Improving Academic PerfORMANCE

At MyGuru, we track feedback on our tutors’ performance to identify top performing tutors and provide constructive feedback about what made things go well or poorly.  Over time, in discussing tutoring relationships with students and tutors and reviewing this feedback, we’ve noticed that the major obstacle standing in the way of a student understanding material and earning a better grade in a class (or a better score on a standardized test) is often a belief they have about their ability.  It’s not a lack of understanding per se, and certainly not a lack of “intelligence” that’s the problem. 

Technology is helping tutors, teachers, and other education professionals go beyond the classroom and textbooks to help students learn.

Virtual lectures, 3-D modeling, videos, infographics, and other online courses encourage students to go further than just memorization and notetaking. Technological developments allow students to fully immerse themselves in the material, revisit lectures, and gain a better understanding of the material through various pathways of learning.

We recently conducted an interview with Sam, who is one of the best online physics tutors on our team.  He's been providing online tutoring for several years in Math and Physics.

What priorities should students set, and how should parents help them get there with their integrity intact?  MyGuru has three simple rules for navigating the college admissions process and the SAT/ACT – and this applies to the GMAT, LSAT, MCAT and GRE as well.  Our rules are designed to take the stress out of the college admissions process, and make it possible for anyone to achieve a higher score on the SAT/ACT.

Think Long Term 

Begin your formal test prep activities one year before the exam date.  Every good test prep process begins with learning the ins and outs of the SAT or ACT.  This requires a thorough review of each of the question types, the scoring method, and the format of the exam BEFORE ever doing a practice question.  This is a relatively low pressure, low stakes way to prep and feel comfortable with the exam.

Taking AP classes is almost never a bad idea. While, some AP classes require you to have a particular aptitude in a subject (for example, you can’t just decide to take AP BC Calculus without taking all the pre-requisites), other AP classes, like AP US History, don’t really have pre-requisites at most high schools – you simply can elect to take AP US History.

Sometimes test preparation requires memorization. For example, the SAT and GRE require building your vocabulary. Here are some tried and true memory techniques.

The Roman Technique

This technique involves setting what you want to remember to the layout of something you’re very familiar with, like your childhood home or route to school. So imagine, for example, that you want to remember your to-do list. Say your first item was to telephone the GRE board to set your test appointment. You might visualize your front door opening but having tons of phones blocking the passage way. Say your second thing on your to-do list is to buy paper. You could imagine your hallway with paper in the picture frames instead of the portraits that normally went there. The idea is to walk through your home putting what you want to remember along the route. Because our spatial memory is more long term memory versus short term memory, this helps us organize and remember the data.