Acing Midterms: The THREE Categories Your Kid Should Keep In Mind While Studying 📚📝
Preparing for midterms is a lot like preparing for a race. You need to condition, learn the ins and outs of the course, and perform on race day. Too often, kids cram without a clear understanding that every subject requires content, preparation, exam-specific procedures, and a focus on optimizing performance.
CONTENT
Start a list of formulas, a glossary of terms, and challenge problems early! Many cumulative tests are expansive and reach all the way back to the beginning of the year, so gathering these details early will give you a headstart and save a lot of time at the end.
STRATEGY
Start a list of formulas, a glossary of terms, and challenge problems early! Many cumulative tests are expansive and reach all the way back to the beginning of the year, so gathering these details early will give you a headstart and save a lot of time at the end.
PERFORMANCE
Does the idea of being thrown a curveball cause you to break out in a cold sweat? Gather and drill those challenge problems from previous quizzes, tests, and homework problem sets before that end of semester test–you’re likely to see a couple similarly formatted questions show up to try and stump you (but you’ll be prepared!).
CONTENT
Organization is key. Talk to your teacher if you have questions along the way (don’t wait till the end!) and consult outside resources as a supplement, like Khan academy (and your tutor!), to help yourself more fully digest those broad concepts.
STRATEGY
Are you sometimes thrown by your teacher’s expectations and detailed rubrics for projects? If you have a project-based assessment at the end of your class, get started early and meet with your teacher ahead of time to have them look at your work in progress—the feedback will be invaluable to your final product.
PERFORMANCE
Test your knowledge by recreating diagrams from scratch! You’ll find out if you really know what’s on there so you can smoothly answer questions in any format on test day.
CONTENT
Papers, papers, papers! Turn your annotations into notecards as you read and then lay them all out on the floor to see where the bulk of your interesting information lies. This process will help you form your thesis, and the notecard format will help you easily organize your information for both an initial outline and your bibliography (keep track of which texts belong to which citations on the back of each card!). You won’t regret the incremental process when your paper topic seamlessly comes together without an all nighter at the very end!
STRATEGY
Reach out to your teacher to see if they will review your outline and/or drafts. Many teachers will applaud your organization in getting everything together early, and their feedback will help you fine tune your essay for a better end result!
PERFORMANCE
Get started as soon as you pick up that text. By forming your ideas and structure of your paper incrementally from the beginning, you’ll cut way back on the stress of facing the dreaded blank page—you’ll naturally move on from annotation to notecards to outline to drafting without becoming depleted or stressed!
CONTENT
Tenses are tough. To help, memorize their usage and any clue words that signify when to use a certain tense. After memorizing, test yourself by doing fill-in-the-blank online exercises or using your class’s study materials if those were provided!
STRATGEY
Do you often get only partial credit for misspelled words on your quizzes and tests? If you’ll have a written element to your language final (ahem, Latin!), make sure you’re solid on spelling—writing out those vocabulary words until you’re comfortable with both the definitions and spelling will help you gather all those minor points that could add up in the end!
PERFORMANCE
Get a paper dictionary and have as much conversation outside of class as possible to get a head start on your conversational fluency—it will help you stay calm and collected if you have a final presentation or creative project.
