School's in Session
How can you help your child make good grades this year? Our tips archive includes suggestions for the wide variety of concerns that come up in school participation for both children and parents. This month's tip also provides a slew of suggestions to help your children start off the school year right. Go to the Monthly Tip.
Featured Parenting Tips:
Making homework count: Not much of watching and listening to the teacher makes it into long-term memory. Homework is supposed to provide the active practice that turns partial and temporary understanding into permanent learning. For most of us, staring at homework, or even reading textbooks carefully, doesn’t result in much progress. If you wanted to improve your golf, you would probably arrange time to practice at the practice tees. If you wanted to learn a piano solo, you know practice would be required. When it comes to schoolwork, let your student know how much practice counts.
As your children work at their homework, they should jot down notes with pictures, graphs and new ways of organizing facts in the work. Kristen’s rule for practice should be, “Never turn a page without writing something.” I never had a student fail who had study and reading notes.
Making up tests is also a good homework activity for your student. My students reported that half of their questions matched the ones on the exam—no surprises there.
Testing Tips: Good test strategies are no substitute for preparation and practice, but after studying hard and using the good homework habits described above, your student's approach to testing can make a difference. Follow these strategies for better test grades.
In school and even in job-hunting, the tests are usually objective. The choices are worked out in advance in a multiple choice or true-false format. When taking these tests, the first important rule is to answer every question, even if it means guessing. Although wild guessing is a waste of valuable time and some teachers use a formula that penalizes guessing, these procedures only penalize random wild guessing. Most students can reject some of the options before they reach a point of confusion and for them, guessing is definitely in their best interest.
The second important strategy is to read carefully. In studies where students were interviewed immediately after the test, their explanations for items they answered wrong showed that 15 percent of wrong answers resulted from misunderstandings in reading the item: "Oh, it asked which of the following was not true, I didn't see the 'not.'" Fifteen percent can easily make a letter grade difference.
For essay tests, the guideline is to answer each question twice - first in outline form and then expanded as the actual answer. The student should write a brief outline on another sheet in the student's own words and shorthand. Now your student's final answer is more likely to be complete and well-organized.
Neatness counts. Even teachers who say that as long as they can find the answer, the student will get credit are more likely to give higher scores when answers are neat and the major points are easy to find. If your student doesn't have an erasable-ink pen to avoid scratch-outs and arrows to scribbles in the margin. Buy one today.
Test Anxiety: Trouble with past tests can lead to panic at test time—especially if the student is not prepared. But even prepared students often feel panic when they are rushed by multiple choice tests and feel that they can't take time to read carefully and eliminate the obvious wrong choices (50 items! That means I have to do one every minute!). A good exercise to ease this panic is for Mom or Dad to time their student while he takes an old test or a practice version they have made up. Usually the experience will show your student he has plenty of time for careful reading and for eliminating wrong answers before making each choice. Practice tests also motivate your student to go over good answers and review the important material. Keep your practice tests in the form of the one coming up. This will calm his anxiety as the test style becomes familiar territory.
Raising Your Teenager
In his just released ninth book, Dr. McIntire gives parents five crucial skills to raising happy, healthy teenagers! Check it out at Dr. McIntire's brand new website, RogerMcIntireOnline.com to read reviews or download a free excerpt, or head over to our bookstore to purchase now!
Parenting tips provided by our expert Dr. Roger McIntire, father of three and author of nine parenting books, including Raising Good Kids in Tough Times, and Enjoy Successful Parenting. Be sure to check out his blog, ParentSuccess with Dr. McIntire for new and updated tips!
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