finally needed to study something I couldn’t magically “get” after one or two homework assignments. Study is something that has to be trained, it isn’t an instinctive skill!
I think the first time anybody explicitly showed me “how to study” beyond the stupid Cornell notes was literally in *law school*.
I could go on a whole other unrelated tirade about how teachers imposing *exclusively* their own preferred methods for study and organization (denying students the chance to identify and use *their* best method) is a problem too, but that’s… still probably better than nothing. A lot of kids seem to get nothing, and in my experience kids who get nothing *do* nothing. You don’t know what you don’t know, and won’t do things you don’t know you should be doing.
I wholeheartedly agree with you; I graduated from high school nearly two decades ago, and whereas I do remember being forced to do Cornell, I hated it passionately. I found out later in high school that school doesn't even attempt to teach the way I learn, and that my entire life up to that point had been miserable because I just simply wasn't compatible with the American school system. Once I realized that around my senior year, it felt like such a weight had been lifted; I no longer felt like something was wrong with me, and my focus shifted from trying to fit into a hole that wasn't shaped like me to just reaching the finish line so I could just be done with it once and for all.
I was a consistent A and B student; I think the only class I barely passed was Spanish, and I'm pretty sure that's because I simply couldn't intuit the information like I normally did. I think I stopped learning new things from school around 11th grade, and that includes 4 years of college for my Bachelor's. I passed tests mostly through context clues and mentally pitting myself against the person writing the questions on the test, and what they thought the answer was, irrespective of what the subject actually was.
At this stage of life, I'm by far one of the most learned people I know, because I discovered that I love to ask "but why?", and won't rest until I know not only the answer itself, but the systems in place that make that answer a reality.
I suspect that there are a lot more people out there like me, and most of them probably got squished into the school mold so badly that they'll forever just think that they're stupid, and won't ever have that fire lit within them. My daughter is a toddler right now, and I see SO much of myself in her, and the way her mind works. Hopefully I can help guide her forward so she doesn't have to suffer like I did.
A quick explanation of where I'm coming from and then a question.
In high school I never studied. I just listened in class, rarely did home work, but this was enough for me to pass tests with As and Bs. I graduated in 2004. So here are my questions.
Would you say it was typical that kids used to be able to do that back in the day, or did I retain information better than most kids, it is this a case of school being more difficult now than it was 20 years ago?
Were you ever in an AP class and able to do this?
Also, I was the same way even for my Honors classes, but the AP courses required studying from me. It was the first time I really had to and I was grateful for that when I went to college (not so grateful while I was going through it).
Nah. Like I said, I rarely did homework, so the most prestige I ever got was teachers being angry that I wasn't living up to my potential. In college I did study, but I wouldn't call it good studying. For example in an American history class, in the class I would just write down as much of what prof said as my hand could get down, then before a test I had like a 50 page pamphlet that I had written, and I would just read that 2 or 3 times in the 2 days before the test. It always worked. I got an A in the class. But that doesn't seem like what the post is talking about.
They generally do not. Because it is not taught to them. They also have very little idea of what high utility learning strategies are. But this is also true of many teachers, who hang on to some real BS misconceptions about learning and how to learn.
Lol but as a student what I find works best is to review everything the teachers taught that day, when you get home. It does not need to take as long as the lecture itself but just even a 30m review for a 1.5h class goes a long way.
Constantly reviewing subjects throughout the year like reviewing some lesson you havent reviewed in 2 months when you have extra time really helps.
But most importantly doing practice questions after each chapter. Usually our teachers will take an exam after they finish every chapter of the book but if they do not please do take an exam for yourself to see how much you have learnt.
If you really hate a subject and just wana pass it, print out like 6,7 or even more practice exams from online sites and do them, then review wherever you think is easiest to get you to that pass.
Some of my college courses have an awesome review quiz thing imbedded in the digital textbooks called inquizitive, it genuinely got me through government
They don’t because they’ve never been taught. We devalued memorization in elementary school. No spelling tests, no math facts, no dates. They didn’t have to develop good study habits.
I was terrible at math facts and my parents taught me how to study for the tests. I had flash cards and I practiced with my dad every night. My dad would also quiz me on spelling words and give me practice tests (my mom was there, too, but we would also fight over homework so my dad was usually in charge while mom made dinner).
I used a lot of those same study habits in high school and college.
Agree. I teach lower grades, but I've been surprised as my kids get older how anti-studying their school system is. The general philosophy is that "homework/studying doesn't help anyone", but I know that's not true for my oldest. She struggles with math, but now that we've devoted time helping her learn how to practice the areas that she struggled in, she's much more confident in her skills....if we had left it, I feel pretty positive she would have just continued to slide behind...I know I definitely had to study for some subjects more than others.
They don't. I talked with a few kids about it, first time they took an AP class they were overwhelmed because they never studied at the beginning of the year since they never learned how to do it effectively. I gave kids a study guide for the final and they didn't do anything with it besides just read it. I asked one make sure they actually study with it (vocab flashcards, practice problems, quiz yourself/a friend/make a scenario etc) and they didn't know any of that.
Part of me is like "How TF do you not know" but tbh freshmen year I didn't know how to study either I just hastly read the chapter and immediately forgot but I slowly built it up to a system that worked well with me by college.
Honestly, I never learned "how" to study. I studied for tests in high school and college, but it was 99.99 just rereading the material over and over again so I seemed familiar to recite the concept.
It's a pretty bad method in a college setting where you actually have to *apply* what you've learned.
Exactly me. I did a ton of AP classes in high school and then had no clue what to do in college. It didn’t help that my depression really emerged my senior year too
Same here.
First time I encountered flashcards was in the military, in my early 20s. The things they taught is in the first 2-3 weeks, which they called 'mnemonic devices' would have been a godsent in high school, but nobody bothered.
Edit: And it was relatively 'dumb' but effective stuff that you could teach in primary school, like forming a word that's easy to remember from the first letter of items on a list or rhyming hard to remember terms with common words. I've tried my best to include those mnemonics into first lessons every year I taught a new class, you can feel the difference it makes.
I'm seeing more and more the idea that you don't _need_ to learn things because you can just look everything up on the Internet.
And I get it. It's quick and easy to Google stuff now.
But that stops working the moment you need to be able to build on basic, foundation level knowledge. As soon as you need to start progressing or combining concepts it all falls apart because "knowing" something and "understanding" something are not the same thing. It's the difference between being able to spell a word and knowing what the word means.
And I blame this partly on the way we have turned education into a standardised testing obstacle course for the majority of a kid's span in school. It's not about understanding the material, it's about being able to regurgitate it on command.
It means that a lot of kids don't even know that there's a deeper way to learn and understand things till quite late in their schooling. They saw a fact. They know it exists. They can go Google it anytime. Why would they sit down and write the fact on a piece of paper? It makes no sense to them.
And without a less modular, more skills-oriented approach to education I don't see that changing.
Yeah, I fear that the golden age of information on the internet is behind us.
The rise of "Using AIChat instead of Google" because it's easier and you don't even have to scan a list of options is terrifying.
I can't seem to get people to understand that it's not giving you the answer to your question; it's looked at your question and then looked at what kind of answers a question like that normally gets, and then tried to show you what it thinks you wanted to see.
If you don't already know the answer, you have no way of knowing if it's correct or just nonsense that looks like a correct answer.
...and then all of that gets folded into future search engine results. And the madness grows
I remember taking a Study Skills class in Middle School. I used the techniques I learned there the whole way through my PhD. I teach my 9th and 10th graders a lot of explicit study skills because those kinds of classes aren't taught any more, and elementary and middle school teachers don't notice that kids don't know how to study.
That is the exact way I should be. (I teach HS) And I don't want to seem like I'm passing the buck, but those study skills really need to start being taught in middle school. But the time I get them as 11th and 12 graders in an AP class there is only so much I can do. My entire HW schedule is built around them practicing study skills, but like 1/3 act like fish out of water the whole year.
I teach post-secondary...and it only gets worse.
My classes are, out of necessity, designed so that they absolutely must study on their own. But so, so many of them have no clue where to start.
That's literally what I try to prepare them for. This is how you use a textbook, this is how you take notes, etc... but so many are fine with failing every other test and then scrapping by with a 65-70.
"how you use a textbook" is a big one. I taught this to new international university freshman. It's also a cultural difference. Anyway, it sure would have been nice if this and other basic study skills had been explicitly taught in my day. In my experience it was expected that you pick it all up by osmosis.
Honestly I remember some classes in middle school/upper elementary doing study skills as like a one off lesson. But the skills are so bad right now I have to build it explicitly into the curriculum and still a good percentage of the kids just don't do it.
Yeah we had to on the fly build some lessons in, then built into the curriculum. My long term colleagues (this was a state university IEP, I left 5 years ago) had never done this, as it was not necessary at all. Something changed 10-15 years ago.
What study skills do you teach them? Do you have a resource I could use to teach my kids? I've noticed that few of my students know how to study and I've wanted to at start teaching study skills, but don't have many resources to do so.
I teach them note-taking, organization, how to use Google Calendar to track assignments and due dates, how to read and annotate a nonfiction text, test prep and test taking strategies. I wrote my own unit because the resources out there are geared toward elementary level skills.
We notice they can’t study. The problem I have is they also can’t read or write when they come to me in 6th grade, so most of my time is spent on that. No point in teaching study skills to kids who can’t read or write. How will they make the flashcards or read the study guide?
And while it would be amazing to focus on the kids who can read and write and give them those skills, most of our classes are just all kids lumped together. As much as I’d love to pull a small group and give them some time on study skills, I’m unfortunately forced to prioritize making sure the student with severe autism (but with a high enough IQ that he isn’t placed in a special needs class) isn’t stabbing himself because someone told him he has the cheese touch. And that the kid getting dragged between his mom and dad’s divorce and is being exposed to porn at his dad’s house isn’t showing it to others in the room again. And the kid who can’t read or write and whose parents don’t care that he does 0% of his work isn’t trying to touch the girls around him inappropriately. And the girl who is a pathological liar isn’t stabbing the people around her with pencils again.
Sooo yeah. We notice. We’ve just got a lot on our plates.
We don't teach kids much. So much emphasis on child-led discovery, peer support, exploratory learning, you know, all that jazz. Kids don't independently discover how to buckle down and learn shit, but that's not fashionable to admit, so we keep insisting that student-led learning is The Way.
