As we head into the final week of Term 1 our Year 11 & 12 students are completing their end of Preliminary course exams in preparation for the start of their HSC year courses next term. We have been discussing with them how to maximise their effectiveness in study as they balance their school, social, work and church youth activities. At Charlton we want to prepare our students for a life of continual learning, with the understanding that learning doesn’t finish when you leave school. There will be many opportunities in the future for them to gain knowledge, to learn new ideas, concepts and skills as well as understand more fully the Creator who designed an amazing world.

At Charlton we encourage our students to understand how they learn and then apply this knowledge when studying to ensure they gain the maximum benefit from it. We want them to understand what study strategies work, and what generally doesn’t work as well. If I reflect on my own school journey, many hours of study time were wasted on the “busy work” of reading my notes and textbooks. Instead of learning the content, I became familiar with the content without developing the necessary skills to apply that knowledge in a variety of situations. I also didn’t understand that sleep and rest are an essential part of the study process, as it is in the deeper stages of sleep where we strengthen our memories. Students who are sleep deprived are giving themselves less opportunity to embed the knowledge they have learned the previous day and are setting themselves up for a day of less focus and attention.

Over the past few years there has been a leap forward in understanding the neuroscience behind how our brain learns, and from this an understanding of how certain strategies can be applied to retain this knowledge and apply it to a variety of situations.  The work of cognitive psychological scientists at “The Learning Scientists” (https://www.learningscientists.org/) has been particularly helpful to me in explaining to students the science behind learning, and what top 6 research-based strategies they can implement to gain the most from their study time. These strategies are:

  1. Reinforcement – Retrieval Practice
  2. Developing understanding – Elaboration, Concrete Examples and Dual Coding
  3. Planning for exams – Spaced Practice and Interleaving

A student could do much worse than focusing much of their study time on retrieval practice. This involves a student putting away all of their notes and writing down everything they remember about a particular subject area, or answering questions that they haven’t prepared for. Once done, they check to see what they have missed. In doing so, an amazing electrical and chemical process is taking place in and between the synapses of their brains, strengthening the neural pathways that aid memory retention and recall.

Mr Ben Straker / Director of Studies