I have a student in 11th grade and sophomore year she thought she wasn’t a math person. She was out of school for 2 weeks in October and fell behind on the unit on linear equations. By the time the class moved on to the unit on quadratics, she was lost. The teacher moved on to the new unit and the student fell behind even more. The student didn’t even realize she had a gap in her knowledge of linear equations until she got her test back a week later with a 58% on it. She said she was confused but never really thought to go back and review the unit on linear equations. Rarely do students realize they have a gap in their knowledge until they see the results of a test, and even then they blame the test rather than retracing back to find the gap.
As previously stated, falling behind in a classroom typically does not happen suddenly. There may be a period of time when a student is absent from school due to personal reasons or illness. In the meantime, the teacher and rest of the class continue learning and covering new material. By the time the student with the illness or personal problems returns to school, the class has already learned and mastered a great deal of new information and the student falls behind. Eventually, the gap in the student’s knowledge grows to the point where he or she is several lessons behind the rest of the class.
The gap is almost never where students think it is
The gap in learning that has developed in a student while they were not paying attention in class is often rooted in material and skills learned previously. A student struggling to complete a writing assignment might not have mastered identifying a main argument in a reading, a skill that was not fully mastered in earlier grades. A student struggling on a math test might not have a good grasp on their 7th grade fractions. Often, a student is trying to work through a problem and they are working on the wrong problem.
To recover lost ground, a student must know just where on the map he or she is currently. Tracing back to find the root cause of lagging behind in school is difficult enough for students as it is. The feeling of being behind in the first place is already stressful and uncomfortable. However, studying to “get back on track” becomes more productive when a student can identify the cause of the lost ground in the first place.
- Go back through graded work from the last few months and look for repeating error patterns, not one-off mistakes
- Ask the teacher directly: “What prerequisite skill do you think I’m missing?” Most teachers will tell you plainly if you ask plainly
- Try a diagnostic quiz on the subject, even a free one online. The results are usually more revealing than expected
- Sit with the textbook chapter before the one you’re struggling with. If that one also feels shaky, go back another chapter
The root cause of a problem can be hard for students to explore because it is against their nature to study something that they believe is unrelated to their current failing. The root cause of a problem is often buried deep in a student’s past learning, long before they even became aware that they were failing. Thus, a junior might be failing to develop good essay skills, yet realize that they need to go back to 7th grade to learn a basic skill for argument writing that they were never quite able to master.
So how do you actually review missed content without losing your mind?
Re-reading all of the material from three or more months earlier in a couple of weekends is generally not productive for reviewing for missing material. I have, however, found a way for students to review in a focused way for missing material. It is not ideal in that it does not enable students to get up to the current level of their classmates in the class; however, reviewing in a focused way for missing material is better than not reviewing at all for missing material.
First, you need to assess the areas in which you are falling behind in your coursework. Then, you can make a list of material that you need to review in order to get up to speed. Next, you must prioritize the most critical information in your list of material. For the majority of subject areas, the largest portion of the material that you will be reviewing will be foundational in nature. This means that the student reviewing to get up to speed will first need to review the foundational material in order to get a proper base for the rest of the material. For example, in math, the foundational material would consist of key computational skills and core definitions. In writing, students would review the key elements of argument construction and how to effectively integrate evidence into their writing.
Rather than getting through all of the material that you were supposed to learn when you fell behind in a few long studying sessions, studying in many short sessions of very focused work will be much more effective. Information learned in short studying sessions is much more likely to be retained than that learned in long studying sessions. The way that people study is to work for 45 minutes and then take a 15 minute break and then go at it again for 45 minutes and then take a 15 minute break and so on and so forth for as long as it is that you keep studying in that given time. After four forty-five minutes of studying take a one hour break in order to give your brain a chance to consolidate what it has learned during your studying sessions.