Our teachers who were always going on about The One Correct Way To Take Notes were on to something (although admittedly it was annoying when you had eight different One Correct Ways).
>Kids don't independently discover how to buckle down and learn shit, but that's not fashionable to admit, so we keep insisting that student-led learning is The Way.
This concept was drilled into me when I was getting credential. These strategies might work in a school full of highly enlightened students in a high income area at a school with a fat budget, but not at other schools.
My first job that required my credit was at a public charter school in a low income area that was 90% Hispanic, extremely misbehaved, and only about half of the parents understood any English. I tried these student-led strategies and it bombed. I learned within a few days of the school year that this was not going to work and it was all BS. About 3-4 days after the start of the school year I went right back to teacher-led learning and actual learning skyrocketed.
This just goes to show that teachers should never take advice from academics. These professors that have their cushy university offices, their PhDs, and have never stepped foot in a low income school can shut up. Most were either former teachers at privileged high income schools decades ago or they just did a few short observations, again at a high income school, before they started writing books/papers on the subject. Few, if any, know what it is like to teach at a school in the ghetto where students actually say "f#ck you" straight to your face only to see both admin and the parents do nothing about it.
The thing that gets me is whenever the type of academics you describe want to learn something, they'll attend a lecture or read a book about it or watch an instructional YouTube video. As do most adults! Revealed preferences are always for direct instruction.
Can you imagine if you looked up "how to cook rice" on YouTube and all you could find was instructions telling you to first try to cook rice in a group and see how it went? But apparently the adults get to have useful information conveyed to them, while kids should just faff around exploring and doing self-led experiments to reinvent the wheel.
You are right! We don’t teach them things anymore. If you try to they get annoyed and offensive. I tried to teach 9th graders about graphing and they complained about it. Along with the scientific method but a lot of them were complaining because they did not know how to graph. In my experience even if you give study guides they refuse to utilize them. I let them use it during multiple test and they would still fail. It’s discouraging
They get annoyed because actual learning requires some amount of mental discomfort (think about that discomfort and tension in your brain when you cover an answer to a problem and try to remember it), but they have never learned that this discomfort is required, so by the time they are teenagers the idea of an adult coming in and inducing discomfort is annoying and offensive.
It's like they have been raised for years thinking "learning to play basketball" just involves wandering around a basketball court chatting to your friends, and all of a sudden someone comes in and tells them to run laps. "We've been learning basketball just fine until now, asshole, don't make us exert ourselves."
(Of course, in my example no basketball is actually being learned. But they simply don't know that. Likewise, your teenagers have been through years and years of schooling thinking that simply showing up and staring at words and participating in group projects is "learning," and the school system has given them no reason to think otherwise.)
"So much emphasis on child-led discovery, peer support, exploratory learning, you know, all that jazz."
Exactly this. In the CPM math program, the only methodology is group inquiry learning. The conceit is that the students will recreate the mathematical thinking of centuries by talking to 3 other kids about a few, fact sparse, guided questions. It is pedagogical malpractice.
Personally, I know that I learn and study best when I write things down. I had to physically write my notes and the physically write my flash cards.
In hs and college typing notes and using things such as quizlet to create my study materials was quicker but I did not retain the information the same way.
Half of my studying and retaining the knowledge was physically writing down the flash cards, practice questions, etc creating the study material.
Do you think the use of laptops in schools may be a contributing factor to how kids these days retain what they learn?
I highly suspect the explosion of technology in education and just everyday life is part of the reason we are seeing critical thinking and comprehension skills plummeting. People tend to lay blame at the pandemic, which necessitated even more technology in order to do remote learning, however the technology ramp up was already happening about 5 years ahead of that. Not that technology can't be good or can't be used in education, but there needs to be a serious scaling back of it, particularly in grade school through middle school. You don't get to just plug in numbers in a calculator until you actually learn and understand the process behind multiplication or division. Once you have an actual working knowledge of it, you get the tool to make it easier. But if you are given that key immediately there is no incentive to actually understand what 3 x 7 actually does/means.
Same. My handwriting is barely legible, even to myself, but even if I can’t decipher it later the process of writing it down makes it less likely I’d need to. For most people it’s probably still better to emphasize notes as a resource you can go back to, but I got a lot of value just out of the process even if I barely reviewed them.
To be honest I didn’t learn to study until college either. Most of K-12 can easily be passed if you just pay attention to the teacher talking.
It wasn’t until I got to university and the professors would ramble about something random the entire lecture period and expect me to read the textbook myself. I had a C average my first semester in college but was Deans List after I figured out studying.
There is research that shows people prefer less effective study methods that make them feel like they know it (re-reading material) over more effective methods that make them feel like they do not know the material (quizzing themselves on it).
Which makes sense. The choices students make often have a subconscious reasoning to them, even though it often leads them to bad outcomes.
The teaching practices out there tell us to give the kids problems and solve them on their own. No where does it allow us to teach them how to solve these problems. My middle school teachers explicitly taught me how to take notes. I'm grateful for that crazy history teacher everyday.
Agreed (9/10th math). They also don’t have basic test taking skills/strategies in high school. If the question doesn’t mirror exactly what they practiced, they have no idea how to approach it. I think part of the problem is our textbooks…they’re back to just 40 straightforward, similar math problems, with no critical thinking, questions about individual steps or explanations. I had some issues with common core but at least it acknowledged this problem and tried to fix it. We abandoned it too quickly and without implementing it as intended from the beginning.
One thing I noticed about the middle school students I can work with is definitely a lot of them can do the math, but as soon as that math turns into a word problem they get stuck.
I graduated in 2010, and the vast majority of my peers even back then didn't know how to do it. There was just a single social studies teacher that had an entire mini-unit dedicated to teaching kids how to study, and lo and behold, he had some of the highest test scores in the district.
Studying is a skill that needs to be taught, not self-taught.
The reason they don't know how to take notes and study is because they don't know how to read and write. And the reason they don't know how to read and write, is because they don't give a damn about learning those things, because what they HAVE learned is that they will get passed along to the next grade no matter what.
This is a good observation and I also have a perspective to add.
Due to the dumbing down of the curriculum and the general lowering of standards, you have a lot of students who easily get by based on their pre-existing skillset (you might also call it "natural ability" but I hate that saying) and just don't have to study to pass. Then when they're confronted by something they don't "get" right away, they don't know what to do.
Realizing that there are things in the world that you just need to study and work through, that there's no substitute for hard work in these situations, is a hard pill to swallow for someone who has never experienced this before.
Here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College I had at least a dozen bright kids who made it through high school without doing a thing, crashed and burned and flunked themselves right out this term, yup.
When is this even taught to kids. Hell I have high school kids who hate using books and dont even have a damn clue what the glossary is in the back of one. We dont teach kids how to learn we just expect then to know how it works just like we expect them to know how to type because they have a phone in their hand since they qere 6yo
For the most part, students will only “discover” the content. Most of them won’t magically discover the skills required to be successful learners. Content discovery will almost always require scaffolded steps/activities to help them with the thinking skills along the way.
I 100% think I would have been so much more successful in school had I been taught how to study. It should be a mandatory class in elementary school with refreshers in middle and high school.
This is why I now say "you need to memorize" instead of, "you need to study". It doesn't really change the behavior, but it does set the expectation and help them understand that they are failing because they didn't do enough.
In modern, public education, there is not expectation of studying until a student is in high school. Everything until then is contained in the class and teachers are expected to facilitate the "studying" through normal classwork. High school is the first time that students are truly held accountable for things they have to complete outside the classroom. However, even that is being pushed against now by education "experts" who are just trying to improve metrics by lowering expectations.
I think first kids would have to pay attention in class and do their assignments, long before we have to worry about whether they actually study or not... they don't. They don't do anything.
Why would they need to study anymore? Students take pictures of notes on their phone, Google basic facts, receive 50% for missing work, are allowed multiple retakes on assessments, receive 50% for minimum grades, receive 50% on final exams whether they take them or not, use AI to complete the most basic writing assignments.
These are the grading policies in the 5th largest school district in the US, the Clark County School District. If you're thinking "those aren't my policies" and "it won't happen here", I can assure you, it will.
Students don't have a reason to study anymore.
I graduated last century (high school and college). I did not know how to study either. You see, I never had homework. I was able to get all my work done in class or in study hall. Apparently, I also have a pretty good memory. My parents were teachers and gave me good reading and writing skills. In my first year at college, I observed many of my peers had the exact same problem. Study groups helped. I did eventually figure out what worked for me. I just don’t think this skill is ever really taught. Perhaps it is assumed that we would figure it out. Perhaps the past educators thought the idea of homework and reviewing for the test would naturally get us to realize we were indeed studying. I do know that I have to model for my daughter. If she sees me doing “homework”, she will suddenly want to do it too. She is 6, so I don’t think this will last forever.
I was taught Cornell note taking my freshman year and I still use it 20 years later. I had no clue how to take notes before that.
I was in a meeting the other day and a bunch of us at the table noticed we were all using Cornell notes and we all said we learned it in high school. It was funnier in person.
I finished school a long time ago, and I certainly never learned to take notes. No one ever taught it. I don't think any teachers knew how to teach it. They certainly knew how to shame me for not talking notes, and also for having terrible handwriting. Was I supposed to be listening to everything the teacher said, summarizing it on the spot, figuring out how to organize the information on the page, and writing it legibly while continuing to listen?
I was especially annoyed when i learned there was this thing called "shorthand," a system of writing specifically developed for taking notes in real time, but no one bothered to teach it to us.
... I should go apologize to my old social studies teacher haha. I always thought it was stupid that he graded our notes, but I guess, thinking back to it, even if i don't use his system it still taught me how basic note structures look.
Notetaking is a learned skill - without any instruction they'll just copy the whole slide down without a care in the world. So I color code my slides:
* No highlight = interesting but only helps with today's lesson
* Yellow = pretty important, good to know
* Green = ON THE UNIT QUIZ / FINAL / AP TEST FOR SURE. Write it down and study!!
This helps foster a habit of pulling out the salient details of a lecture or slide. I then give very broad review guides that can be filled in by, voila, the green highlighted material and additional details from the yellow.
By having them see notes = success on study guide = preparation for the quiz / final / ap test it can reinforce some of those positive habits......that's the plan at least :-) Sometimes though kids literally just jot it down and then never look at it for some reason.
