4 Ways Tutoring Can Help Your Child Get Into the Right University
Who doesn’t want their child to get into a good university or college? Getting into a top school can transform a student’s life, providing them with incredible resources and much better chances of success in their chosen career path.
But as any parent who has participated in the process themselves knows, admissions to top-tier universities is competitive. With tens of thousands of candidates and only a few spaces to fill, your child needs to be among the best of the best if they want to make the grade (Harvard’s admission rate, for example, is 6.5%). This means your child needs to be in the top ten percent if they even want to be considered, and will have to be better than 93.5% of their peers if they are to receive admittance.
Given how stiff the competition is, the students who get into elite universities often do so because they have started preparing for their application years in advance. Grades need to be consistently strong, extra-curricular activities need to be chosen strategically, and students need to be able to show that they can perform at the highest levels academically.
For this reason, it can be useful the hire Prep Academy Tutors to provide your child with bespoke tutoring options that can help them prepare for the rigours of university admissions. We meet students where they are, and our tutors work alongside them to help them meet their learning goals. If you want to know more about how hiring a tutor can give your child an edge, here are four ways tutoring can help your child ace their university admissions.
1. Tutoring is Both Rigorous and Personal
Tutoring isn’t just about passing on information; it is about engaging students intellectually to help them internalize what they are learning so they can build on this knowledge over the course of their academic life. The best tutors don’t just know the material well, they also know how to help a student master it on their own terms.
Expert teachers are at the heart of how our tutoring services work because we understand that effective tutoring requires the same kind of methodical, strategic approach that teachers use in the classroom. At the same time, a tutor isn’t just teaching to a class of one: tutors take advantage of the more informal, personal dynamic a one-on-one lesson allows to help students build confidence and develop their own problem-solving skills.
2. Tutoring can be Tailored to Each Student’s Needs
Every student is different, and every student has slightly different needs. One of the reasons children struggle in school is because the size and format of the typical public school classroom privileges a certain learning style. While Howard Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences has achieved widespread support among educators, budgetary and logistical restrictions still conspire to give students with linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence an edge.
Because tutors can use a one-on-one approach, they are able to help your child learn the material and prepare for standardized tests in a way that plays to their strengths. If you want to know more about our tutoring philosophy, check this out to learn about how our tutors turn pedagogical insights into tools like gamification to maximize educational outcomes.
3. In-Home Tutoring Provides Flexible Options
Universities are increasingly looking for students who aren’t just book-smart, but who also have a commitment to service and an interest in extra-curricular activities. This means that students angling to get into a good college or university should also be taking their involvement in organized sports, arts programmes, science fairs, and community volunteering seriously.
This puts a lot of students in a catch-22 situation: they need strong grades to even be considered for top schools, but they also need to prove that they have a well-rounded personality. When are they going to find time for all of this?
Private tutoring is a flexible alternative to the after-school tutoring offered by many high schools. When students are juggling dozens of commitments a week, tutoring needs to be adapted to the student’s individual schedule, even if that schedule changes week by week. Scheduling tutoring sessions for when your child is free ensures they can work on their grades while also working to strengthen other parts of their university application.
4. Don’t Just Learn the Material, Learn the Test
If your child is applying to study outside Canada, they will need to take one of the standard American admissions tests: the SAT or the ACT. Both of these tests are extremely demanding, and will play a major role in determining whether or not a student will be admitted to the university of their choice.
Both are designed to test a student’s general academic knowledge, but it is a well-known fact that studying strategies for taking the test is an important part of doing well on it. If you are considering any international schools it is important to find your local tutor early so they have adequate time to help your child prepare for the gruelling process of taking one of these standardized entrance exams.
When it comes to preparing your child for the rigours of university, there simply aren’t any shortcuts. If you want them to get into a top tier institution, you need to start preparing them for the hard work ahead now.
Because tutors meet students at their own level, tailor their approach to the student’s needs, and have the expertise to help not only with particular subjects, but with standardized tests themselves, they can play a vital role in helping your child achieve admission to the school of their choice.
