All Articles tagged Testing

Too Much to Learn and Too Little Time? Effective Cramming

February 7, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Cramming.

The term is usually frowned upon, but as a medical school student, I’ve come to learn that “cramming” doesn’t deserve the negative connotation it comes with. The vast amount of material that has to be learned in short periods of time leaves little option but to make extremely effective use of the time given to study. Focused and strategic learning in a limited amount of time- this is what I mean by “cramming”. It’s a skill I learned out of necessity, but the value of it can be appreciated by most students. Choosing to treat your normal study sessions with a cramming mentality could be a more effective use of your time than endless hours of unfocused “review.”

Be intentional about studying in the time you have committed to doing so- knowing that you promised to yourself that this is all the time you will be spending specifically studying, be sure to treat it accordingly. Cut out all distractions, have out only the books and notes you need to study with (some extra paper and pens for you tactile learners wouldn’t hurt either!), and get to it. Take frequent breaks- after each chapter/major topic/ at least every hour. The breaks shouldn’t be long at all- just enough time to walk around, think, maybe send a few texts, or have a snack and water. Take a good half hour for meals. Right before you break after finishing a section, be sure to either try some questions testing your recall and understanding, or try to quickly teach yourself (and not just re-reading) what you just learned. Come back from your break and do the same- either try a few questions or teach yourself (or a friend). Questions that test your recall and use of the information you just studied will make it possible to retain information.

Always make sure to get enough sleep afterwards- you must make sure you treat your body to some well-earned rest.

You don’t need to be forced into situations to cram- choose to study efficiently by being intentional about studying in the time you want to, and you’ll find you can really learn more information than you usually would have. It gives you more time to doing the things you would want to, and get to do them without feeling guilty for having not studied yet!

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.

National Mentoring Month: Why Tutoring?

January 1, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives. ~Clay P. Bedford

Can you remember your favorite teacher? Tour guide? Facilitator? What made that experience so memorable? January is National Mentoring Month, and we believe that those memorable experiences always come down to relationships and connections.

Passionate, engaging teachers tend to have passionate, engaged students. A master teacher really makes a difference. A master teacher is invaluable at all stages of life. With the help of a great teacher, mentor or coach, we can push ourselves that much farther and realize our full potential.

It isn’t about competition with others; it’s about self-empowerment, self-motivation, curiosity, and a desire to achieve for one’s own gratification. Tutoring comes in all shapes and sizes. Beyond school consultation, we generally work with families for one of three reasons:

A student is struggling in a particular subject area and needs help to fill a learning gap or reinforce material.
A student is seeking additional challenge or wants to pursue a specific curiosity with an enrichment teacher or academic coach.
With busy schedules and stressful workloads, the homework and study front is sometimes best facilitated by a neutral 3rd party rather than a parent.

Ultimately, the goal is to help students develop effective studying strategies and confidence that will lead to self-empowerment and independence. Whether the focus is support or enrichment, tutoring may be short-term to jump-start the process or long-term to provide more ongoing instruction. In the case of short-term tutoring, students often need a teacher, mentor or coach to help them springboard into success.

A common question is “How long does it take to create a habit?” There are varying opinions ranging from 21-66 days. But the bottom line is that consistency and practice are needed for any habit or behavior change to stick. This idea applies to tutoring as well. If a student needs support to develop organizational systems, study habits, or new behaviors, then tutoring may be a short-term engagement to help get on the right path and take off.

Tutoring may also be short-term if the learning goal is narrow. For example, you may want to spend several sessions with a language tutor getting ready for an upcoming vacation, business trip or study abroad experience. Or you may want to meet with a museum educator to help bring a historical unit to life. Other students have sought out short-term support to prepare for a specific exam or to expedite progress in a particular area. Longer term tutoring may begin as specific academic support but then evolve into broader academic coaching.

Once the relationship is developed, my students often request that the tutor stay on as a resource for continued support, enrichment, motivation and structured practice. I’m so impressed with how much ownership our students assume. We have students as young as fifth and sixth graders that directly manage scheduling, send text messages when they have questions and prepare the agenda and work priorities for the upcoming session. As a teacher, you can choose to be the “Guide on the Side” or the “Sage on Stage.” Both have their time and place, but more often than not we look to be the “Guide on the Side” because that means our students are equal partners in the process.

As a classroom teacher, my colleagues and I used to say that an “A” has 3 points: 1) the student’s accountability, 2) the teacher’s accountability, and 3) the parent’s accountability. Another way of saying this is “my job, your job, our job.” When all 3 points are working together, a student’s achievement is unstoppable! Contact us to discuss tutoring as a springboard to achievement for your child.

Happy National Mentoring Month!

By Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed.
Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist
My Learning Springboard, Inc.

College Planning and Test Preparation

December 16, 2013 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

So, you are ready to take on the seemingly monumental task of beginning your college planning and test preparation for the SAT or ACT exam. Because of the rote nature of preparing for such tests, it’s rare for students to find the process itself intrinsically interesting. That being said, now that you’re about to start, it’s time to get excited about test prep!

