Whe students don’t understand how much effort learning takes – they set themselves up for failure

Many students fail to get the grades they are capable of getting because they don’t do the work they need to to get the marks they deserve. But this lack of work is the result, not the cause, of their problem.

We have all known students like this, and we have probably accused them of being lazy, or unorganized, or even of not caring about their work. And we were probably wrong!

The story goes something like this -

Johnny (sorry to all those called Johnny!) has a test coming up in a week.

He knows that he has to revise if he is going to get good marks, and he also knows that the work was pretty easy for him to do the first time round. So, he thinks that all he needs to do is to quickly look through his previous work, maybe reread a section or two from the text book, and all will be fine. After all, he did OK last time so everything will be fine this time.

The night before the test he looks over what he has to learn, does some reading, and feels ready to do well in the test the next day.

You know what happens next.

He does not do well. He complains that the test was too hard, or that he didn’t understand the questions, or he answers the questions in such a haphazard way that he gets low marks.

And he wonders what went wrong!

Let’s get one thing clear, Johnny is a bright boy, and the work he has been asked to do is well within his capabilities. He knows this, so when he fails the test he has no idea why. If this happens more than once he starts to think that he is stupid, that he really cannot learn, and that no matter how hard he tries he will never do well.

The problem is not that he does not do the work he thinks he should do, the problem is that he has no idea how much work he has to do to be sure that he knows what he is supposed to know. Johnny would do the work if he knew what he had to do.

Let’s replay the scene above, but this time Johnny understands the amount of effort he has to put in to get good marks on the test.

Johnny is not worried about the test because he knows that he found the work pretty easy to understand. He also knows that he needs to be sure that he has all the information at his fingertips so he sets up a revision plan. He starts thinking about this about a week before the test and he decides to review one small section of the work each night.

So far so good.

But Johnny takes it even further. Not only does he review the work, he sets himself a small test on each bit of work, just to be sure that he understands and remembers it. He realizes that some information he thought he knew he cannot remember well. He spends a bit of extra time reviewing that information.

How do you think Johnny did on the test this time?

You guessed it, he did quite well, and felt good about himself and the work he had done.

Same Johnny, different perceptions about the effort required to review the material in the test.

One of the basic learning skills you can help your child develop is the ability to understand the amount of effort they will have to put in to achieve something. It can be a hard lesson to learn.

In the next post I will give you some ideas about how you might do this. Trust me, it is worth the effort (ha!), and your child will be a much better learner as a result.