3 Strategies You Can Use to Study More Efficiently
Educators have long understood that students need more than classroom instruction if they are to successfully master curriculum material; this is why homework is a staple part of elementary, secondary, and post-secondary education.
Some experts suggest that children should on average spend between forty-five and seventy-five minutes a day on extra-curricular study. Routinely reviewing the material being covered in class doesn’t just help students lock what they’ve learned into their long-term memory, it also helps them develop active memorization and problem-solving skills that will serve them well throughout their lives.
But researchers who study the psychology of learning have consistently found that it isn’t enough to simply spend time with the material. If students want to make the most of study time, they should use evidence-based learning methods that have been proven to improve recall and comprehension. As with most tasks in life, working hard isn’t the same as working smart, and the students who are most likely to succeed academically are those who use their study time most efficiently.
If you want to know more about how your child can get the best return on the time they spend studying, here are three strategies that are scientifically proven to help our brains retain information.
1. Spaced Practice
The principle behind spaced practice is a relatively simple one: if you plan on studying for two hours over the course of a week, splitting that time into four intensive half-hour study periods will yield much better results than a single two-hour cram session.
Spaced practice offers two key benefits: first, it allows a student to divide the material into digestible chunks of information, which reduces the chances that they will become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information. Second, going back to the same material several times throughout the week helps to encode the information into their long-term memory.
One way to help make spaced practice more intentional is by hiring a tutor. Having a series of set times throughout the week or month when your child is scheduled to meet with a tutor locks intensive study into the calendar and helps encourage spaced practice (you can click to learn more about our tutoring services and how an experienced tutor can help improve your child’s learning outcomes).
2. Retrieval Practice
In their book Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel relay an anecdote about a group of professors who, as part of a fire drill, were quizzed on where the nearest fire extinguisher to their office was. Most of the professors failed, and one of them, a psychology professor, was perturbed by his inability to remember such a basic piece of information. He went looking for the nearest fire extinguisher only to discover that it was right next to his door — despite having passed by it every day for twenty-five years, it hadn’t worked its way into his memory.
This anecdote underscores an important point about learning: being exposed to information doesn’t necessarily mean we will take it in. Learning is an active process, and simply re-reading is not enough to make a piece of data stick with us. Instead, students should focus on trying to retrieve information from their memory.
Retrieval practice can involve things like practice tests, cue cards, and the copy-and-cover method, but in all cases it should be geared toward finding and filling the actual gaps in a student’s memory.
Retrieval practice can be challenging, especially for students who struggle with memorization, which is why hiring a tutor can help. Our team of certified teachers provide in home tutoring in all subjects for students from JK to Grade 12, and because they all have real world teaching experience, they can help students master the kinds of evidence-based retrieval practice that will help them meet their learning goals.
3. Create Visual Resources
The human memory is an amazing thing. Memories that are locked away for decades come flooding back when we taste food from our childhood or see the face of an old friend because our brains form memories through association. Learning to study effectively is about unlocking the huge potential of our memory so that we can recall information at will, and one of the best ways to do this is through sensory cues like visual resources.
Have you ever noticed that when you are trying to remember a phrase or piece of information from a book, you can often recall where on the page it was? This is because your brain has locked away visual information to help you find it.
Creating visual resources that help you call up information is an important part of effective studying, so you might want to find a tutor near you who can help students come up with visual and other sensory resources that help them learn most effectively.
Ongoing research into the psychology of learning is showing more and more that our brain, like the rest of our body, operates best when we are able to strike the right balance between repetition and novelty. Helping your child find a balance of study practices that works for them is essential to long-term learning, and while many students struggle to master these strategies on their own, hiring a tutor can definitely help (you can click here to learn how).
All too often, potentially fruitful hours of studying are wasted because students are using inefficient study methods that simply do not deliver good learning outcomes. It is important to remember that, when it comes to studying, more is not always better. The best way to get good results is by using study strategies informed by the latest insights of learning psychology.