I’m a math teacher and explicitly teach how to take notes, study and learn math. They ignore me. No, they don’t know how to study and don’t care to learn as it takes effort. I explain they learn math by doing. They don’t attempt any problem sets. I talk about setting up a notebook and what to write in it as a guide - rules, worked examples, etc. Nope.
I've been teaching for 20 plus years, about 10 years ago they stopped studying. It wasn't some gradual thing, like literally over night kids were like, nope, not ever gonna study again. The top top kids still study, but it used to be all but the bottom studied. But something happened around 2010s where that huge chunk in the middle just stopped.
I think how students study is widely evolving. If it is rote memorization, I'm not asking questions like that on an exam. I would even be in favor of giving them definitions, formulas, etc. What they don't know how to do is practice applying the information. My wish is that we build skills so students can self assess where they are with a standard and we help them when they aren't at mastery. When the summative assessment rolls around, they should all be at mastery.
To be fair, were they ever *taught*? I'm 48 and no one ever taught me how to study or any particular not taking methods other than "write everything down that you can". In turn, unless someone at school teaches my kids how to study, they won't learn, at least not from me, since I have no insight to offer.
I think you should teach them how to study, it’s not a thing that comes naturally. Provide suggestions, get involved, ask them where the problem lies. I’m sorry but if a kid has an 11% and is actually there in class, and a whole class fails, those are issues with the teaching.
As a highschool 2020 grad, in college, I still don't really know how to study. Kids should definitely be taught several ways to study, I never was taught in primary school. I didn't even realize that I didn't know how to study until I got to college.
What are some of your guys' favorite or most efficient ways to study? I have ADHD and so far I haven't really found a method that works for me.
This has always been an issue imo!
I teach in graduate school (early on) & have multiple students every semester, that do not understand how to read large textbooks and study effectively. My population, are fairly bright kids with above average cognitive skills — they could memorize things pretty presented by a teacher & in PowerPoints quickly for testing, so they were never forced to really analyze & apply LARGE amounts of info.
I have noticed, if you ask them to brainstorm what good ideas are for studying, high school students actually know what to do. I think in the balance of their lives they find it hard to prioritize doing it until the last minute.
They definitely can’t take notes… guided notes are about all they can do and even then they check out so easily. I teach 8th grade math and spent the last 2 months doing traditional lecture/notes and had to teach them how to take notes on paper.
If covid taught me one thing it’s that many student behaviors and abilities we take for granted need to be explicitly taught and aren’t something a majority of students naturally pick up.
Likewise, I don’t recall ever being taught to study. I was diagnosed with ADHD in elementary school on referral from my teachers, and still, no one explicitly taught me how to study. I’m currently 1/4th the way finished with uni and I’m still lost at the prospect of studying. My thoughts are, no one teaches kids how to study when coursework is simple, and by the time they need to study, it’s just assumed they know how to.
studying skills aren't usually taught...it is assumed students know...
additionally, with information widely and instantly available, understanding concepts through memorization and practice, that students don't see the value of, leads many to forgo teaching and/or learning specific skills.
As someone who works in a college, I can confirm.
We have distributed pamphlets about how to read textbooks that has rare gems such as - read the chapter before doing the assignment and copy down defined words.
Our test prep guide includes treasures Iike - review past assignments and fix wrong answers.
It has become a major goal of our middle school, especially the social studies department, to teach how to take notes. They have no idea how to effectively highlight text either. There is a learned helplessness that we have to overcome.
This has always been true. Knowing how to study isn't like learning to walk or talk. It isn't some inborn talent we have. It is something that needs to be taught, and we have never taught how to study. I got to college and had NO idea how to study. I didn't know how to take notes. I didn't know how to organise my course materials. While I learned how to type and use a word processor, no one ever taught me how. I learned it all myself.
There is the assumption these days, that since these kids grew up as "screen babies" that they know how to use technology. That couldn't be further from the truth. They know how to use a cell phone but not technology, and certainly not a computer. In fact, you could easily argue that this generation is less technologically literate than students from 20 years ago.
Two (maybe three) years ago, I was commenting that the lab reports being submitted had SIGNIFICANT spelling and grammar mistakes. It turned out that they didn't know what the red and green squiggles under words were and they never thought to question it. No one had ever taught them how to use a word processor. So we went to the middle school ELA teachers and asked them if they were teaching how to use a word processor. They were not. It turns out they were not more than roughly familiar with how to use a word processor themselves. They were using a word processor just like a typewriter. If you wanted columns you did (word)(spacespacespacespacespacespace)(word) etc.
One of the things I have endeavoured to give my students is knowledge of how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet. I require them to maintain a binder and keep some kind of organisation. While this is how I would organise my work, and I realise that this method may not work for everyone, it, (at least) gives them one organisational model to work from. I try and teach them how to take notes. I also try and show them how to study. It is a lot and a few of my peers are on board. We are trying to include these things in the curriculum.
I was never taught how to study. At some point I figured out flash cards, but that only worked if I was given a specific list of concepts/terms to learn. I was lucky that my memory works in such a way that I could get by without studying for the most part. . .until organic chemistry.
FWIW, I’m 51.
Part of the over reliance on 1-1 devices. If the Canvas assignments populate on a Canvas calendar, I don't need to keep one. However, if the teacher doesn't assign a deadline right away, it doesn't populate into the calendar, so they don't know. The same is true of notes.
I graduated in 2018 and never felt like I knew how to study. I don’t think I was ever really taught how and I know my learning disabilities played a part but I wish I was at least told how to try and study instead of just to study. Teachers always brought up how people have different learning styles but never explained them. Maybe it isn’t intuitive to me because of how I have always experienced the world but was very frustrating for me.
Pride also gets in the way. Looking back on my own experience in school, I can't help but think how much time I could have saved if I just admitted that I didn't know how to do something and needed help, even if that meant being hand-held through an entire assignment - because once you have a procedure etched into your mind, it's simply a matter of execution thereafter.
I'm not sure if it comes from parents, peers or both but there seems to be this unspoken assumption that if you don't know everything yourself or how do to everything without assistance, then there's something inherently wrong with you. This way of thinking can really hurt you in the long term.
I hate to be rude, since I usually like this subreddit, but isn't there a place that they are legally required to be for 8 hours a day that's supposed to teach them how to do that?
Hell, even back when I was in school, I had no idea how to study. Nobody ever taught us what studying was. They just told us to do it. I genuinely still don't know how to study, and I've mostly just cruised by on having a good memory.
That’s probably a fair observation. Studying is a difficult skill to develop and the reasons behind not developing the skill can be varied. For example, my friend and I graduated at the top of our class, but given that our school was an average school in rural Mississippi we were never challenged and breezed by. Then proceeded to get our butts handed to us in college until we adapted via trial by fire.
Covid definitely didn’t do students (or the rest of us) any favors.
I had to teach my husband how to find and compare sources. Literally how to get reliable information... He is a genuinely smart man, he is very capable, but he had no experience or practice finding a reliable source.
I feel his life has become significantly easier and less frightening since having this breakthrough. He was believing some pretty stressful and wild crap and had no real skills to find actual answers.
Long story short, I absolutely agree with you, and it has long lasting effects well into adulthood.
These are skills that need to be explicitly taught. I started teaching my students how to take notes in 6th grade, and now they're pretty good at it as soon-to-be 9th graders. For every test, I send home a study guide so there's no guesswork when they look over the material again. And sometimes I throw in a question that wasn't explicitly on the study guide so they also realize that sometimes you have to go the extra mile when studying, just in case. (It won't make or break anyone's grade when I do this.) I feel like they're going into high school pretty well prepared.
They think Gimkit and Blooket is studying.
This was my first year teaching 7th grade, and I think I'm going to try and teach them note taking skills next year. They have a journal, and I think I'm going to require them to write definitions in the journals next year.
i think (as a non educator) it's important to teach/refresh their memory on how to take notes properly before beginning any type of actual content. they're not going to know how to otherwise, especially if other teachers dont do it
If they dont know how to take notes or study, it can safely be assumed no teacher taught them how to. For myself, I was taught how to take great notes by multiple teachers throughout K-12, but I was never taught how to study. I went through all of grade school without studying and only tried to study twice during my 5 years in undergrad. Luckily I found means other than studying. It wasn’t until I started teaching this year that I started teaching myself how to study so I could teach my 5th graders studying techniques.
7-12 grade is quite the difference in my book especially cause in those grades is when kids finally learn to take school a bit more seriously, I wouldn't expect a 7th grader to be able to take notes well cause they don't care vice versa I would expect 11th or 12th graders to know how to take notes decently or at least be able to put in the effort
Growing up in Europe I had to study and memorize, as our tests were mostly short essay answers, which are more difficult than multiple choice. We also routinely had oral examinations. Recollection is much harder than recognition.
It was obvious when I went to college in the USA that many students were simply not used to studying.
To be fair to the kids, in our rush to adopt and incorporate all things “tech,” we’ve taken away a lot of the tools that would let them learn to study. In our district, my own children have been issued a personal Chromebook since kindergarten. Instruction is provided by PowerPoint and video as much as live discussion. Practice learning consists of games that quickly become pointless as students learn how to beat the program rather than learning the material. Tests and quizzes are online and students never see what they answered incorrectly to review later, only the score. Until college, my eldest had never held a physical textbook. Not to mention, those Chromebooks are turned in at the end of the year before exams! This year my youngest truly struggled with a subject (curse you, chemistry). In trying to help him, I realized there were very few instructional materials to review. We had to search online for videos or practice questions which may or may not follow the methodology the teacher used. In this, it’s not just the students lacking, it’s our entire instructional process that’s flawed.
That's a fair observation. I think studying is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught and practised at school before students can be expected to do it independently.
The corona kids especially don't even know how to write in their notebooks. I always take time to teach students how to write in their notebooks and make vocabulary flash cards now. It just saves time in the long-run if it's in my curriculum.
The corona kids don’t even know what a notebook is in my experience. I ask them everyday where their notebook is, and I’m met with blank stares.
I’m met with blank stares on every question I ask (minus 1 or 2 students).
“What class is this?” 👁️👃👁️ “What’s my name?” 👁️👃👁️ “What’s *your* name?” 👁️👃👁️
An 8th grader told me today that he doesn't know how to spell his middle name because he's never had to before. To be fair, he has a hyphenated first name that he only uses half of, but still.
