Pre-Planning

• Ways to improve daily planning
• Ways to create weekend plan to incorporate reviewing and studying
• Ways to create a table of content for final exam
• Ways to seek teachers’ guidance based on one’s personal strengths and weaknesses
• Ways to map out a time line for studying for 3-weeks prior to final exam

 Refining Learning

• Ways to polish learning by reading, note taking and reviewing
• Ways to anticipate questions on a test by reviewing HW, past quizzes and tests
• Ways to sync learning by utilizing note cards, study guides and concept posters
• Ways to implement memory strategies to retain new concepts

Strategic Thinking pre-test and during the test

• Ways to modify behaviors to create a test-taking zone
• Ways to read and organize test questions
• Ways to format answers by anticipating what the teacher wants
• Ways to map out an answer by creating outlines

STRATEGY BINDER

Overview & suggestions for each student will be provided in a form of a Tool Kit that students can access all year-around. Parents need engage in on-going discussion regarding HOW TO process and work with the student to help them carryover the strategies to enhance the culture of learning.

          Ideally, academic teaching methods should direct students to inculcating self-guided learning. However, these methods are illustrative and subtle; hence not every student is astute enough to accomplish that without explicit help. Tying self-regulated learning with academic achievement is a pivotal part of the emergent executive functions in an adolescent. By the end of high school, every student is expected to develop academic competence to study new material effectively and efficiently, and master the tacit skills that lead to successful test taking. Students’ performance on quizzes, tests and exams permit every teacher to determine those students’ retention and application of learning. Then the question arises as to when someone does poorly on a test, is that because of poor learning, memory lapse or lack of application skills?

          Part of the preparation for a final exam depends on how the student recognizes and views the part-&-whole of this process. Performing well on a final exam depends on a variety of factors including:

1. How well the academic content is grasped and learned
2. How well it is mapped out and interconnected to past learning and 
3. How well that content is recalled during the test

This workshop will focus on helping students establish strategic thinking for self-guided learning to expand on memory, analysis/synthesis skills and retention and retrieval necessary for test taking. This will be done in three parts – pre-planning for exams, refining learning and strategizing test taking itself.

WHO CAN BENEFIT FROM THIS PROGRAM?

High School students who:

• Don't know how to prepare for finals and need training to do so
• Waste a lot of time and do not engage in effective study methods
• Are bright and capable but flounder when it comes to test taking
• Need guidance to assimilate complex information