Why is my child studying hard but not improving?
Long evenings at the desk and flat marks usually point to the method, not the effort. How to tell which one it is, and what to change this week.
It is one of the most common conversations we have with Sydney parents. Their child is at the desk every night, the notes are immaculate, the folders are colour coded, and the marks have not moved in two terms. The natural conclusion is that more is needed: more hours, a stricter routine, perhaps a different subject. In most cases the effort is real and the conclusion is wrong. The hours are being spent on activities that feel like study and build surprisingly little of what an examination rewards.
An HSC paper asks for one thing above all: producing knowledge from memory, under time pressure, in response to a question the student has not seen in that exact form. Rereading notes, highlighting, rewriting summaries and watching explanations again all train something different. They train recognition. Recognition feels like knowing, because the material looks familiar as the eye passes over it. But the examination never shows the student the material. It shows them a question, and waits.
The research on this is unusually consistent. A widely cited 2013 review by Dunlosky and colleagues assessed ten common study techniques against the evidence and rated rereading and highlighting as low utility, while rating practice testing and distributed practice as high utility. Later reviews have reached similar conclusions. Closing the book and forcing yourself to recall is harder than rereading, and the difficulty is not a side effect. It is where the learning happens.
If rereading is so weak, why is it so popular? Partly because it is comfortable: an evening of rereading ends with a pleasant sense of coverage. Partly because it is visible: a parent walking past sees open notes and a busy highlighter, which looks exactly like diligence. And partly because it never delivers bad news. Retrieval does. A blank page shows a student precisely what they do not know, and nobody enjoys that at nine o'clock on a school night.
- Most study time is spent with the notes open
- Practice questions are saved for the week before a test
- Marked work comes back and is filed rather than redone
- The same kind of mistake appears on consecutive tests
- Your child says they knew it, but could not remember it in the exam
If three or more of those sound familiar, the fix is not more time. It is a different use of the same time, built on three shifts. The first is retrieval: every study session starts from a blank page rather than open notes. The second is spacing: topics come back after a gap of a few days, just as they begin to fade, rather than being studied once in a long block. The third is correction: marked work is redone, not filed, until the error that cost the marks has been fixed and practised.
- 1Blank page, five minutesWrite everything remembered about the last lesson's topic, with the notes closed.
- 2Check and colour, five minutesOpen the notes and mark what was missing in a second colour.
- 3Three questions, ten minutesAttempt three exam style questions aimed at the gaps, timed.
- 4Log one error, three minutesWrite down the single mistake that cost the most, and the fix.
- 5Schedule the return, two minutesNote when this topic comes back: in three days, then in a week.
Spacing deserves a little more explanation, because it runs against instinct. A student who studies a topic for three hours on Sunday will usually remember less of it by the test than a student who studies it for an hour on Sunday, an hour on Wednesday and an hour the following Monday. The second student has done the same amount of work, but each return forces a small act of reconstruction, and reconstruction is what strengthens memory. In mathematics and the sciences, mixing question types within a session does something similar: the student has to decide which method applies, which is exactly what the examination demands.
Families should be ready for one thing. For the first fortnight, the new method will feel worse. Practice scores often dip, because the student is finally seeing the gaps that rereading concealed. Some students conclude it is not working and drift back to their notes. It is working. The dip is the method surfacing problems early enough to fix them, rather than in the examination room where they cost marks.
Your child scores 90 per cent on questions attempted straight after reading the chapter. What does that tell you?
Parents can help most by changing the question they ask. How long did you study tonight rewards time at the desk, which is the wrong target. What did you get wrong today, and what did you do about it rewards the only kind of study that moves marks. It also changes the tone at home: the conversation becomes about progress rather than surveillance, and a student who can name an error and a fix every evening is a student who is improving, whatever the clock says.
At MA99, every session opens with the first step of the MA99 Method, which we call Connect and Retrieve. Before anything new is taught, the student reconstructs last week's work from memory, without notes. It is uncomfortable for the first fortnight and then it becomes the reason marks move. If your child has made these changes for a full term and the marks are still flat, the cause is more likely to be a specific content gap or an exam technique problem, and that is exactly what a proper diagnostic is designed to find.
Edward MaDirector, MA99 Education
