My DS11 in 5th/6th grade is now going to have a class in study skills. But what happens to a kid who doesn't really study? He seems to get it all the 1st or 2nd time. Will he even think this is worth while? I am trying not to say anything this year until I really really need to because I want him to start to be the driving force in his education. I wish the teacher would actually give him something really hard to study so he would have the challenge.
Could he possiblly get anything out of this class (which is all year)?

Definitely. Eventually, whatever he does in life, he will need to study. Learning to take organized notes, how to read chapters and take notes on that, how to possibly write a research paper. These are all very important skills to learn. Time management.

He can -- the question is, will he?

As a person who never had to study, I always considered those classes to be a total waste of time. Hopefully your DS will have a better attitude and not wait till much later in life to realize that there are study skills worth having.

I think that the chances of your child internalizing the lessons and seeing them as valuable would be much greater if there were assignments or lectures in the regular class schedule that actually required study strategies to complete successfully. Unfortunately, the opportunity to get experiences like this often doesn't happen until college. Maybe you could talk to the teacher who is teaching this class and see if she could assign application projects throughout the class that could be individualized to be at an appropriate level?

Examples might be:

A. Choose a non-fiction article, a short non-fiction book, or a chapter of a longer non-fiction book on the topic of your choice, and outline the main points. Develop 4-5 study questions that require at least 1 or 2 sentence answers (no true/false or single word answers) that you could use to quiz someone studying for a test on the article or chapter to be sure that they understood the main ideas.

B. Watch a documentary, news program, science program, history program, or other non-fiction educational program on the topic of your choice and take notes as it is in progress, and then organize the material into outline form, a graphic web, or some other method that shows relationships between and among main ideas and details.

Allowing relatively free choice of material on assignments like these can auto-differentiate to a degree without a lot of extra teacher work, because children are more likely to gravitate to material that interests them and that is at or at least near their challenge level when they get to make the choice.

I never had study skills and it killed me in college. My papers were terrible. I developed methods of communicating that assumed people could follow me, as I followed quickly.

And courses just get more challenging. I remember Heat, mass and Momentum. It had a passing rate of 25%. Part of that was the boring instructor. But that course challenged my inert study skills.

I think that's a function of engineering. Once you are past the basic science/engineering weed out courses, you get into the courses that are no longer intuitive and you actually have to do work and attend class to pass the class.

That being said, it would have been nice to have study skills going into college.

I don't think I ever developed study skills. I just relied on my intelligence and test taking skills to get through college and law school rather than personal effort. I rarely attended class and I avoided doing the work whenever possible, due to the fact that work require effort.

My grades represented significant underachievement when compared to my actual potential.

I fell into a a full load of AP/Honors in the 10th grade and HAD to study to catch up after reading on my own in the back of the class. I had chemistry, physics, precalc and geometry, english, and history. All honors or AP and with a small group of kids who had been together since elementary school. With dozens of problems in the STEM classes per day and hundreds of pages of reading and writing assignments each week.

It was fun but it was also a shock.

The big thing was having a weekly planner, a weekly plan, and time to study each night.

The summer before I went to college I decided I would test out of some classes - and spent that summer working my way through textbooks. And successfully tested out.

My last semester in school I took 24 hours with just one B. They let me do that because the semester before that I took 21 hours and got As.

In college, the hardest class I took was from a Caltech visiting professor. He was absolutely ruthless. He spent the first class putting up what our schedule should be and how to fit in the amount of study he would require. I realized then that I was not anywhere near my potential in how much I could work.

When I moved over to the math department, my adviser there gave me a book on how to study. And they required me to take a weekend course on being organized. This helped even more.

How to develop it at an earlier age if the school is not challenging?

The only way is to pick a subject the child likes, set goals, then work on it every night as if it were a college level course with hard deadlines. I know that a number of metro areas have Chinese or Russian weekend courses and there are some math courses via math clubs that do this. Or, you could pick a dead language. Or an online course.

Thanks everybody. great input.

Austin - I may look into some of your suggestion. That's what he needs.

I think that study skills are about a lot more than just learning stuff in school or college. They carry over into life in the workplace. When I'm analyzing something or writing something, I won't be productive unless I can concentrate for long periods ---often on something I don't necessarily want to be concentrating on. Acquiring study skills taught me how to focus on something that didn't necessarily excite me mentally.

Yeah, the transition from school, where you don't have to actually do much of anything or be anywhere, to a professional job where you are actually expected to do things and be productive is somewhat traumatic.

I was just reminded by a friend about Chinese Schools. He is Indian and his son attends one. They have homework and tests. And do more than just Chinese.

I've had similar experiences, I had absolutely no idea how to study and I went to a tough college and it kicked my butt. Some things I think might have helped me:

Consistant challenge:

If you're not consistantly put into a position of work hard or fail, you just never work hard. It can't be a one off thing. I don't think this would have worked early, because a child doesn't yet believe in themselves. Once you hit high school though, if a child has developed a strong sense of (I call it pride) perfectionism (in the healthy sense) they will work hard because they simply dont' want to fail.

A VARIETY of challenge:

One thing that sucked was that in HS I got good grades in everything, like 100% perfect in everything. As a result I never figured out what I liked. Try to find some AP or EC for your child to help them figure out what they actually enjoy (and therefore want to work hard for).