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Is it Better to Review or Preview?

Posted on by Chris Loper
Reading Time: 3 minutes

A woman contemplating the best option

Here’s a common line we get from parents, especially at the beginning of the school year:

“They don’t have anything right now, so can we cancel this week’s tutoring session?”

Our standard reply is, “Yes, but we suggest using the time to strengthen their foundational skills or look ahead and preview upcoming content.”

Most students (and parents) think it’s more valuable to review for a test than it is to preview what they’re about to learn. While we do, of course, encourage students to study before their exams, we’re also keenly aware of the value of previewing lessons before you receive them in class.

Why Previewing Helps

Most students show up to class with no idea what’s coming. They struggle through the lesson, struggle through the homework, and later review the material for the test. This pattern usually produces subpar results.

So what if, instead of cramming for the test at the last minute, you moved that effort to the front?

two students studying at a desk

If you previewed the lesson beforehand, then you’d already have a basic understanding of it when you arrived to class. It would be easier to follow along. The homework would be easier, and it would go faster. And, most importantly, you’d have a head start on forming a long-term memory of the material.

Since the mastery path is a muddy slope, any new knowledge is quickly lost without spaced repetition. Specifically, most people need three repetitions within the first 24-48 hours of learning something. Without that, the knowledge slips away, and they have to start over. Previewing a lesson the night before, attending class, and doing the homework gets you those three repetitions. The typical pattern of attending class and doing the homework (with a review many days later) doesn’t get you three repetitions in that critical period.

What Previewing Looks Like

If you want to preview upcoming content, you have several excellent options to choose from:

You can start taking notes because written product helps you learn. You can even write down questions to ask your teacher. Remember, you’re just previewing it to get a head start; you don’t need to fully understand the topic yet.

How to Predict What’s Coming

It’s usually easy to know what’s coming next. It will be on the syllabus or in the class calendar online. Tutors also typically have a good idea what’s coming up in your course. Or, failing that, you can simply ask the teacher.

a student asking their teacher what's coming next

You Can Do Both

Of course, it’s not a one-or-the-other choice. You can both preview and review. For difficult classes like Calculus or AP US History, doing both might be essential.

The harder the class, the more it’s necessary to do more than they ask you to do, and the more important it is to be proactive in your learning.

Reactive Learning vs. Proactive Learning

Reactive Learning:

  • You wait for the teacher’s lesson before you start learning.
  • You wait for homework to be assigned before you start practicing.
  • You wait for the test to be announced before you start studying.

Proactive Learning:

  • You look ahead and preview upcoming topics.
  • You practice what you’ve learned regardless of whether or not there is homework.
  • You understand that the test is always coming, so you start studying as soon as a new unit begins.

A proactive learner is resourceful, hard-working, and strategic. They understand that they’re in charge of their own success, so they don’t have to wait for someone else to tell them it’s time to start learning. And given the chance to preview a topic ahead of time, they’ll always jump at the opportunity.

Tutoring vs. Parent Coaching

Posted on by Chris Loper
Reading Time: 2 minutes

a student with his tutor

What’s more valuable: tutoring or parent coaching?

Meeting once or twice a week with an excellent tutor can be wonderfully beneficial for a child. Tutors are skilled at meeting students’ specific academic needs, encouraging their progress, and growing their confidence. Plus, many students (teenagers in particular) are more likely to listen to a tutor than a parent. As such, it’s often easier for a tutor to influence an adolescent’s behavior than it is for a parent.

On the other hand, parents get far more than an hour or two per week with their children, so parents have far more opportunities to influence their children. And although a teenager is often like a Chinese finger-trap, resisting whatever well-meaning advice parents give, teenagers are deeply influenced by their parents.

a mom and daughter having a difficult conversation

Parents can adjust the physical environment of the home, creating easy-to-use study spaces and making healthy choices the norm. Parents can use growth-minded language and ask proactive questions. Parents can model making wise choices, being resilient when faced with challenges, and using smart strategies to overcome problems. Parents can actively demonstrate curiosity, passion, and grit.