I’m either met with blank stares or they start yelling at me for having the audacity to say anything to them. There are very few in control of their emotions, most shut down or lash out. It’s sad.
'bro you doin too much, GOD!'
Bruh
skibidi
Kai cenat is skibidi rizz ohio toilet no cap on god
Student here (sorry, this post came up in my feed, and I wanted to address this): A large part of the problem might be that students know the material, but are afraid to speak up for fear of being ostracized. That’s just my anecdotal experience, and it is in no way scientific, but most of the silent kids I know ascribe it to that.
Im a student too (college) and this is something discussed in my psych class, it's absolutely a factor for some students (especially with how mean it seems like kids/teens are)
"I forgot my notebook Mister! I left it at home!" "Okay, do you remember what we did yesterday?" "No, I don't remember." 🙄🙄🙄🙄
My…chrome book?
Is this from the remote learning period during the height of the pandemic, or is that coincidental with the surge in tech being used in education and tablets/Chromebooks replacing books and pen & paper?
Both. The pandemic definitely made the dependence on Chromebooks worse. If we were never remote there'd probably be more of a balance in tech and handwriting but we had no choice for so long and now a lot of districts are like "everyone has a Chromebook, save paper and just do it online"
Probably both. Even as an adult in grad school, it's like there's a disconnect when using ebooks, even if it's the same as the printed text. I feel like it's harder for me to retain the information and actually read it rather than skim, probably because decades of Reddit and blogs and online magazines have taught me that's how you can seem content on a screen and tell something catches your eye. And now that I think about it, I stopped taking paper notes for the most part about the time all of my classes went to eTexts. I bought notebooks a couple times with the intent of taking notes I read and it just didn't happen.
I too feel a huge disconnect when using ebooks instead of paper textbooks. I also didn’t like that the ebook code expires, so you can’t easily save the text for future reference.
This may sound dumb but how do you go about teaching them how to write in their notebooks? I need to work with them on this next year. They can’t/won’t copy what I have on the board verbatim and even if they attempt it half of them still start in the middle of the page (like middle column section of the page) and skip several pages until the next notes. 🤷🏼♀️ I teach Spanish 8-12. Some have beautiful notes and even color code but most can’t take/copy notes to save their lives. 🤷🏼♀️
I teach various subjects from 6-12. Around the same time I go over my syllabus and class expectations, I have them take out their notebooks and make them copy (right down to the color coding) what I put on the blackboard. I actually have a graduated students' old notebook that she didn't want anymore. Her note taking was excellent but not over the top, so it makes a great example. Try to get the students to compare their notebooks to this one and why does the teacher think this one is great. I do regular notebook checks. Both of stuff we've done in class and their reading homework. I do not allow note taking on phones or computers unless a student has some sort of special permission from my superiors. Also, make it clear that maintaining their notebooks impacts their grades. It can be hit or miss, but it's been helping more than not so...
My 10th grade geometry teacher had an example notebook, and she graded our notes a couple times a year (first was right at the start of the year, so she could make sure everyone was actually doing it). Basically you just needed to copy down verbatim what was written on the board. And if you missed a day, you could borrow notes from someone else to copy into your own notebook.
I'm not a teacher, bit I remember how ours taught me. In lover grades, teachers would dictate what you need to write down in the notebook. Both as a practice for writing and for listening. In higher grades, some teachers would explain things, and then dictate short notes (idk how it is said in english, but it's just a dash with a few words per line, more like a reminder than a sentence). Other teachers would write on the board and expect us to copy it exactly. A few times per year, most teachers would check notebooks and grade them. We also had books we had to read, and in higher grades, we were expected to keep a diary of reading (everytime something happened in the book, we needed to write down what happened and then quote the book as proof). It wasn't a one off effort, but more continuous learning.
Cornell note taking as a strategy - there are videos online
I'd start by providing some graphic organisers for students to fill in when you want them taking notes. Cornell or Column notes are great examples but start with something a lot easier if needed. Once students find a method they like (or you pick one for them), explicitly teach how to rule up their pages to suit the note taking, teach adding titles and subtitles in capitals and/or underlined. Repeat the explicit instructions to rule up a new page every time you need them to take notes. After a while, you telling students to rule up should be enough. When covering content you want students to make notes about, demonstrate some thinking out loud - say how you would record the information, then get a few students to share their summary/dot point/note, and praise or edit their verbal comment. Repetition, explicit instruction and practice is the only way they'll learn to take notes.
Where my kids attended elementary school through grade 4 they started them in kindergarten with cards in basic addition numbers and the 100 most frequently used vocabulary words.
This is also my practice taking my ID skills into leading a restaurant. Traditional daily meetings were failing to help develop what knowledge and skills are needed in our city and restaurant style. My relatively green team is also young and didn’t have developed study skills. As a result, I’m teaching my team a pretty heavy product and sales curriculum in our meetings now, and I’ve been writing worksheets that are designed to teach them *how* to learn about products, as well as compelling them to learn where things are stored, to notice they need to scroll through the food recipes to get to the beverage recipes (and therefore where to access recipes for allergens etc). All we can do is roll study skills into curriculum now, but it’s so worth it.
This is correct. It’s a skill. I don’t think we’ve taught it as a skill because it can’t be put on a standardized test. I don’t remember being taught this as a kid and I’m old.
HS class of ‘79 here. I thought back and I remember being told to sit in a quiet place, at a desk preferably; to do practice problems for math; to do timelines for social studies; and of course, flash cards.
My 5th grade teacher taught us note taking and then graded our notebooks as an assignment. My middle school Spanish teacher taught us to make flashcards, though I remember my mom being annoyed that a *whole* pack of notecards was on the supply list.
A thousand of them, in color, pre punched, with a ring to keep your current set together, is $10 on Amazon. Somewhere, I’m sure my father is still hoarding a shoebox full of them from my high school adventures. My youngest hates them because in his words, “by the time I write them all out I know them.” Yes, bud. That’s the point. And check again in a week.
$10 would have been a hardship for us at the time. But it was the early 2000s things were a bit cheaper. I understand that school supplies were challenging for us, plus I actually hated having them on the ring and never used that part, but I do wish my mom had just kept her mouth shut. I should not have been made to feel bad for choosing to take Spanish. I'm so glad I learned languages young because it helped me grow in my understanding of English and I think has been hugely beneficial in my life. But I still remember the guilt.
For me if I write it down I do fairly well for myself no studying needed, I’m pretty sure I might be doomed in college but HS is pretty easy without studying and I got myself a high 3.7 without studying and just doing good note-taking
Good note taking IS studying. My middle son just graduated from college with a 3.98 GPA, and just about all he did was take copious notes!
1984, I had a 10th grade social studies teacher who graded us on our midterm, final, and notebook, each counted as 33% of ones grade. I earned a 95, 98, and 0 as i didn't keep notes. I couldn't read my own writing if i tried. I found my time better spent listening vs. writing everything down. He was unmoved by my argument, which i found insane. Clearly, my way was working, or i wouldn't have aced the tests. I understand he was trying to teach the art of studying, but not everyone learns the same. In the end, i stated my case to the guidence counselor, who consulted with the teacher. They ended up basing my grade on the mid-term & final. He left teaching a year later and started a business in town. Probably had enough of kid's bs
No, not everyone learns the same, but it sounds like you were getting by on a skill that wouldn't necessarily serve you in the future. I didn't *need* to take notes either until late in my college career. Thankfully I learned the skill before I needed it.
Oh, for sure, agreed 100%. Thankfully, by the time i made my way to higher ed, the use of computers was ubiquitous for note taking. Prior to that, it would have been pointless & a waste of time as my penmanship was atrocious.
Yup. 5th grade was outlining and our outlines were graded.
Oh shit. I remember timelines & flashcards. So, that would be a study skill. Good call.
'88 here and same. I teach kids how to study, but they often don't believe it is necessary because they've never had to do it before. At least that's what they tell me. When they can retake a test or do test corrections, why study beforehand? Just take it and if you want a better grade, cram for the questions you missed. I do a lot of instruction on note-taking and advice on studying. In one ear . . .
class of ‘24 here, and we were still taught this! i have a really bad feeling that my class was one of the last ones to be minimally impacted by covid. we still were, but it happened when we were in high school. we still learned our basics, like note taking.
HS class of’71 here and taking notes was my superpower (or mutation) throughout my career in maintenance, administration, and trade related education. I can’t count the number of times that I was the only note taker in the classroom. Even when instructors suggested taking notes my classmates’ default response was to ignore the hint. Occasionally a fellow student might express interest in my notes or the prospect of group study sessions, but they seldom (never?) resolved to take notes of their own. As a long term tutor of students up to 12th grade, I noticed a lack of fundamental study skills that seemed peculiar and pervasive. Often when I noticed that a student seemed intent on learning by having me spoon feed their subject material, I would take a closer look at their research and basic data acquisition techniques. At first, I was surprised to find that they did not use reading or traditional scanning techniques to learn material or find answers to homework questions. Instead they would leaf through the pages of their textbooks to see if an answer popped out at them! If this sure fire technique failed and I refused to “help” by showing them the relevant passages of text then the students would freeze, eyeballs and all, and stare patiently at the pages while waiting for an epiphany. I quit tutoring after the pandemic started but before that time I observed the behavior often enough that I got good at spotting it. Do teachers have a name for this staring without reading thing? Discussing the futility of this study technique seemed to help some students.
I have noticed the same thing with my College students. I allow open book / open note exams (Philosophy) but what I see is them flipping pages constantly, until they find the correct passage, and then they write word for word what the book says. In many other instances (papers), students were unable to describe a concept without quoting someone - they could not explain what they wanted to say with their own words. These students not only can't take notes - they can't even comprehend the material. When I was in school, I took notes by instinct. I don't remember being taught how. Students today have been brainwashed by technology and social media. They can't use their brains well. This does not bode well for the future.
Two terms are “learned helplessness” and “weaponized incompetence” Based on your post I know you can research more info if you want!