Develop A Study Plan That Does Not Fall Apart After 2 Weeks
A student typically starts out with a study plan that is going to fall apart within the first two weeks of school. This is because after the first week of school, a student will realize that after dinner and some TV, they are going to be tired for the rest of the night and that they will need to rest up for the next day of school. The next night after dinner and some TV, a student will realize that they are tired again and that they will study the next night. And the next night.
Most study plans are too ambitious and therefore fail. They say that you will study 2 hours a night starting on Monday of your second week of school. By Thursday of that week you will have failed to complete your study plan and you will feel horrible. This is because your plan was too ambitious. Instead, make a study plan that you can sustain. Make it seem too easy at first. Then, as the weeks go by, you can increase the amount of time you study.
- Identify the two or three topics with the biggest gaps (from your honest assessment earlier)
- Assign each one a specific week to tackle, not a vague “soon”
- Schedule review sessions like appointments, on specific days at specific times
- Build in one session per week that’s purely retrieval practice: no notes, just recalling what you’ve learned
Make your study plan look really easy at the beginning of the year. You want to be able to say that you have a lot of time to study at night and not actually use it all. So for example, you could say that you are going to study for 2 hours every night and only end up studying for 45 minutes. This will help you to keep studying all year long.
(Sharing your study plan with a parent, a friend or with a teacher can also help you to stay on track. The fact that someone knows what you planned to do to study each night can be a powerful motivator, even when your study plan is so ridiculously simple that you’re embarrassed to admit how little you’re doing.)
When the coursework gets genuinely harder
Even after a student has begun to get back up to speed, the rest of the coursework can continue to pose problems for the student. Later sections of the course will typically require higher levels of academic thought and require the student to complete written work in order to achieve success. In addition, the format of the test for later sections of the course will typically differ from that of the earlier sections. For example, the multiple-choice portion of an AP test is written to test students for a shallowness of understanding. This section is not typically a series of fill-in-the-blank type questions that the student can bluff their way through correctly.
A more challenging situation arises when the student has managed to get up to speed with past work and is able to keep up in class for current material but needs some additional work in order to achieve a high score on an exam. In these circumstances, working with an outside tutor can be of great benefit. For example, an 11th grader taking AP Calculus in school would benefit from the work of an AP tutor in Newark. The tutor would help the student to determine where there is room for improvement in order to get a high score on the exam, and then help the student to learn the necessary skills.
|
Situation |
What tends to help |
What usually doesn’t |
|
Missed a unit recently |
Targeted review with teacher or peer |
Rereading all notes passively |
|
Gap from several months ago |
Diagnostic assessment, then focused backfill |
Starting where the class is now |
|
Struggling with AP-level material |
Subject-specific tutoring and timed practice |
Generic study tips |
|
Overwhelmed by volume of missed work |
Prioritizing foundational concepts first |
Trying to cover everything at once |
One last thing worth saying, and I mean it
First of all, students often fall behind in school due to bad timing, a lack of support outside of school, or an unseen gap in knowledge and/or skill. This student is in school, is able to come to class every day, and is capable of learning in school. So, in many ways, he or she is not the student who is “struggling in school” for a number of reasons. What I mean by this is that, this student is not struggling in school because he or she is not capable of learning in school. In reality, this student is struggling in school for reasons that are largely outside of his or her control and for reasons that are, for the most part, temporary. Because of these circumstances, this student could be considered to be the type of student who is very capable of learning in school but is unable to perform academically for reasons outside of his or her control.
I bring this up because the student I described previously who had “caught up” from having to learn three months worth of material in a matter of weeks was a sophomore. Her confusion with a third of the material from the year stemmed from her earlier struggle with work involving the use of fractions from 10th grade. In short, three weeks or so of concentrated review with a tutor to shore up her knowledge of a certain part of the math that she had learned in previous years was all that was required for her to “get” the material for the last 3 months or so of the year. By junior year she was able to pass in precalc. This does not mean that she was necessarily excellent in the class, but rather that she had made a great deal of progress from where she was a few years earlier when it seemed as though she was falling behind.
Start with what you know, then build from there. Study patiently and consistently.