First, you need to ask yourself why you’re starting this college planning and test preparation process, and the answer, “My parents are making me!” won’t cut it. Test preparation is just one aspect, albeit an important one, of putting together a competitive application to the colleges you’re interested in. Whether you have already begun work with an admissions coach or only have a vague idea of which colleges fit you, it’s important to start thinking seriously about potential college choices now.

You should then check online to find the SAT or ACT ranges for a few of the colleges that you’re interested in. This will allow you to see approximately how many points you need to add to your baseline scores to be a competitive applicant for your schools.

While your score isn’t everything, improving your baseline scores to within the ranges of the colleges you might be interested in will certainly help ensure that admissions offices will consider your application. It’s important to keep this big-picture motivation in mind throughout your tutoring sessions, homework assignments, and practice tests.

So how do you get from your baseline score to your target score? Let’s say you want to raise your SAT Math score from 540 to 600 (out of 800) or an ACT English score from a 28 to a 32 (out of 36). It’s helpful to know not just the number of points you want to improve, but how many more correct answers that equates to:

SAT students:

For the SAT, a good rule of thumb is that for each score improvement of 10 points, you’ll need to answer approximately one more question correctly that you previously answered incorrectly. So for the hypothetical increase from a 540 to a 600, you’d need to start getting approximately 6 more questions correct on the Math portion of the SAT exam than you did on your baseline assessment.

ACT students:

For the ACT, the rule of thumb is slightly more complex, but still very useful. For each 1 point you hope to improve your score on an individual ACT section, you’ll need to answer between 1 and 3 more questions correctly on that section. The number varies based on which subject you’re setting your goal for, and how high or low your initial score is. You can come up with a more exact ACT improvement goal using the test’s scoring guide.

Having a college or two in mind that you’re excited about, as well as setting a quantitative test preparation goal will help make the nebulous and seemingly overwhelming task of improving your score more manageable and attainable. Click to learn more about the differences between the ACT and SAT.

Good luck as you start your college planning and test preparation journey!

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.

The Unexpected Advantages of e-Tutoring

November 12, 2013 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

I was once asked to tutor the Royal family back in England. And I turned it down.

I was just too busy. I already had a fully booked timetable. During the decade when I was a tutor in London, I was highly sought-after for my ability to transform my pupils’ math skills. I even had a waiting list.

But when I moved to America, no one knew me. Well, my new wife did. A few fellow actor/comedians did. But here I was, starting from scratch in a new country where no one knew what I had to offer, while at the same time back in the UK there were many people who still wanted me to teach their son or daughter. Ultimately it was actually a parent who insisted that I try teaching her son by Skype: she had decided that I was the only person who had proven able to get her son to understand what he was supposedly being taught at school, and if we had to tutor from either side of the Atlantic Ocean, then so be it.

As it turns out, being in the same room as your tutor isn’t that important at all. It all boils down to the rapport you have together. A good rapport creates great willingness to learn. I make my pupils think hard, but I make them laugh at the same time, and apparently that works just as well online with video 3,000 miles apart as it does when we’re next to each other in the same room. Parents who were skeptical at first tried it out and then recommended it to their friends. Before long I reached families I would never have found while living in London, including several who lived out on the Yorkshire moors far from any major town. Online learning solved a problem for them, and I even have pupils stuck out in the middle of nowhere, whom I have never actually met in the flesh, who only know me as a face in the screen and yet apparently look forward to the online lessons and now consider math to be their favorite subject… or so their parents tell me.

Yet it’s not just long-distance or stranded families who have found that Skype tutoring really works for them: I have Skype-tutored people over here in the USA in states up and down both coasts, several of whom were close enough for me to visit at home, and yet most of the time we would still opt to work online.

Why? Well, I think part of it is that this generation is really at ease in front of the TV or computer screen. Sometimes it even seems to me that I get more attention from some pupils, perhaps because they feel more comfortable or under less pressure when interacting with a screen than with a full-size adult? Perhaps because they just love screens. Who knows? Certainly a lot of homework is done online these days, so the student can look at the screen to do their work and at the same time have my face in a little corner helping them understand what they’re doing. It just makes sense.

However there are several other advantages to online tutoring that neither I nor my clients saw coming. One of the most significant is that, instead of writing on paper, we end up writing on Google Documents, which allow both users to write on the same page at the same time. The unexpected bonus is that we end up with a great set of notes, really well-formatted and available online wherever and whenever the pupil needs to refresh his or her memory. What’s more, since the notes were made together during the sessions, the examples and explanations tap the pupil straight back into the mindset when we were making them in the first place. My pupils now have far, far superior notes (and with much less effort) than they ever had when we met face-to-face.

Another advantage for the parent is that working over the internet like this can allow me to draw attention to the resources that are available online. A well-trained, motivated student who knows where to go online can solve a lot of their own problems. Not only is this a great skill to develop and one that encourages the pupil to take control of their own education… it also means that you as the parent may well not need to pay for as many tutoring sessions!