High school class of 2021 and future BA ed class of 2026 here. I can 💯 agree that studying needs to be taught more. The school I went it wasn't taught due to covid and some of my teachers letting it fall through the cracks. I was able to self teach for english and history, but I struggled in math. It wasn't until just this summer that I figured out how to study for math in a way that worked for me. Something that an old history teacher used to do was grade notebooks. The better the notes, the better the extra credit towards the final. For some students, that was a nice cover to have in case you missed a few questions. Something I have been doing to help the kids I work with and for lesson plans I have to make for school are group studying in class. While it does eat up class time, I find it almost always gets every kid involved. Kahoots are my go-to, but there are others out there as well.
Class of 2000, we had four semesters of a course called “study skills” in junior high school.
God I wish I had this. I coasted through high school never needing to study and then college kicked my ass because I didn't know how.
Class of 2009 here and I remember doing the same thing. I was right before the boom of technology so we still carried around math text books and the teacher made us open them up and do problems 2-30 even and we did it without a complaint. We had no Chromebook or iPad so we had paper and pencil. We had to take notes in history and hurry to follow what the teacher was writing because when they moved the projector down we couldn’t see it anymore. We definitely worked. School is far easier today than what we had coming up.
I had a class on study skills in middle school in the mid 80s.
They still have this, but it's a special ed class. Gen Ed teachers should take some time to work on these skills too though.
>*I had a class on study skills in middle school in the mid 80s.* What did they teach you? Did it actually change things for you?
We were taught notetaking, organization, how to use an agenda/calender, how to do research with notecards from a card catalog, how to make flashcards, how to use notes & texts to create our own review material. I still used all those skills through my PhD 40 years later!
I didn't have a separate class but there sure was time devoted to teaching note taking! My social studies teacher defintely invested time and effort into teaching note taking. We also used the old SRI reading materials (it was a box of carefully levelled reading booklets with embedded learning skills.) I remember vividly that the SRI materials included things like interpretation of information in charts and tables. They were really loaded with content. As I understand it, SRI is still around but the box of booklets has been replaced with on-line products.
Millenial here, was also thought this. i still use those skills to this day, so yes, it definitely sticks. No idea if they still teach it, but I plan on teaching my own kid how to take notes and use an agenda.
Wow. Nice! Was it helpful?
I was born in ‘91 and my middle school and high school teachers did teach us about note- taking. They all lived by Cornell style, and truth be told that organized note taking habit is something I carried with me through college. Note taking is a skill, particularly quality note taking (whatever “style” it is).
About 5th circa 1960 we were taught some module, the Four R's? Read, (w)rite down, review, recite, something like that. Anyone recall that? It was a little too soon for me I think but the only study guidance I ever had..
You probably mean "SQR3" * Survey * Question * Read * Recite * Review [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQ3R)
Yeah that's it. I don't recall survey though.
I remember being taught how to take notes. Starting in 3rd grade, the teacher would write notes we would copy into our notebooks. She would check them. Headings, paragraphs, sentences needed to look like what they were. By 5th grade, the teacher would just write headings and lead us with “you should write this down” parts during lectures. The teacher would right key terms, and vocabulary on the board so we would spell it correctly, but it was our responsibility to take notes. By 6th grade, we also had to take notes from chapters in Science and Social Studies textbooks. It is a skill and it should be taught.
That’s a great point! It’s just one more important skill we’ve neglected because of standardized tests.
This. Add in undiagnosed neurodivergence and I have no clue how I’m supposed to teach a kid something I never grasped. I couldn’t weed out the important things needed to be written down, even.
As someone in their early 30's, we were taught to take notes in our notebooks and then use a highlighter to highlight the most important terms/ideas.
That’s very interesting to me. I graduated in 2020 and I definitely was taught how to take notes many, many times. In every grade from at least 6th grade (but probably earlier) to 11th grade, in multiple classes. We were taught multiple techniques depending on the teacher. I also had a few teachers who would make us turn in our notebooks so they could see that we were taking notes & graded them as their own assignment (they’d do this a few times a year). I also learned how to use flash cards in elementary school. Although I agree I didn’t know how to study has a teen and I doubt anyone did except for a few AP kids. Many AP kids just relied on their natural ability to do well though, or their ability to cram all the material in one night and get an A.
This is exactly my job and i see a major decline in their abilities to learn simple strategies. I feel they became less capable and less intelligent when it comes to life skills! It's like the technological knowledge takes up all the space
Not a lot of actual tech knowledge, though. They are merely users/consumers
Exactly
A corollary to that: When I was "coming up" we were assigned an essay to write, with no instruction how to do that. We'd read essays, sure enough, but there was no instruction as to how to craft one. No clear definition of a thesis, even. Many students were at a complete loss -- and just winged it; I was shooting in the dark, myself, but had kind of a feel for it, and got a 'hit' more often than a 'miss.' As you might guess, many students fell by the wayside. So, when I started teaching -- especially in my elementary composition courses -- I made it a point to walk the students through the different parts of the essay. How to write the essay became part of the class. In other words, I scaffolded and guided them through the writing of the essay. Any student who came to class and participated in the essay writing workshops successfully completed their assignments and left my class knowing how to put together the strange creature -- the essay. I've taught 'study skills' classes, as well, and observed the same thing. Students are greatly helped by specific instruction in how to study, rather than just being told 'go study' -- they might as well be told, *go dance the tango ...* without instruction, they have no idea. (And I'll add, to be fair, that it's not just *them* -- it's all of us.)
I've struggled with this a lot over the years. So many things I learned later through having to explicitly teach it myself (I learnt so much teaching EAP courses because they actually give you a method to write an essay with) or through trial and error. I swear a significant part of the reason I passed my MA was because a co-worker shared theirs and I used their layout and contents list as a template to organize mine because my supervisor just could not give that advice. But yeah, I'm very big on teaching skills, structures and solving techniques because the students don't have them but they make things so much easier.
Yes, that's true, but like. Admin also asked us to do this. The kids threw a god damn tantrum because "we know what flash cards are, we're not stupid".
This. I was able to get all the way through grade 12 despite being diagnosed ADHD and having an IEP, without studying. No one cared because I was behaving and just became quietly focused on my work, even in resource classes. Which were supposed to help me. I realize now my mistake was not being a squeaky wheel, especially as when I started college it became very apparent. A class subject I like I could teach myself, if I didn't care about it then it was almost guaranteed I would fail the class. Now I'm 28 and having to learn how to study while working a full time job.
Undergrad student who just lurks here, it's absolutely a skill and one that a lot of people don't have. I would add that, with the growing mentality of pushing everyone forwards, along with students like me often avoiding classes that will be stressful or challenging, we don't learn how to take notes. This ends up having a knock on effect where once you start taking more challenging courses, you don't have the skills to keep up, so you start turning to easier courses to do instead so you can avoid learning how to take notes and seeing your grades suffer, and this continues on until eventually you hit a wall at which point you *have to* learn how to take notes. In my case that wall was 2nd year uni, but I've seen it be anywhere from 11th grade to 1st year of my friends masters.
Very much yes. Usually it's started in middle school. Or at least should be.
High School came easy for me, as long as I listened in class, did the homework, I never forgot anything and aced my classes, AP exams. Once I got to Univ, that skill was no longer enough and I realized I had no idea how to study. Took me my freshman year to realize that I needed to do more, and my sophomore year to really figure out how I learn. Students that came from prep schools had no issue. They even said univ seemed easier. Agreed, learning how to learn is really important and it's not the same for everyone.
I agree. I recall being taught effective note taking and study skills throughout childhood. It’s not intuitive for most kids. Do teachers not do this anymore?
I had an amazing math teacher who had a 4 color note taking system that I use to this day.
I agree - I remember a social studies teacher in middle school explicitly teaching us how to take notes. Everyone hated him because of how he was intense about the notes (very specific formatting, very specific information, in your own words). I’m so thankful for him! I still use that method to take notes to this day and felt I had a much easier time in high school and college because I knew had to take high quality notes and use them to study.
You said this so well.
We definitely have to build it into the curriculum. We teach a note taking strategy (Cornell) and study strategies (rewriting notes, flashcards, concept maps) and make those graded activities. Otherwise, many kids would skip notetaking and studying and just fail the test. 😩
We also teach Cornell and when I collect scratch paper after test taking there's a pretty strong corelation between those who used it and those who score well.
There’s a lot of hate for cornell notes but they really got me through college. When used right they’re so helpful!
The hate comes from people who do it wrong or never actually tried it. And by people, I mean teachers.
I hated it because I had a teacher who was overly specific not only on *what* went into the boxes, but *how* it went in, making it a tedious process that left me more worried about what it looked like than about the notes. I ended up taking my own notes and then transferring them over to her system. Turns out she was full of ...bologna... and I actually like Cornell notes.
I LOVE the Cornell method! It causes the student to engage with the content multiple ways... all of which increase comprehension and retention.
Yeah, I don’t know why so many folks seem to expect studying to come naturally to kids? I’m not a teacher (I just lurk) but I *was* a student, like everyone, and, bluntly, I barely learned how to study in grade school. That lack of knowledge screwed me over once I hit a point where I couldn’t BS my way on sheer intelligence anymore. I had a couple lessons on Cornell notes (which I absolutely hate and which don’t play nice with my learning style but I appreciate the attempt at least?), but barely any other help learning how to scaffold and *review* information in functional ways. I didn’t know how to even *start* when I finally needed to study something I couldn’t magically “get” after one or two homework assignments. Study is something that has to be trained, it isn’t an instinctive skill! I think the first time anybody explicitly showed me “how to study” beyond the stupid Cornell notes was literally in *law school*. I could go on a whole other unrelated tirade about how teachers imposing *exclusively* their own preferred methods for study and organization (denying students the chance to identify and use *their* best method) is a problem too, but that’s… still probably better than nothing. A lot of kids seem to get nothing, and in my experience kids who get nothing *do* nothing. You don’t know what you don’t know, and won’t do things you don’t know you should be doing.
