Bleary-eyed and sleepy, your middle schooler awakens at 6:30 AM. After stumbling through their morning routine, they arrive at school about an hour later. The rest of the day is a cacophony of activity that includes classes, tests, projects, socializing with friends, in-school sports, and often extracurricular activities. With any luck, they are back in bed around 9:30 that night. The previous 15 hours are often a blur at this point, and sometimes many tasks are left undone. Not much time is leftover from the 24 we are granted each day. Nine. Nine hours to eat, shower, do homework, and sleep. Nine. Let that sink in. 

How, then, can a busy middle schooler be expected to fit studying into this schedule? Most middle school students at Independence have five to seven built-in study halls in a seven-day cycle. Students are taught the importance of using this time well. They often are able to complete any written assignments that they have due and are also permitted to work with peers on collaborative projects. But studying… studying is a separate entity from homework. Research shows that repeated practice over time allows students to transfer knowledge from short-term memory to long-term memory. https://www.retrievalpractice.org/ Students need multiple avenues by which to learn information in a way that they can manipulate it critically in their minds. 

A good rule of thumb for students to follow is to spend about 5-10 minutes per subject, per night having some sort of contact with information learned that day. Note that I did not say they should “study” each night. Contact could mean anything from discussing with you on the car ride to basketball practice what they learned that day in class, or categorizing the notes they took into groups. Let’s take history as an example. When a teacher introduces a new topic, the student can take a few minutes each night simply adding new information to lists - people, terms, events, etc. After a few days, they can make flashcards for these pieces of information. Interacting with those flashcards for a few minutes each night counts as “studying.” Once a larger amount of content is gathered, the student can now begin to manipulate the information on these cards into different mediums. They might, for example, write a paragraph about how a laissez-faire government led to events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. This, in turn, caused the New York State Legislature to create the Factory Investigating Commission. Instead of a paragraph, the student can transcribe this information into a picture or graphic that they can re-use later to tell the story aloud. For a few weeks, this type of regular exposure to content is helping them to understand it and be prepared for a test on it. Although this method of repeated retrieval in short intervals may seem slow and ineffective, it really is the better way to learn. Students will soon find that they do not need to spend a large amount of time the night before the test to “study.” That’s not how our brains work anyway! 

Vita Biddle, Independence's LeApps™ Specialist, has taught at our school since 1992. She is a team member of the Center for Wellness, Innovation and Learning (CWIL™).