Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Bad Study Skills Turned Around with Good Learning Techniques

By Courtney Pollock

Bad study skills are endemic in the student population. Sometimes it's hard to trace the reason for this deficit in knowing how to learn. Yet, it's easy to see how a student's failure to achieve in school can play a role in developing bad study skills. Failure is a part of every day life, yet kids and teens are often stopped cold by academic underachievement. While adults can conquer failure and move on, failure can block a student's progress in school, and can virtually wipe out learning techniques that have been taught to them. These failures pose a threat to learning and can cause even good students to adopt bad study skills or none at all. While their parents understand that we all can learn something from failure, adolescents and older teens view failure through the skewed eye of youth.

One of the things that failure can bring is the determination to improve. If students can understand this they will be open to receiving new learning techniques. Comprehending that they learn best when they know how they learn, young people can get past the disappointment of failure. Discovering how our brain intakes information depends on three key learning techniques. Deciding what is our best learning style is the first one. Finding whether our focus is external or internal comes next. Knowing the exact areas where we are already smart is the final thing to determine.

It's not easy making these determinations. There are academic summer camps for youth and teens that show students how to identify what kind of learner they are and how to apply that knowledge to better their study skills. With some help, students can identify their individual personal learning styles, which differ for every person. People who learn by seeing are visual learners. Those who learn by hearing are auditory. Everyone who learns by moving or touching things is a kinesthetic learner.

After they identify how they are learning, students need to understand personal focus. It's important for teens to know in what situation they will focus the best. An easy test is to ask them whether they learn better with others around them or alone. Learning techniques, such as these, are multifaceted and usually are only made clear when a student can concentrate on this information without distraction. This can happen in summertime at academic camps, which provide a concentrated course that produces multiple changes in a teen's confidence, study skills, and learning ability.

The list of learning techniques is not complete until students grasp the fact that all of them are smart, but display it in their own individual way. How people display they are smart can actually be measured in eight separate ways. Spatial intelligence can be found in those who are good at putting puzzles together. Linguistically smart people are those who are good at story telling and jokes. Empathy toward other people's opinions and feelings displays an aptitude for interpersonal skills. Musical intelligence can be measured if a person plays a musical instrument. People who look for patterns in the stars are nature smart. Bodily smart means a person is a good actor, mimicker, and role-player. Those who are gifted in the intrapersonal area spend time alone thinking things through. Finally, mathematically talented people figure out the reasons for things.

Failure often puts kids and teens in a position to fail in the future. It's tough to get them to want to concentrate on their schoolwork and to know they can put the failure behind them and be achieve better things. When students are introduced to different learning techniques, they are empowered to advance. That process improves their study skills, and their life skills, resulting in better grades and fewer incidents of failure. Then, when failures do come, students know how to use them to improve their lives rather than stopping them cold.

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