Best of Luck to June Test Takers!
The standard school year feels like a long slog, where students begin knowing very little in certain subjects and finish fearing that they’ve learned little more over seven or eight months of instruction. All those culminating exams from finals, APs, and state tests to the SAT and ACT may feel like obstacles in the way of a lovely summer break, but they actually represent critical opportunities to lock in learning and prove that a long year of study was not spent in vain. June is here. Crush the SAT, ACT, and every other test in your way. On the other side lies a long summer with plenty of time to rest, play, and prepare for future challenges!
Olympic Athletes Know Test Prep
No matter what else is happening in the world, the Olympics have always commanded attention. If you ever doubt the burning will to exceed all limits inherent in all of us, just look at the dedication these indomitable athletes exemplify. No spectacle captures the world’s imagination on such a grand scale. But we’re not tuning in to catch up on air rifle or luge or any of the other hundreds of sometimes obscure events (race walking… really?) we somehow ignore every other week of the year. No, we thrill to the competition, the effort, and the unquenchable commitment to win. Everyone on the path to their best test scores and grades can learn what being the best really requires from those who have paid the costs and reaped the rewards–including Gold Medals and enshrinement on boxes of Wheaties–of enduring excellence… “We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams…
Resolved to Be Better
Happy New Year! The fresh slate of a new year inspires most of us to select some (or most) areas in our lives to improve in specific ways. From our position at the intersection of education and performance, we see lots of students looking for better grades and test scores, but, more generally, people aspire to better health, better jobs, better relationships, and better financial situations. Better does not come easy. Becoming better than you were in any dimension of your life may be a worthy goal. Staying better–being able to cast aside bad habits and develop new, more adaptive ones–is another thing entirely. How do we get and stay better in just about anything? Better takes a plan. Better takes time. Better takes practice. Better takes persistence. Better often takes help. Whatever your ambitions this year, we wish you luck in the accomplishment for your dearest goals. Let us…
What Really Motivates Students?
One of the great conundrums of human history has surely been how to motivate teens to do what society wants them to do rather than what they themselves want to do. Your average high schooler may happily spend marathon sessions practicing sports, playing games, or just scrolling through social media but still balk at ten minutes of homework or chores. Unsurprisingly, researchers have been delving the depths of student motivation for decades, exploring a variety of angles across age groups and cultures. Some of the findings aren’t that surprising either, though others seem rather unexpected. An overview of the current research encompassing over 144 studies and more than 79,000 students has been published as Pathways to Student Motivation: A Meta-Analysis of Antecedents of Autonomous and Controlled Motivations, and the key takeaways of this meta-analysis are powerful: Students’ self-determined motivation (acting out of interest, curiosity, and abiding values) is associated with…
Be Patient Long Enough to Improve
While summer will always be my favorite season, this time of year presents particular challenges for educators. Every student and family carries particular learning or prep goals into the summer, but– far too often–other plans and priorities push academics to the end of the year. We always see a flood of students seeking to compress months of prep into the final two weeks of August, usually right up to the August SAT. But can months of prep and practice really be condensed into a shorter time frame? Not really. Yes, students with sufficient motivation and time can accomplish a ton in a short period. Yes, students can work with their coaches to interleave instruction, practice testing, and review into a productive daily rather than weekly sequence. Yes, prepping at the last minute is better than not prepping at all. But no–you can not expect to improve at the pace of…
Signs of Lack of Persistence
Success in the face of great challenges and competition does not come easy. No less an authority than Napoleon Hill asserts that effort only fully releases its reward after a person refuses to quit. The theme of persistence as an essential ingredient of true accomplishment is central to his famous works, particularly Think and Grow Rich, one of the best-selling self-help books of all time. What happens, in Hill’s perspective, when persistence is lacking? One thing we all know, if one does not possess persistence, one does not achieve noteworthy success in any calling. When defeat comes, accept it as a signal that your plans are not sound, rebuild those plans, and set sail once more toward your coveted goal. The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail. Persistence played such a fundamental…