Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion How to get child to actually "study"

Hello, any tips for getting your child to enjoy studying?

My 11 yo DD has always been able to grasp concepts easily, but she finds the "drudgery" of memorizing and studying boring. She struggled with math in elementary because she wanted to learn algebra concepts but wouldn't take time to memorize her multiplication table. We finally got past that, but now we are hitting high school content, and she really needs to master her study skills. I'm a bit at a loss; when I was her age, I loved memorizing my tables of squares, roots, digits of pi, and long poetry verses just for the sake of it. How can I incentivize her? Is there, perhaps, an online class on study skills I can give her? Any tips are welcome!

Keep in mind the bigger picture, which is that the typical child of her age does not have much in the way of study skills, nor does every child enjoy memorizing. (I have only one who does.) In fact, the principal function of middle school (which is her current age) is to teach students executive functions (study skills and other related organizational and self-regulation skills) and social skills. She appears to be very much on track with her age-peers in this respect. It's as well to remember that just because a child is advanced in one or more areas of cognitive and/or academic development does not mean that they are equally advanced in all other areas, including executive functions or social-emotional development. Independent study skills are part of the larger package of executive functions that she will be growing into over the next several years, just as she will be learning personal responsibility for self-care, helping around the house, and maintaining and repairing relationships.

Also, is it really study skills that you are describing, or only rote memorization? Conceptual learners quite often dislike rote memorization as a study strategy, since it leaves their preferred learning channel idle while forcing them to use an intellectually mundane brute force approach. I noted that one of mine would memorize, but all of them prefer conceptual learning, which fills a need in their pattern-seeking brains better. If you find that lack of fluency in these skills is impeding her progress in math, I would suggest looking for patterns in them, and trying games. When we were children, my sibs and I used to play (and invent) card games that used mathematical operations of various kinds, with increasingly sophisticated manipulations as we became more skilled at math. My own children played a variety of math apps for fact fluency as supplements. If her siblings are a year or two behind her in math, you could also ask her to create some practice activities for them, which might be a fun way of giving her the lead in teaching others--which nearly always results in a higher degree of mastery for the teacher.

I would reply with my own experience in hindsight as well as from mentoring and research. I do not fully agree with aeh's opinion on the matter.

I would say it is important to learn study skills early especially if your daughter is gifted (standardised testing?) as often we learn to coast by osmosis until it affects us down the line, such as myself when I was a freshman at university and had to transfer to another university due to a significant discriminatory conflict. It would teach her ways to study especially when she arrived at HS or university and begins struggling against the curve (especially some T20 unis in the US).

I wouldn't be the man I am today without the study skills I attempted to learn at 11. I would have been close to flunking out of university and I am an intellectually gifted dude.

I would first start out by introducing shortcuts to memorise some parts of the multiplication table, for instance 4x4 = 16 = 4^2 = 2x8 = 1x16 to see the factors involved in 16. Similar for 25: 5x5 = 25 = 1x25. Perhaps she could time herself with the Pomodoro method, and if her executive function is weak maybe start with 10-minute study and 10-minute breaks then after three 10-min study sessions take a 25-min long break? It's not much, but some people are weak in EF and ADHD is a more common disorder than you might think.

Just because she may be "very much on track with her age-peers in this respect" does not mean there is no weakness. If your daughter is gifted then it could perhaps be arguable she is weak in EF and attention compared to her developmental age (not chronological age). How was she like when she was younger? Is she physically healthy?

For my experience, I got diagnosed with ADHD after starting another university after transferring myself out due to a discriminatory conflict. That is a genuine, correct diagnosis at the time and probably before.
The huge mistake that psychiatrists made was to interpret symptoms relative to age. This is incorrect and this is where I believe aeh has erred. The DSM criteria for ADHD states that symptoms should be excessive compared to developmental level (including age, IQ and intellectual maturity). This doesn't imply that your daughter has ADHD or other disorders but it may be worth considering. Even for social emotional development they benchmark against developmental stage (not age only).

As people, we live in a society, and there are certain inherent requirements in the society. Perhaps you could read The Social Contract for a libertarian political perspective of this.

Perhaps your daughter could teach your siblings or begin paid tutoring if possible? Does she have medium-term or long-term goals?