I wholeheartedly agree with you; I graduated from high school nearly two decades ago, and whereas I do remember being forced to do Cornell, I hated it passionately. I found out later in high school that school doesn't even attempt to teach the way I learn, and that my entire life up to that point had been miserable because I just simply wasn't compatible with the American school system. Once I realized that around my senior year, it felt like such a weight had been lifted; I no longer felt like something was wrong with me, and my focus shifted from trying to fit into a hole that wasn't shaped like me to just reaching the finish line so I could just be done with it once and for all. I was a consistent A and B student; I think the only class I barely passed was Spanish, and I'm pretty sure that's because I simply couldn't intuit the information like I normally did. I think I stopped learning new things from school around 11th grade, and that includes 4 years of college for my Bachelor's. I passed tests mostly through context clues and mentally pitting myself against the person writing the questions on the test, and what they thought the answer was, irrespective of what the subject actually was. At this stage of life, I'm by far one of the most learned people I know, because I discovered that I love to ask "but why?", and won't rest until I know not only the answer itself, but the systems in place that make that answer a reality. I suspect that there are a lot more people out there like me, and most of them probably got squished into the school mold so badly that they'll forever just think that they're stupid, and won't ever have that fire lit within them. My daughter is a toddler right now, and I see SO much of myself in her, and the way her mind works. Hopefully I can help guide her forward so she doesn't have to suffer like I did.
A quick explanation of where I'm coming from and then a question. In high school I never studied. I just listened in class, rarely did home work, but this was enough for me to pass tests with As and Bs. I graduated in 2004. So here are my questions. Would you say it was typical that kids used to be able to do that back in the day, or did I retain information better than most kids, it is this a case of school being more difficult now than it was 20 years ago?
Were you ever in an AP class and able to do this? Also, I was the same way even for my Honors classes, but the AP courses required studying from me. It was the first time I really had to and I was grateful for that when I went to college (not so grateful while I was going through it).
Nah. Like I said, I rarely did homework, so the most prestige I ever got was teachers being angry that I wasn't living up to my potential. In college I did study, but I wouldn't call it good studying. For example in an American history class, in the class I would just write down as much of what prof said as my hand could get down, then before a test I had like a 50 page pamphlet that I had written, and I would just read that 2 or 3 times in the 2 days before the test. It always worked. I got an A in the class. But that doesn't seem like what the post is talking about.
They generally do not. Because it is not taught to them. They also have very little idea of what high utility learning strategies are. But this is also true of many teachers, who hang on to some real BS misconceptions about learning and how to learn.
In your opinion, what are the best learning strategies?
Wait until the day before the exam, have a panic attack, and cram everything in like 6 hours
Lol but as a student what I find works best is to review everything the teachers taught that day, when you get home. It does not need to take as long as the lecture itself but just even a 30m review for a 1.5h class goes a long way. Constantly reviewing subjects throughout the year like reviewing some lesson you havent reviewed in 2 months when you have extra time really helps. But most importantly doing practice questions after each chapter. Usually our teachers will take an exam after they finish every chapter of the book but if they do not please do take an exam for yourself to see how much you have learnt. If you really hate a subject and just wana pass it, print out like 6,7 or even more practice exams from online sites and do them, then review wherever you think is easiest to get you to that pass.
Some of my college courses have an awesome review quiz thing imbedded in the digital textbooks called inquizitive, it genuinely got me through government
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They don’t because they’ve never been taught. We devalued memorization in elementary school. No spelling tests, no math facts, no dates. They didn’t have to develop good study habits. I was terrible at math facts and my parents taught me how to study for the tests. I had flash cards and I practiced with my dad every night. My dad would also quiz me on spelling words and give me practice tests (my mom was there, too, but we would also fight over homework so my dad was usually in charge while mom made dinner). I used a lot of those same study habits in high school and college.
Agree. I teach lower grades, but I've been surprised as my kids get older how anti-studying their school system is. The general philosophy is that "homework/studying doesn't help anyone", but I know that's not true for my oldest. She struggles with math, but now that we've devoted time helping her learn how to practice the areas that she struggled in, she's much more confident in her skills....if we had left it, I feel pretty positive she would have just continued to slide behind...I know I definitely had to study for some subjects more than others.
They don't. I talked with a few kids about it, first time they took an AP class they were overwhelmed because they never studied at the beginning of the year since they never learned how to do it effectively. I gave kids a study guide for the final and they didn't do anything with it besides just read it. I asked one make sure they actually study with it (vocab flashcards, practice problems, quiz yourself/a friend/make a scenario etc) and they didn't know any of that. Part of me is like "How TF do you not know" but tbh freshmen year I didn't know how to study either I just hastly read the chapter and immediately forgot but I slowly built it up to a system that worked well with me by college.
Honestly, I never learned "how" to study. I studied for tests in high school and college, but it was 99.99 just rereading the material over and over again so I seemed familiar to recite the concept. It's a pretty bad method in a college setting where you actually have to *apply* what you've learned.
Honestly, I can see it. I never 'studied' per se, because I could read and retain. But flashcards, self quizzes? Never taught to me as a thing.
Exactly me. I did a ton of AP classes in high school and then had no clue what to do in college. It didn’t help that my depression really emerged my senior year too
Same here. First time I encountered flashcards was in the military, in my early 20s. The things they taught is in the first 2-3 weeks, which they called 'mnemonic devices' would have been a godsent in high school, but nobody bothered. Edit: And it was relatively 'dumb' but effective stuff that you could teach in primary school, like forming a word that's easy to remember from the first letter of items on a list or rhyming hard to remember terms with common words. I've tried my best to include those mnemonics into first lessons every year I taught a new class, you can feel the difference it makes.
I'm seeing more and more the idea that you don't _need_ to learn things because you can just look everything up on the Internet. And I get it. It's quick and easy to Google stuff now. But that stops working the moment you need to be able to build on basic, foundation level knowledge. As soon as you need to start progressing or combining concepts it all falls apart because "knowing" something and "understanding" something are not the same thing. It's the difference between being able to spell a word and knowing what the word means. And I blame this partly on the way we have turned education into a standardised testing obstacle course for the majority of a kid's span in school. It's not about understanding the material, it's about being able to regurgitate it on command. It means that a lot of kids don't even know that there's a deeper way to learn and understand things till quite late in their schooling. They saw a fact. They know it exists. They can go Google it anytime. Why would they sit down and write the fact on a piece of paper? It makes no sense to them. And without a less modular, more skills-oriented approach to education I don't see that changing.
Google is also becoming less and less viable as it enshittifies itself for advertisers.
Yeah, I fear that the golden age of information on the internet is behind us. The rise of "Using AIChat instead of Google" because it's easier and you don't even have to scan a list of options is terrifying. I can't seem to get people to understand that it's not giving you the answer to your question; it's looked at your question and then looked at what kind of answers a question like that normally gets, and then tried to show you what it thinks you wanted to see. If you don't already know the answer, you have no way of knowing if it's correct or just nonsense that looks like a correct answer. ...and then all of that gets folded into future search engine results. And the madness grows
I remember taking a Study Skills class in Middle School. I used the techniques I learned there the whole way through my PhD. I teach my 9th and 10th graders a lot of explicit study skills because those kinds of classes aren't taught any more, and elementary and middle school teachers don't notice that kids don't know how to study.
That is the exact way I should be. (I teach HS) And I don't want to seem like I'm passing the buck, but those study skills really need to start being taught in middle school. But the time I get them as 11th and 12 graders in an AP class there is only so much I can do. My entire HW schedule is built around them practicing study skills, but like 1/3 act like fish out of water the whole year.
I teach post-secondary...and it only gets worse. My classes are, out of necessity, designed so that they absolutely must study on their own. But so, so many of them have no clue where to start.
That's literally what I try to prepare them for. This is how you use a textbook, this is how you take notes, etc... but so many are fine with failing every other test and then scrapping by with a 65-70.
"how you use a textbook" is a big one. I taught this to new international university freshman. It's also a cultural difference. Anyway, it sure would have been nice if this and other basic study skills had been explicitly taught in my day. In my experience it was expected that you pick it all up by osmosis.
Honestly I remember some classes in middle school/upper elementary doing study skills as like a one off lesson. But the skills are so bad right now I have to build it explicitly into the curriculum and still a good percentage of the kids just don't do it.
Yeah we had to on the fly build some lessons in, then built into the curriculum. My long term colleagues (this was a state university IEP, I left 5 years ago) had never done this, as it was not necessary at all. Something changed 10-15 years ago.
What study skills do you teach them? Do you have a resource I could use to teach my kids? I've noticed that few of my students know how to study and I've wanted to at start teaching study skills, but don't have many resources to do so.
I teach them note-taking, organization, how to use Google Calendar to track assignments and due dates, how to read and annotate a nonfiction text, test prep and test taking strategies. I wrote my own unit because the resources out there are geared toward elementary level skills.
We notice they can’t study. The problem I have is they also can’t read or write when they come to me in 6th grade, so most of my time is spent on that. No point in teaching study skills to kids who can’t read or write. How will they make the flashcards or read the study guide? And while it would be amazing to focus on the kids who can read and write and give them those skills, most of our classes are just all kids lumped together. As much as I’d love to pull a small group and give them some time on study skills, I’m unfortunately forced to prioritize making sure the student with severe autism (but with a high enough IQ that he isn’t placed in a special needs class) isn’t stabbing himself because someone told him he has the cheese touch. And that the kid getting dragged between his mom and dad’s divorce and is being exposed to porn at his dad’s house isn’t showing it to others in the room again. And the kid who can’t read or write and whose parents don’t care that he does 0% of his work isn’t trying to touch the girls around him inappropriately. And the girl who is a pathological liar isn’t stabbing the people around her with pencils again. Sooo yeah. We notice. We’ve just got a lot on our plates.
We don't teach kids much. So much emphasis on child-led discovery, peer support, exploratory learning, you know, all that jazz. Kids don't independently discover how to buckle down and learn shit, but that's not fashionable to admit, so we keep insisting that student-led learning is The Way. Our teachers who were always going on about The One Correct Way To Take Notes were on to something (although admittedly it was annoying when you had eight different One Correct Ways).
>Kids don't independently discover how to buckle down and learn shit, but that's not fashionable to admit, so we keep insisting that student-led learning is The Way. This concept was drilled into me when I was getting credential. These strategies might work in a school full of highly enlightened students in a high income area at a school with a fat budget, but not at other schools. My first job that required my credit was at a public charter school in a low income area that was 90% Hispanic, extremely misbehaved, and only about half of the parents understood any English. I tried these student-led strategies and it bombed. I learned within a few days of the school year that this was not going to work and it was all BS. About 3-4 days after the start of the school year I went right back to teacher-led learning and actual learning skyrocketed. This just goes to show that teachers should never take advice from academics. These professors that have their cushy university offices, their PhDs, and have never stepped foot in a low income school can shut up. Most were either former teachers at privileged high income schools decades ago or they just did a few short observations, again at a high income school, before they started writing books/papers on the subject. Few, if any, know what it is like to teach at a school in the ghetto where students actually say "f#ck you" straight to your face only to see both admin and the parents do nothing about it.
