What Study Skills Are and Why Your Student Needs Them

All students can benefit from stronger study habits – especially after an unusual year of distance learning. We’re here to explain how study skills and executive function coaching can help your student reach their potential.

To understand how study skills might benefit you, let’s discuss both what study skills are and who typically benefits from study skills coaching. We’ll tackle the latter first.

What are Study Skills?

The biggest misconception is that students who need study skills are only those struggling in school. In reality, it’s any student that wants to be better at learning—period. But if you’re looking for specific ways to identify a need for study skills, there are some diagnostic questions you can ask:

• Is your room, binder, or digital file system a mess? 

• Do you lack systems for tracking assignments, materials, and deadlines? 

• Are you struggling under the weight of your schedule?

• Do you give up in classes where you lack motivation or interest?

• Do you consistently procrastinate? 

• Do you struggle to communicate consistently and clearly (or at all) with teachers in and outside of class?

• Do you fail to adapt your preparation to suit the assignment?

• Do you ignore essays and exams once they come back with a grade?

• Do you struggle to work without accountability?

Now, let’s talk about exactly what study skills are. Study skills comprise a range of practices that improve your ability to learn, regardless of subject matter. Each skill speaks to the issues surfaced by the questions above, including:

• Setting and achieving goals

• Getting organized and managing time

• Participating in class and taking effective notes 

• Staying motivated

• Preparing for essays and tests

• Dealing with failure

• Instilling healthy habits with devices

Some of these skills are built into the classroom experience, but many of them require students to develop them on their own. And if a bright, ambitious student is disorganized, unstructured, and undisciplined, they’ll perform well below what they’re capable of. In other words, they don’t need content mastery – they need study skills.

In study skills coaching, our tutors help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and develop skills that match their goals. We work with students transitioning between different educational models (for instance, from Montessori to a private prep school), students who have consistently struggled academically, high-achieving students who are feeling overwhelmed, and those who are simply anticipating the high-level challenges of an ambitious course load. 

Inside a Study Skills Coaching Session

During a typical study skills session, tutors will not focus on completing particular homework assignments or conduct content-specific instruction. Instead, we focus on meta-cognitive and practical exercises that help a student better understand their processes and their learning systems. This can help build up better executive functioning, a sort of mental mission control that correlates with memory retrieval, self-control, and mental flexibility. 

Robust executive functioning is increasingly important as students take on more complex workloads. For example, if a student struggles to manage their time, they’ll spend time in a session mapping out their week, their existing priorities, and their desired priorities. Is there a positive correlation? Is the student thinking deliberately about how they spend free time? They’ll then reflect on their goals, identify patterns of struggle, and develop systems for managing their time and priorities in a way that actually works. This provides an immediate, practical outcome—a clearer roadmap for managing time that week or month—but it also models an executive function process that is of significant long term value.

At this juncture, many students and parents might think, “we’re in crisis mode with the workload; we don’t have time to not complete assignments.” But it’s exactly this mentality that prevents a student from developing vital study skills, which allow them to thrive even as new challenges arise. What presents itself as a problem at the content level often has as much to do with circumstantial and meta-cogntive factors as it does subject-specific struggles. For instance, a student who struggles to write and turn in essays regularly may not be a bad writer, per se. The problem may lie at the level of planning, process, and discipline, where the student is unable to successfully navigate the writing process relative to other demands or interests, academic or otherwise. Focusing solely on how to write a better essay with such a student misses the crux of the issue.

Study skills coaching is not a sort of “homework club” that forces students to complete assignments. Such accountability can indeed be useful, but what we’re really after is empowering students to take ownership over their learning.

Conclusion

All students benefit from consciously improving their study skills. Ideally, these are the sorts of practices every student would be developing consistently throughout their education. But more often than not, we don’t think about these skills until some moment of educational crisis. Our advice to families is don’t wait. While these foundational skills might not show up on a transcript, they form the backbone of successful learning—in high school and beyond. 

Learning isn’t just about content. It’s a skill in itself, and we can all learn better. To learn more about how your student can reach their potential with study skills support, please contact our team.