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And whether you're new or returning, I hope you get a ton of value from this week's email. As always if you have questions, send me a reply. I'd love to help!
Creating an Effective SAT (or ACT) Study Plan with your student. 📅
Teenagers have busy and hectic lives. So unless they have a plan to study for the SAT or ACT in place, they will forget. They will put it on the back burner. They will put it on the back burner at their friend’s house down the street.
Even incredibly motivated students - and I’ve tutored a lot of them - do not have test preparation as their #1 favorite thing on their to-do list.
So, if test preparation is going to happen - it won’t happen by chance. They need a plan.
Why your student needs a study plan for the SAT. 📋
Your student needs a study plan in order to be fully prepared for to take the SAT or ACT. These high stakes tests are complex tasks. A good plan should address the following components of their preparation. Let’s break them down to understand their importance.
- 🧠 Thoughts - High stakes test like the SAT and ACT are mentally challenging tests for most students. This is for two reasons - they are not academic tests and they are designed to be a mind game. The SAT and ACT are psychology tests pretending to be reading tests or math tests.
- ❤️ Emotions- Students (and parents) have a lot of emotions around high stakes tests like the SAT. Part of this is because they are high stakes; things we care about like money and purpose and our social standing can be tied to test performance. Also, students often have faulty beliefs about themselves and about the test that create obstacles to doing well.
- 📚 Knowledge - A foundation of content knowledge is helpful for tests like the SAT and ACT because they are, you know, tests. By the time a student is a junior, they should have built up solid skills in reading, textual analysis, grammar and mathematics. It would be extra bonus if they had built a reading habit and had been exposed to wide variety of genres and ages of texts. Having strong skills allows students to focus on the first two things above. Poor skills adds another layer of challenge to an already complicated test preparation.
What does studying for the SAT or ACT mean?🤔
Over the last 16 years and with over 8,000 hours of one-on-one tutoring experience, I have found that preparing for high stakes tests like the SAT and ACT is basically two parts - content skills and execution skills.
Content skills means mastering the core skills and facts your student has to know to do well on standardized tests. For example, they have to know how to read reasonably well. They should know standard grammar rules. They should be able to do math like how to write a linear equation or how to use the quadratic formula.
PRO-TIP The actual content on the SAT and ACT is quite limited. Many students are worried that there will be so much information they can be tested on that they get worried that they will never know it all. Once students start preparing they realize that the content is actually kind of repetitive, and they start to relax with the test.
Execution skills means the actual process of doing the test. For starters this often refers to classic test strategies like process of elimination and reading the question carefully. For some of my most advanced students, execution could mean helping them uncover that physically pointing to data in a table helps them to answer 3 more questions and achieve an amazing final score.
How can your student actually study for an SAT or ACT and begin to understand themselves better as a test taker? Check out the full blog article at the link below for my full SAT/ACT study framework.
Yes, tell me exactly how my student should study for the SAT or ACT.
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If you aren’t sure what areas of preparation your student needs to focus on, check out my Student Test Prep Readiness Quiz. You will get a report outlining which areas your student needs work so they can focus their time and energy on fixing problem spots.
And if you have a student taking the PSAT this October or an SAT test later this fall, check out my self-paced online course Digital SAT Foundations. This course guides students uses the above method to guide students through each of the sections of the SAT along with my most common tactics and content tips. Click here to find out more and to purchase Digital SAT Foundations.
Of course, if you found this helpful, please share it with friends or other parents who might find it valuable as well!
Best regards,
Kevin A. Doty
Rocket Scientist turned Master Tutor
P.S. Have any questions? Feel free to reach out—I’m here to help!
Want to find out how your student should study for the SAT or ACT?
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