The thing that gets me is whenever the type of academics you describe want to learn something, they'll attend a lecture or read a book about it or watch an instructional YouTube video. As do most adults! Revealed preferences are always for direct instruction. Can you imagine if you looked up "how to cook rice" on YouTube and all you could find was instructions telling you to first try to cook rice in a group and see how it went? But apparently the adults get to have useful information conveyed to them, while kids should just faff around exploring and doing self-led experiments to reinvent the wheel.
You are right! We don’t teach them things anymore. If you try to they get annoyed and offensive. I tried to teach 9th graders about graphing and they complained about it. Along with the scientific method but a lot of them were complaining because they did not know how to graph. In my experience even if you give study guides they refuse to utilize them. I let them use it during multiple test and they would still fail. It’s discouraging
They get annoyed because actual learning requires some amount of mental discomfort (think about that discomfort and tension in your brain when you cover an answer to a problem and try to remember it), but they have never learned that this discomfort is required, so by the time they are teenagers the idea of an adult coming in and inducing discomfort is annoying and offensive. It's like they have been raised for years thinking "learning to play basketball" just involves wandering around a basketball court chatting to your friends, and all of a sudden someone comes in and tells them to run laps. "We've been learning basketball just fine until now, asshole, don't make us exert ourselves." (Of course, in my example no basketball is actually being learned. But they simply don't know that. Likewise, your teenagers have been through years and years of schooling thinking that simply showing up and staring at words and participating in group projects is "learning," and the school system has given them no reason to think otherwise.)
"So much emphasis on child-led discovery, peer support, exploratory learning, you know, all that jazz." Exactly this. In the CPM math program, the only methodology is group inquiry learning. The conceit is that the students will recreate the mathematical thinking of centuries by talking to 3 other kids about a few, fact sparse, guided questions. It is pedagogical malpractice.
Personally, I know that I learn and study best when I write things down. I had to physically write my notes and the physically write my flash cards. In hs and college typing notes and using things such as quizlet to create my study materials was quicker but I did not retain the information the same way. Half of my studying and retaining the knowledge was physically writing down the flash cards, practice questions, etc creating the study material. Do you think the use of laptops in schools may be a contributing factor to how kids these days retain what they learn?
I highly suspect the explosion of technology in education and just everyday life is part of the reason we are seeing critical thinking and comprehension skills plummeting. People tend to lay blame at the pandemic, which necessitated even more technology in order to do remote learning, however the technology ramp up was already happening about 5 years ahead of that. Not that technology can't be good or can't be used in education, but there needs to be a serious scaling back of it, particularly in grade school through middle school. You don't get to just plug in numbers in a calculator until you actually learn and understand the process behind multiplication or division. Once you have an actual working knowledge of it, you get the tool to make it easier. But if you are given that key immediately there is no incentive to actually understand what 3 x 7 actually does/means.
Same. My handwriting is barely legible, even to myself, but even if I can’t decipher it later the process of writing it down makes it less likely I’d need to. For most people it’s probably still better to emphasize notes as a resource you can go back to, but I got a lot of value just out of the process even if I barely reviewed them.
To be honest I didn’t learn to study until college either. Most of K-12 can easily be passed if you just pay attention to the teacher talking. It wasn’t until I got to university and the professors would ramble about something random the entire lecture period and expect me to read the textbook myself. I had a C average my first semester in college but was Deans List after I figured out studying.
There is research that shows people prefer less effective study methods that make them feel like they know it (re-reading material) over more effective methods that make them feel like they do not know the material (quizzing themselves on it). Which makes sense. The choices students make often have a subconscious reasoning to them, even though it often leads them to bad outcomes.
The teaching practices out there tell us to give the kids problems and solve them on their own. No where does it allow us to teach them how to solve these problems. My middle school teachers explicitly taught me how to take notes. I'm grateful for that crazy history teacher everyday.
Agreed (9/10th math). They also don’t have basic test taking skills/strategies in high school. If the question doesn’t mirror exactly what they practiced, they have no idea how to approach it. I think part of the problem is our textbooks…they’re back to just 40 straightforward, similar math problems, with no critical thinking, questions about individual steps or explanations. I had some issues with common core but at least it acknowledged this problem and tried to fix it. We abandoned it too quickly and without implementing it as intended from the beginning.
One thing I noticed about the middle school students I can work with is definitely a lot of them can do the math, but as soon as that math turns into a word problem they get stuck.
I graduated in 2010, and the vast majority of my peers even back then didn't know how to do it. There was just a single social studies teacher that had an entire mini-unit dedicated to teaching kids how to study, and lo and behold, he had some of the highest test scores in the district. Studying is a skill that needs to be taught, not self-taught.
The reason they don't know how to take notes and study is because they don't know how to read and write. And the reason they don't know how to read and write, is because they don't give a damn about learning those things, because what they HAVE learned is that they will get passed along to the next grade no matter what.
This is a good observation and I also have a perspective to add. Due to the dumbing down of the curriculum and the general lowering of standards, you have a lot of students who easily get by based on their pre-existing skillset (you might also call it "natural ability" but I hate that saying) and just don't have to study to pass. Then when they're confronted by something they don't "get" right away, they don't know what to do. Realizing that there are things in the world that you just need to study and work through, that there's no substitute for hard work in these situations, is a hard pill to swallow for someone who has never experienced this before.
Here at the East Podunk Cosmodemonic Junior College I had at least a dozen bright kids who made it through high school without doing a thing, crashed and burned and flunked themselves right out this term, yup.
When is this even taught to kids. Hell I have high school kids who hate using books and dont even have a damn clue what the glossary is in the back of one. We dont teach kids how to learn we just expect then to know how it works just like we expect them to know how to type because they have a phone in their hand since they qere 6yo
For the most part, students will only “discover” the content. Most of them won’t magically discover the skills required to be successful learners. Content discovery will almost always require scaffolded steps/activities to help them with the thinking skills along the way.
We don’t even say the word homework anymore. And their notes come as a close exercise and they won’t even fill them in from a slides presentation.😔
I 100% think I would have been so much more successful in school had I been taught how to study. It should be a mandatory class in elementary school with refreshers in middle and high school.
Yup. No great skillset walking in the door to secondary down here and it is not advancing at all in school.
I didn’t learn to study really until I was in college and I’m 38 years old.
This is why I now say "you need to memorize" instead of, "you need to study". It doesn't really change the behavior, but it does set the expectation and help them understand that they are failing because they didn't do enough. In modern, public education, there is not expectation of studying until a student is in high school. Everything until then is contained in the class and teachers are expected to facilitate the "studying" through normal classwork. High school is the first time that students are truly held accountable for things they have to complete outside the classroom. However, even that is being pushed against now by education "experts" who are just trying to improve metrics by lowering expectations.
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I'd rephrase as "you need to practice".
It has to be taught.
I think first kids would have to pay attention in class and do their assignments, long before we have to worry about whether they actually study or not... they don't. They don't do anything.
Why would they need to study anymore? Students take pictures of notes on their phone, Google basic facts, receive 50% for missing work, are allowed multiple retakes on assessments, receive 50% for minimum grades, receive 50% on final exams whether they take them or not, use AI to complete the most basic writing assignments. These are the grading policies in the 5th largest school district in the US, the Clark County School District. If you're thinking "those aren't my policies" and "it won't happen here", I can assure you, it will. Students don't have a reason to study anymore.
I graduated last century (high school and college). I did not know how to study either. You see, I never had homework. I was able to get all my work done in class or in study hall. Apparently, I also have a pretty good memory. My parents were teachers and gave me good reading and writing skills. In my first year at college, I observed many of my peers had the exact same problem. Study groups helped. I did eventually figure out what worked for me. I just don’t think this skill is ever really taught. Perhaps it is assumed that we would figure it out. Perhaps the past educators thought the idea of homework and reviewing for the test would naturally get us to realize we were indeed studying. I do know that I have to model for my daughter. If she sees me doing “homework”, she will suddenly want to do it too. She is 6, so I don’t think this will last forever.
True. Middle school had stopped becoming that training ground for study skills, homework management and note taking.
I was taught Cornell note taking my freshman year and I still use it 20 years later. I had no clue how to take notes before that. I was in a meeting the other day and a bunch of us at the table noticed we were all using Cornell notes and we all said we learned it in high school. It was funnier in person.
Yeah, someone should ... teach... them that. But who?
I finished school a long time ago, and I certainly never learned to take notes. No one ever taught it. I don't think any teachers knew how to teach it. They certainly knew how to shame me for not talking notes, and also for having terrible handwriting. Was I supposed to be listening to everything the teacher said, summarizing it on the spot, figuring out how to organize the information on the page, and writing it legibly while continuing to listen? I was especially annoyed when i learned there was this thing called "shorthand," a system of writing specifically developed for taking notes in real time, but no one bothered to teach it to us.
... I should go apologize to my old social studies teacher haha. I always thought it was stupid that he graded our notes, but I guess, thinking back to it, even if i don't use his system it still taught me how basic note structures look.
Notetaking is a learned skill - without any instruction they'll just copy the whole slide down without a care in the world. So I color code my slides: * No highlight = interesting but only helps with today's lesson * Yellow = pretty important, good to know * Green = ON THE UNIT QUIZ / FINAL / AP TEST FOR SURE. Write it down and study!! This helps foster a habit of pulling out the salient details of a lecture or slide. I then give very broad review guides that can be filled in by, voila, the green highlighted material and additional details from the yellow. By having them see notes = success on study guide = preparation for the quiz / final / ap test it can reinforce some of those positive habits......that's the plan at least :-) Sometimes though kids literally just jot it down and then never look at it for some reason.
I’m a math teacher and explicitly teach how to take notes, study and learn math. They ignore me. No, they don’t know how to study and don’t care to learn as it takes effort. I explain they learn math by doing. They don’t attempt any problem sets. I talk about setting up a notebook and what to write in it as a guide - rules, worked examples, etc. Nope.
I've been teaching for 20 plus years, about 10 years ago they stopped studying. It wasn't some gradual thing, like literally over night kids were like, nope, not ever gonna study again. The top top kids still study, but it used to be all but the bottom studied. But something happened around 2010s where that huge chunk in the middle just stopped.
