Study Habits

I'm conducting a little informal study of students' study habits as they relate to a midterm exam that is coming up in about 3 weeks. The exam is cumulative, spanning all the topics we have covered this year except natural selection.*

My advice to the students is to study a little each day (15 minutes or so), starting now, outside of any class time that I might give them to get prepared. They have packets of notes, old study guides, and most importantly, a set of flashcards that I devised for them.

As part of their daily "do now" assignment, I had them create a study log, so that each day I can now ask them how much time they spent studying the night (or weekend) before and what kind of studying they did - review flashcards, write/organize notes, do homework, etc. I tried to emphasize that the information would not be used for grading purposes, that it will not help them or me to be dishonest, and that honesty would not harm them - except of course that if they don't study they likely will be harmed by not performing well on the test - but that's not about the honesty issue. I further stated, just to be safe, that if keeping the log actually encourages them to study more, then that's a good thing. They don't need to worry that it will mess up my research if they study more now than they normally would have!

Obviously what I will be looking for here is a correlation between study habits and scores on the exam. I will choose questions that are more or less directly modeled on the flashcards, using slightly different diagrams and wordings from old regents exams. This levels the playing field somewhat in terms of what I discussed previously as the "IQ" portion of the regents exam. I will be testing what students have been taught and what they are responsible for studying.

I may get some interesting results. Based on Willingham's idea that the more you know the easier it is to learn more, I suspect a reasonable number of high scores on the exam will show very little study time. Many high performing students pay attention in class, get the concepts from the instruction, and assimilate it rapidly with little need for study time outside of class. I do expect those individual to be outliers and hope that I can show a more general trend where study time correlates to scores. Unfortunately, I also expect to see outliers on the other end of the spectrum, - those students who report a lot of study time and still get low scores. At least that will give me a target audience for some interventions before June comes around.


*I taught natural selection superficially in the beginning of the year and decided to keep it off the midterm - most of the regents questions relating to evolution are embedded with questions about genetics, heredity, or ecology that we haven't covered yet.