How Can You Help Your Child Study?
How many times have you read a paragraph only to realize you had no idea what you just read? This can happen to your child’s attention while reading, all the more so if phones or other distractions are around.
The fewer distractions, the better: Along these lines, try offering small rewards, such as a short break after a period of effort with no distractions. Keep in mind that, cognitively speaking, nobody can effectively multitask. If students are paying attention to a favorite show or song, or responding to a text, they cannot also be paying attention to the material they are studying.
So what can you do to help?
3 WAYS TO HELP YOUR CHILD STUDY
1. Ask questions: Quiz students on the material. Provide as few hints as possible, which helps your child realize what they know and don’t know, while also eliminating a false sense of knowledge that can accompany guessing correctly. Guessing isn’t necessarily bad, but you don’t want your child to develop a false sense of mastery. Question the reasoning of a specific answer. Have students answer correctly multiple times before moving on.
2. Discuss stumbling blocks: Ask your child to write down major concepts relating to the material. Have them explain their understanding to you without relying heavily on their notes. If they stumble, especially after you offer a small hint, this indicates that they haven’t mastered the material. Calmly ask your child to explain their confusion. Often, discussing stumbling blocks helps students recover and move on.
3. Ask recall questions when possible: With multiple-choice, matching, and fill-in-the-blank questions—three forms of recognition questions—students must recognize the correct response from a corresponding word bank. If you have access to these kinds of questions—in a textbook’s unit review, for example—you should avoid them. Recall questions are more challenging, involving no hints. One way to turn a recognition question into a recall question is to ask your child the question without providing the possible correct responses.
- Taken from Edutopia/George Lucas Educational Foundation 2021