Ultimately you can use your tutor much more carefully and cleverly when the relationship is set up online. For instance, what happens when your child has homework to do that they don’t understand? Do you arrange for a tutor to come around to your house every week at that time? But then, does that mean your child will end up doing the homework with the tutor rather than learn to deal with it themselves? And does that extra hour of tutoring only serve to make your child even busier on a night when they have homework to do?! With online tutoring you can arrange to have a quick 15 minute chat to go over the concept and then your child can tackle the homework themselves, putting into practice their newly-won knowledge. No tutor is typically going to make the journey to come to your house for a quick 15 minutes, but the tutor available via internet will probably be able to fit in a quick chat and not charge a full hour for it.

I always encourage my pupils to notice the difference between when they truly understand a concept or a topic and when they are merely following the instructions they have been taught. In math, more than any other subject, it is vital to fully understand the concept you are learning if you are going to use it to solve problems or to build further knowledge upon. My pupils are taught to be aware of when the lights go on, the penny drops and the concept suddenly completely makes sense. Which means they’ll know that if they don’t get that feeling then there is still something eluding them… and whenever that happens, they are free to email me or call me. Any time, any day. If I am not too busy I’ll always help. It’s my job to work myself out of a job, to make myself unnecessary. And by working online I can do that more efficiently than ever.

By Nick Thomas, Private Tutor

Explaining Learning Disabilities to Your Child

October 31, 2013 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Marcia Brown Rubinstein
Original Source: Smart Kids with Learning Disabilities

AT A GLANCE

How and when to tell your child about her learning disabilities depends on your readiness as well as hers • The “right time” is sooner rather than later, never in anger, and always in an atmosphere of optimism and confidence • Encourage ongoing discussions characterized by honesty, clear communication, reassurance, and an emphasis on her unique abilities.

As a parent, you must make sure that your child has the right information at the right time so that she can navigate her world with confidence. The same is true for information about learning disabilities.

Parents often agonize about telling a child that she has learning disabilities. But can you imagine not telling your child she has asthma because you don’t want her to feel funny using an inhaler to breathe?

Learning disabilities are just as real and just as disabling as biological differences. The sooner they’re addressed, the better the prognosis for a productive future.

FINDING THE RIGHT BALANCE

In the absence of an explanation, your child will assume that she is stupid if she stumbles in class, struggles with assignments, and sees that others need less assistance to learn. If you haven’t educated her about her unique learning style before that happens, you’ve waited too long.

On the other hand, if you describe all the difficulties that may develop from a particular diagnosis, you may create a self-fulfilling prophecy. She may assume that she is incapable of learning anything, so why bother trying? In that case, you have disclosed too much too soon.

Is there a perfect time to inform your child about her learning disabilities? Of course. But the perfect time is different for every child, in every family, in every culture, in every setting, in every school, for every type of intellectual range, and for every type of learning disability.

So how and when should you begin to educate your child about her learning differences? The answer is simple: When you are ready, when she is ready, when the time is right, better sooner than later, never in anger, and always in an atmosphere of optimism and confidence. Following are tips to help you through the process.

Educate yourself about your child’s diagnosis and her assets and deficits before communicating the scope of the learning disability to her. In your discussions do not lose sight of her strengths and unique abilities.

Reassure her that she’s perfectly healthy, then explain her specific learning disability in detail suitable to her age and intellect. If she has dyslexia, for example, you may want to say that her brain works differently when she reads. If she’s been mixing up letters, point it out as an example of what happens with dyslexia. With older kids, prepare material for them to read and referrals to websites that explain their specific type of LD in language they can understand.

Tell her how you’re going to get help. Reinforce the fact that you and all family members will do everything it takes to guarantee her success. Share some examples of successful people with LD.

Explain tasks she’ll find easy to complete and ones that might provide challenges. Find support professionals to cover areas you cannot manage yourself. This includes emotional as well as cognitive issues.

Maintain an ongoing discussion about your child’s future. Discuss your expectations and hopes as well as hers. Make sure she knows that she can excel as long as she works hard. Don’t downplay the fact that there will be frustration along the way. Reinforce the fact that you and other family members will do what’s needed to ensure success.

Communicate clearly. Make sure your child understands everything you’re saying. Don’t hide behind jargon and clinical terms. Translate those into language she will understand. Help her apply the information in proactive, upbeat ways.
Compliment her often and sincerely. Self-esteem and resiliency are often fragile in a child with LD. Praise her lavishly, but make sure you mean it. Never give empty or gratuitous praise.

Get involved in your child’s school. There is nothing better than your active and obvious presence. You are your child’s primary educational advocate. Make sure that the teachers and administrators know you and know that you are overseeing her entire school program. Don’t find out too late that accommodations were not carried out.

Tell your child at least once every day, “I love you.” This advice works well for kids without LD too, but for those with LD, it’s as critical as food and shelter.

There may be few things more difficult than having these important discussions with your child, but if you get stuck, keep going back to No. 9. It’s more important than all the others combined.