We invite (and do our best to lovingly compel!) all the boys in our care on a journey to academic excellence at St Peter’s College. Excellence, of course, looks different for every student. For some young men, it involves seeking entry into highly competitive university degrees. The lessons we learn from our scholars who achieve some of the country’s highest ATARs are worth noting for every student, no matter their interests or imagined limitations. For these high-performing young men, who we survey every year, they nearly always offer the same advice to boys with similar academic aspirations:
- A sustained engagement in the School’s sport and co-curricular programs throughout the senior years is essential.
- Ambitious scholars should seek to connect with a group of like-minded students who exercise mateship in a very specific way: by knowing each other’s goals and holding one another to account over these goals. This means not accepting excuses from one another when it comes to drafting, exam practice, homework completion, engagement in class and seeking out feedback. These boys tend to use The Year 12 College, Faculty Support Sessions and the Old Scholar Academic Mentor Program particularly well.
What does the research say about effective study skills for boys?
Contemporary educational literature points to a range of dispositions and strategies that appear to be of benefit to ambitious high-school students, particularly boys. It is worth noting that the research also points out that none of these things will work unless students are eating properly, getting enough exercise, minimising distractions (like social media) and – most importantly – getting enough sleep.
- Active retrieval practice is more useful than passively reading over course information; students who push themselves to recall information and use it in a variety of fresh contexts (‘teaching’ the content to a younger sibling, for example) – rather than simply revisiting the original information in its original shape – tend to have better long-term retention. Some recent research points to the benefits of actively recalling material just when it is starting to fade from one’s short-term memory.
- Combining visual cues with the written word when taking notes seems to help ideas ‘stick.’ Drawing diagrams, constructing mind-maps and visually representing concepts fits into what is known as ‘dual-coding theory,’ where the brain processes information through simultaneous verbal and visual channels.
- Studying productively with others should help; as our old scholars remind us every year, being part of a group that constructively critiques each other’s work and holds its members to account around study practices helps everyone. The Journal of Child Development affirmed this in their important study of the relationship between peer group, motivation and achievement.
- Practising tests under test conditions – again and again – can be of great service to an ambitious student; in 2010, the Journey of Experimental Psychology found that repeated test practice “produces superior transfer of learning” than simply “repeated studying.”
- ‘Chunking’ one’s learning usually works; students who break down their work into smaller, more manageable chunks (through things like task lists and weekly study timetables) tend to do better.
These strategies should not come as a surprise – most educational research is affirming rather than revolutionary, I have found – but students would do well to challenge themselves to commit to practising at least three of these across Semester 2. This is precisely the challenge I offered to the Year 12 cohort when I addressed them at the start of this week.
Mr Nick Carter
Deputy Headmaster / Teaching and Learning