Term 4 Exam Preparation: A Parent’s Guide to Supporting Studying

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Term 4 Exam Preparation: A Parent’s Guide to Supporting Studying

I want to talk about exams, assessments and tests. We’re going into term four now, which, from grade 4 upward, is an exam term, and it’s a big term. And it’s really about finalising things, putting what you know down on paper through an examination, developing those skills, getting your report and passing the grade.

But I want to look at it more deeply. In my environment, we see exam-taking as a skill set, almost like a subject in itself. Because exam writing is the skill of listening in class, absorbing information, studying the work, understanding how to write an exam, how to answer questions, the layout, the mark allocation, the time allocation, and how to set things out so you get the best possible outcome. We even talk about mark hunting.

These are all skills that are not necessarily taught in class by the teacher because she’s trying to get the curriculum done. So where do children learn these skills?

In my environment, we see it as a subject, and we teach it quite comprehensively. We give children multiple opportunities to write exams to develop the ability, not only to write the exam and to study, but to have a mindset of exam taking that is productive, that they can take forward with them for the rest of their school career. But if that’s not happening in your school, what can you as a parent do to help your child with exam writing?

There are a number of books, several courses you can lean into, tutors and some reading centres that run these exam-taking workshops, and I suggest your child attends those. But there’s a lot you can do at home as well.

If you were to bring some of your work home and you needed to hold an online meeting at seven o’clock at night, let’s say, or if you’re working from home and you run a lot of your meetings at home, what have you done?

You’ve probably set up a workspace in your home, either a room if you’re lucky enough to have a spare room, or if I think about in COVID. You have a family that had three people working online and a fourth child at school, and each person sort of disappeared into their corner of the house that they set up specifically to be able to do these activities. The background was sorted out, the sound was sorted out, they prepared themselves with tea and lunch if they needed to or had it beforehand, and you, as an adult, set your environment up.

Do we do that for our children when it comes to studying? We don’t always do that. We look at our homes as sacred home spaces, and our children end up being relegated to their bedroom to sleep, to watch TV, to game and then to study as well. And that can be really hard on a kid.

So I want you to think about how you might set up your house, look at the full space, in a way that would give the message to your child that studying, test-taking, and exam writing are an important part of their life and therefore an important part of the family life as a whole whenever exams and studying come around.

If you can look at the space and see what else the space is used for, is it distracting?
Should it be in their bedroom, where they should be lying on their bed studying? Does that work for them or not?

Not to look at it in terms of you evaluating, but to work with your child. So to say okay, we need to get this studying done and studying actually doesn’t need to take hours and hours and hours, you could do 20 minutes a day. You can look into the forgetting curve, which is really interesting; repetition really helps with that.

You can also look at time tabling, you can look at different exam or study techniques and go through all of this with your kids, so you can land on something that they can try out.

Now, ultimately, you’re trying to get your kid to get the best mark possible because when they get the best mark, it is an indication of them knowing the work. Then they take that knowledge of the work into their next year, their next grade, because imagine only taking 30% of the knowledge into your next grade, you know you’re building on a very weak foundation. So you actually want them to do well, but more importantly, you want them to know how to do well, not just to sort of wing it.

You might be very lucky and you might have one of those kids who studies really easily, who is very diligent and goes into their space and gets it done,

80% of the time, they’re a bit lost; they don’t know what this is all about. So helping them through this process of self-reflection and trying different things out, so they can get to know their study style, and each subject will have a different study style, maybe even a different study space.

Do they use the Pomodoro effect, which is 25 minutes of studying and a five-minute break, and you do that in three cycles, then you’ve done an hour and a half’s worth of studying. Do you do three subjects, do you do the same subject, can they test it out and see the outcome, what does retention of information mean?

The learning curve for me always starts with learning or studying and then forgetting, so giving yourself some space to walk away from it and then trying to see how much you can remember, because exams ultimately are how much you can remember and then can you put those answers into the context of the question? Do you read the question well?

But a large part of it is, can we forget and then remember? There is this forgetting curve, an idea that the more often you forget and then recall, the more you can recall or remember. There’s a lot of information out there in terms of how I can teach my child to study.

When you hit grade 4, it’s the beginning of the journey of learning what studying feels like for your child, what it looks like, where it should be, what is optimal, what is not optimal, and the decisions they make. We don’t want studying to be cumbersome and more than it needs to be; we want it to be efficient, especially when they’ve got so many subjects and so many exams they’re writing.

So from grade 4, (it’s actually never too late, you can do it at any age), but ultimately, if you want to make a perfect process from grade 4 we should be chatting to children about what is this thing called studying and exam writing and how are we going to lean into this and how are you going to know you.

Is it different per subject, is it different per day, is it different for tests and exams? Let’s give it a go, let’s see what happens when you take this approach rather than driving for results. I know a lot of children are driven to get the best results possible. I often see children who are studying to get the result rather than studying to know the work, and that’s fair enough when it comes to primary school and high school but

I’ve seen it in an occupational therapist who was in their first year and meeting with a seasoned Occupational Therapist (OT), and I thought the question was going to be How do I become the best OT. That wasn’t the question she asked; she asked How do I write the best exam and get the best marks. What hit me so hard is that I will never use that OT in my business because I’m not looking for an OT that’s trying to get the correct answer; I’m looking for the OT trying to be the best OT.

We need to talk to our children about what exam writing is all about, and how you know yourself, what you want for yourself, and what you are driving towards. From that process come better results, but purely driving for good results empties the learning process of anything valuable. I see so often the day after an exam is written, children can’t call a thing because they’ve almost put it into this working memory that disappears after they’ve written their exam, but actually, we want to be building knowledge.

There is an argument that some subjects seem redundant, and why are we learning this anyway, but actually, it’s the skill of learning and building knowledge that we can spider web out of, or we can create more knowledge from existing knowledge.

As you’re going into term 4, think about where your child is in terms of their own reflection, their own ability, and their knowledge of themselves when it comes to studying and exam writing. What can you tweak or do differently? Can you create a space for them? Can you give them not only a physical space to study but also the mental space to try a different technique and see if it works? Are you okay that they get a lower mark having tried a different method, then being able to reflect on that and grow from that for the next time they write exams, or are you driving purely for high marks? Your intention is also very interesting.

You have an opportunity to take a few days, a few weeks even, to reflect on what your approach as a parent is going to be towards your child’s exam writing. It’s going to be very different to other parents because your child is different, you are different, and your home is different. Expectations and skill levels are different.

I took a subject in matric that I knew I could get excellent marks for without studying, because I took two other subjects that I knew I needed to work really hard in. My daughter took E.G.D. but didn’t take art because they said both of those subjects together would take too much time. You need to look at all the subjects they’re taking as well, and where they should place their energy and where they shouldn’t? Where do they not need to put too much energy because they already have it, and of course, practice, practice, practice.

Setting up those organisational skills, those planning skills, look at how they take a break, how they resist temptation, what makes it easy, what makes it hard and helping them to reflect because the skill of reflection is like a muscle you build and build it going forward. Good luck for term 4, good luck for exams.