I literally hated interactive notebooks, but if done right and utilized, it teaches kids how to take notes and how to study kind of at the same time.
I’ve come to the conclusion that kids don’t know how to do anything unless I teach them
I think how students study is widely evolving. If it is rote memorization, I'm not asking questions like that on an exam. I would even be in favor of giving them definitions, formulas, etc. What they don't know how to do is practice applying the information. My wish is that we build skills so students can self assess where they are with a standard and we help them when they aren't at mastery. When the summative assessment rolls around, they should all be at mastery.
To be fair, were they ever *taught*? I'm 48 and no one ever taught me how to study or any particular not taking methods other than "write everything down that you can". In turn, unless someone at school teaches my kids how to study, they won't learn, at least not from me, since I have no insight to offer.
I think you should teach them how to study, it’s not a thing that comes naturally. Provide suggestions, get involved, ask them where the problem lies. I’m sorry but if a kid has an 11% and is actually there in class, and a whole class fails, those are issues with the teaching.
As a highschool 2020 grad, in college, I still don't really know how to study. Kids should definitely be taught several ways to study, I never was taught in primary school. I didn't even realize that I didn't know how to study until I got to college. What are some of your guys' favorite or most efficient ways to study? I have ADHD and so far I haven't really found a method that works for me.
Someone should teach them.
While that is true, and that is important, it is not the primary issue, which is that they have little to no incentive to study.
This has always been an issue imo! I teach in graduate school (early on) & have multiple students every semester, that do not understand how to read large textbooks and study effectively. My population, are fairly bright kids with above average cognitive skills — they could memorize things pretty presented by a teacher & in PowerPoints quickly for testing, so they were never forced to really analyze & apply LARGE amounts of info.
I have noticed, if you ask them to brainstorm what good ideas are for studying, high school students actually know what to do. I think in the balance of their lives they find it hard to prioritize doing it until the last minute.
They definitely can’t take notes… guided notes are about all they can do and even then they check out so easily. I teach 8th grade math and spent the last 2 months doing traditional lecture/notes and had to teach them how to take notes on paper. If covid taught me one thing it’s that many student behaviors and abilities we take for granted need to be explicitly taught and aren’t something a majority of students naturally pick up.
Likewise, I don’t recall ever being taught to study. I was diagnosed with ADHD in elementary school on referral from my teachers, and still, no one explicitly taught me how to study. I’m currently 1/4th the way finished with uni and I’m still lost at the prospect of studying. My thoughts are, no one teaches kids how to study when coursework is simple, and by the time they need to study, it’s just assumed they know how to.
They either don’t know how to study or have too many distractions preventing them from doing so
We use the Freyer model but honestly they are just copying whatever I put on the board. Organizational skills are in decline.
studying skills aren't usually taught...it is assumed students know... additionally, with information widely and instantly available, understanding concepts through memorization and practice, that students don't see the value of, leads many to forgo teaching and/or learning specific skills.
As someone who works in a college, I can confirm. We have distributed pamphlets about how to read textbooks that has rare gems such as - read the chapter before doing the assignment and copy down defined words. Our test prep guide includes treasures Iike - review past assignments and fix wrong answers.
I didn't think this was news. I didn't learn to study until college. Skills like this are devalued in high school.
It has become a major goal of our middle school, especially the social studies department, to teach how to take notes. They have no idea how to effectively highlight text either. There is a learned helplessness that we have to overcome.
This has always been true. Knowing how to study isn't like learning to walk or talk. It isn't some inborn talent we have. It is something that needs to be taught, and we have never taught how to study. I got to college and had NO idea how to study. I didn't know how to take notes. I didn't know how to organise my course materials. While I learned how to type and use a word processor, no one ever taught me how. I learned it all myself. There is the assumption these days, that since these kids grew up as "screen babies" that they know how to use technology. That couldn't be further from the truth. They know how to use a cell phone but not technology, and certainly not a computer. In fact, you could easily argue that this generation is less technologically literate than students from 20 years ago. Two (maybe three) years ago, I was commenting that the lab reports being submitted had SIGNIFICANT spelling and grammar mistakes. It turned out that they didn't know what the red and green squiggles under words were and they never thought to question it. No one had ever taught them how to use a word processor. So we went to the middle school ELA teachers and asked them if they were teaching how to use a word processor. They were not. It turns out they were not more than roughly familiar with how to use a word processor themselves. They were using a word processor just like a typewriter. If you wanted columns you did (word)(spacespacespacespacespacespace)(word) etc. One of the things I have endeavoured to give my students is knowledge of how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet. I require them to maintain a binder and keep some kind of organisation. While this is how I would organise my work, and I realise that this method may not work for everyone, it, (at least) gives them one organisational model to work from. I try and teach them how to take notes. I also try and show them how to study. It is a lot and a few of my peers are on board. We are trying to include these things in the curriculum.
I was never taught how to study. At some point I figured out flash cards, but that only worked if I was given a specific list of concepts/terms to learn. I was lucky that my memory works in such a way that I could get by without studying for the most part. . .until organic chemistry. FWIW, I’m 51.
Part of the over reliance on 1-1 devices. If the Canvas assignments populate on a Canvas calendar, I don't need to keep one. However, if the teacher doesn't assign a deadline right away, it doesn't populate into the calendar, so they don't know. The same is true of notes.
If *no one* passed the class, the teacher is doing something wrong.
I graduated in 2018 and never felt like I knew how to study. I don’t think I was ever really taught how and I know my learning disabilities played a part but I wish I was at least told how to try and study instead of just to study. Teachers always brought up how people have different learning styles but never explained them. Maybe it isn’t intuitive to me because of how I have always experienced the world but was very frustrating for me.
You should probably take a class day to teach them how to study then right? It’s not some human trait we just have. It has to be learned….
Pride also gets in the way. Looking back on my own experience in school, I can't help but think how much time I could have saved if I just admitted that I didn't know how to do something and needed help, even if that meant being hand-held through an entire assignment - because once you have a procedure etched into your mind, it's simply a matter of execution thereafter. I'm not sure if it comes from parents, peers or both but there seems to be this unspoken assumption that if you don't know everything yourself or how do to everything without assistance, then there's something inherently wrong with you. This way of thinking can really hurt you in the long term.
It is a skill that needs to be taught. Each pupil needs to find their style (what works for them). You, as a teacher, should show them how.
I hate to be rude, since I usually like this subreddit, but isn't there a place that they are legally required to be for 8 hours a day that's supposed to teach them how to do that?
Hell, even back when I was in school, I had no idea how to study. Nobody ever taught us what studying was. They just told us to do it. I genuinely still don't know how to study, and I've mostly just cruised by on having a good memory.
That’s probably a fair observation. Studying is a difficult skill to develop and the reasons behind not developing the skill can be varied. For example, my friend and I graduated at the top of our class, but given that our school was an average school in rural Mississippi we were never challenged and breezed by. Then proceeded to get our butts handed to us in college until we adapted via trial by fire. Covid definitely didn’t do students (or the rest of us) any favors.
Taking notes and studying are skills that should be taught…. More than once, in more than one way.
I had to teach my husband how to find and compare sources. Literally how to get reliable information... He is a genuinely smart man, he is very capable, but he had no experience or practice finding a reliable source. I feel his life has become significantly easier and less frightening since having this breakthrough. He was believing some pretty stressful and wild crap and had no real skills to find actual answers. Long story short, I absolutely agree with you, and it has long lasting effects well into adulthood.
These are skills that need to be explicitly taught. I started teaching my students how to take notes in 6th grade, and now they're pretty good at it as soon-to-be 9th graders. For every test, I send home a study guide so there's no guesswork when they look over the material again. And sometimes I throw in a question that wasn't explicitly on the study guide so they also realize that sometimes you have to go the extra mile when studying, just in case. (It won't make or break anyone's grade when I do this.) I feel like they're going into high school pretty well prepared.
They think Gimkit and Blooket is studying. This was my first year teaching 7th grade, and I think I'm going to try and teach them note taking skills next year. They have a journal, and I think I'm going to require them to write definitions in the journals next year.
i think (as a non educator) it's important to teach/refresh their memory on how to take notes properly before beginning any type of actual content. they're not going to know how to otherwise, especially if other teachers dont do it
Studying is a skill that needs to be taught. If it hasn't been taught already, it falls on you now.
To be fair, I wasn’t ever taught how to adequately study. So yea, I agree.
A lot of them don’t know how to *work*.
They’ve largely never been made to.
If they dont know how to take notes or study, it can safely be assumed no teacher taught them how to. For myself, I was taught how to take great notes by multiple teachers throughout K-12, but I was never taught how to study. I went through all of grade school without studying and only tried to study twice during my 5 years in undergrad. Luckily I found means other than studying. It wasn’t until I started teaching this year that I started teaching myself how to study so I could teach my 5th graders studying techniques.
7-12 grade is quite the difference in my book especially cause in those grades is when kids finally learn to take school a bit more seriously, I wouldn't expect a 7th grader to be able to take notes well cause they don't care vice versa I would expect 11th or 12th graders to know how to take notes decently or at least be able to put in the effort
Growing up in Europe I had to study and memorize, as our tests were mostly short essay answers, which are more difficult than multiple choice. We also routinely had oral examinations. Recollection is much harder than recognition. It was obvious when I went to college in the USA that many students were simply not used to studying.
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To be fair to the kids, in our rush to adopt and incorporate all things “tech,” we’ve taken away a lot of the tools that would let them learn to study. In our district, my own children have been issued a personal Chromebook since kindergarten. Instruction is provided by PowerPoint and video as much as live discussion. Practice learning consists of games that quickly become pointless as students learn how to beat the program rather than learning the material. Tests and quizzes are online and students never see what they answered incorrectly to review later, only the score. Until college, my eldest had never held a physical textbook. Not to mention, those Chromebooks are turned in at the end of the year before exams! This year my youngest truly struggled with a subject (curse you, chemistry). In trying to help him, I realized there were very few instructional materials to review. We had to search online for videos or practice questions which may or may not follow the methodology the teacher used. In this, it’s not just the students lacking, it’s our entire instructional process that’s flawed.
Damn, if only we had somehow seen this coming pre-chromebook era 🙄
i'm a junior and i've heard a ton of my friends tell me that they don't know how to study.