Smarter, Not Harder!  

By Sharon Marshall Lockett

Sharon Marshall Lockett is the author of Home Sweet Homework and the founder/director of Educational Innovations/SCORE.

“Why are you getting a C (or D, or F) in this class, and what can I do to help you?”
I posed that question to 600 high school freshmen, one at a time, as I endeavored to find a way to accelerate their learning.  Their answers would forever change the way I approach teaching. 

Think of possible answers to that question…answers you’ve heard in your own classrooms.  A version of “It’s the teacher’s fault” was the number 2 response, but educators usually guess that one first.

I thought they probably weren’t doing homework, but I found thick notebooks of homework done and never turned in.  When I asked why, the answers fell into three categories: 

1.  I didn’t think it was good enough. 
2.  The teacher won’t let us hand it in if we didn’t do it all, and I didn’t know how to do number 4.  It never occurred to them to leave a blank and call a friend or come early to ask the teacher for help; they simply didn’t hand it in. 
And, of course, the classic response:
3.   Were we supposed to hand that in?  I didn’t know we were supposed to hand it in.  When did they say to hand it in?

I thought they probably weren’t studying, but heard over and over again stories of studying all night but failing the test.

Although I had been a high school teacher for ten years, the number one response from 600 students shocked me, and it needs to be heard in a scenario:

First, a look of fright would cross their eyes, and they would drop their heads.  If I waited out that deadly 12 seconds of silence, they would peek up and catch my eye.  If they read trust, I got gut honest answers.  They would again drop their heads and respond, “I don’t know.  I think I’m stupid.”

“‘Stupid’ is not a word in the SCORE dictionary,” I told them.  Then we began to talk.

I asked a number of questions.  For my geometry students, I asked: “Have you memorized your theorems?”  I expected that answer to be no, but their answer to my follow-up question surprised me:  “How do you go about memorizing them?”  The most structured answer I ever received from anyone earning less than an A in Geometry was, “Oh, I read through them two or three times.”  They had no process for acquiring new information or committing material to long-term memory. 

When an assignment was to answer questions at the end of the chapter, I suggested we read the question first; then skim through the chapter to see what we needed to study.  They thought it was cheating to read the question first.  They also didn’t know how to skim for key ideas; they approached every reading task the same way:  word for word for word.

We soon discovered that these bright students who were failing classes were doing so partly because they lacked study skills.  Study skills became the pedagogical basis of SCORE.  The original curriculum was written by students from the University of California, Irvine as “Advice to my younger brothers and sisters, alias, what I wish I had known when I got here.”  The curriculum is comprehensive, but here are three of my favorite study strategies:

• Chunk It; Study Only What You Don’t Know.  When students say they “studied all night long,” probably they were reviewing all night long. When I ask students what they need to do to earn an A, they usually answer with behaviors:  “I have to turn in my homework.”  “I have to pay attention in class.”  We taught them to identify what they need to learn.  We taught them to “divide and conquer,” to devote their time to drill, not review. Our Learning Theories teach them how:  “Out loud, sets of three, five to fifteen minutes.”
• Do It Twice.  When students are stuck, we ask them to draw a picture of what they’re seeking to understand…or create a skit about the problem they are trying to solve…or sing a song with lyrics about the problem…or write a text message about the solution.  We use their interests and natural intelligences to bring about comprehension; then we can help them translate it into the language of the classroom.  Our students express every answer twice:  once with words and once with a strategy of their choice.
• Synthesize It.  A teacher once commented that learning our strategy of feedback was worth taking our workshop.  On test day, a student threw his paper down and kicked back in his chair, breathing loudly.  When questioned, he responded, “Your test sucks.”  The teacher responded, “We learned about feedback in here.  Tell me what ‘sucks’ means.”  He didn’t know the definition of one word.  Definition given, the student finished the test and earned a grade of B.  So often students stumble over one word and quit.  We help them re-state the question, summarize the question, pull out the key words in the passage.  We have them identify what they do know and guess what the unknown word means.

When we evaluated the program, we expected to have “turned the students on to learning;” we expected that they would devote more of their free time to their studies.  They didn’t; in fact, they spent slightly less time doing homework after our intervention than they did before.  But they were turning in homework more often, earning higher grades, and enjoying their classes more.  They were studying smart rather than hard.

All 600 of the students in the original program had been identified by their middle school counselor or teacher as “probably not going to college.”  My mandate was to make them eligible for the University of California by the time they graduated.  Four years later, 40% of them graduated in the top 12.5% of their graduating class; 40.8% enrolled in 4-year colleges, and 50% enrolled in community college.  When we met them at their point of need and empowered them with effective study strategies, our students excelled.

They studied smarter, not harder!

Sharon Marshall Lockett is the author of Home Sweet Homework and the founder/director of Educational Innovations/SCORE, a program validated by the U.S. Department of Education for effectiveness in improving the performance of high-risk youth. She has more than thirty years of experience in public education.