And parents get thousands of little opportunities to do these things each week. With some coaching, you can take these frequently missed opportunities and transform them into fuel for your child’s growth.

a parent checking in on their teenager before bed

So, bang for your buck, parent coaching is more valuable than tutoring. (You can, of course, do both.)

One way to improve your approach to parenting is through personalized coaching. These sessions, offered by Northwest Educational Services owner Greg Smith, are not about telling you how to raise your kids. They’re about troubleshooting the challenges you’re experiencing as parents with strategies derived from decades of working with children. They’re also not about judging you. Parenting is hard, and no one does it perfectly. If you’re interested in parent coaching, email greg@nwtutoring.com.

Another option is to take our Parenting For Academic Success classes. These classes are co-taught by Greg and me, combining Greg’s wisdom with what psychology and neuroscience have to say about helping adolescents learn and grow. Our three classes are perennially available as videos that you can watch at your own pace. To learn more, click here.

How to Succeed at Skipping a Year in Math

Posted on by Chris Loper
Reading Time: 3 minutes

a child jumping over a gap

Long-time readers will know that I generally advise against skipping a year in math. For many reasons, it’s usually a bad idea. Nonetheless, many students continue to make this choice, so let’s talk about how to do it right.

Most people just figure that the school said they were smart enough to jump ahead, so that’s good enough. This approach often leads to serious problems down the road: a snowballing accumulation of knowledge gaps and a growing feeling that you’re not really a “math person,” which ultimately leads to giving up on STEM.

Skipping Ahead in Middle School

The most common version of skipping a year is jumping from 7th-grade math to Algebra 1, effectively skipping over 8th-grade math. If that’s your path, then you should spend this summer learning the course you’re skipping.

Make a Khan Academy account (it’s free) and work your way through their 8th-grade math course. Do every single exercise in every single unit. Watch the videos on topics you don’t know yet and take notes.

Khan Academy's 8th grade math dashboard

If something is hard for you, print worksheets from Kuta Software (also free) and work the problems until you’ve really mastered the topic. Take Khan Academy’s quizzes and the tests. Retake them after more practice if you do poorly. Even if you think you already know the material, prove it by doing the work.

If the math comes easily, great, but learning the math is only part of the reason you should do this. The other part is practicing doing more work than you’re required to do. Succeeding in advanced math doesn’t just require intelligence and math knowledge; it also requires diligence and grit. Skipping ahead usually means more homework and more difficult homework, but it also means you’ll frequently need to study and practice beyond the homework. Doing regular math practice over the summer is a powerful way to build this habit.

All of this is doubly important for those students who skip two years – jumping from 6th-grade math to Algebra 1 in 7th grade.

Skipping Ahead in High School

The other way people skip a year in math is by taking a course over the summer. Most commonly, students take an online Geometry class in order to jump from Algebra 1 to Algebra 2. This is, actually, not a terrible idea. It avoids the “Geometry sandwich” that is often problematic for students, and of all the regular high school math courses, Geometry is the least connected to the others.

(A less common – and far worse idea – is to take Algebra 2 over the summer to skip from Geometry to PreCalc. Algebra 2 is the foundation of higher math, and shortcutting through this course is likely to be disastrous. Math is an upside-down pyramid, and all of the layers are important, but Algebra 2 is uniquely important. It effectively serves as a gateway to higher math.)

a gateway at the bottom of a staircase

If you’re taking an online class over the summer (or retaking a class in summer school), you should keep in mind that you’re cramming a year’s worth of content into a couple of months. This makes it much harder to engage in mastery learning, so you’ll have to do more work on your own. I know that’s a tough sell, since it’s summer vacation, and you’re already doing the work at a faster pace than you would during the school year. But if you want to retain the knowledge, you’re going to have to earn it.

What if it’s too late?

What if you already skipped a year, and you’re starting to feel like you’re drowning? Then it’s time to patch the holes in your math knowledge, so you’re actually ready for what comes next. This investment will pay off enormously during the school year.

Imagine if all those lingering areas of math where you’re unconfident – fractions, long division, factoring – were as easy for you as addition. That can be your reality; you just have to earn it. Oh, and those things that were hard to learn when you were young? They won’t be as hard now. You’re smarter than you used to be.