7 Study Habits to Teach Kids This School Year

At the start of the school year, teachers tend to focus on routines, building relationships, and content. But one foundational skill is often overlooked: how to study. Many students—especially in middle and high school—don’t have a clear understanding of what effective studying looks like. And without that foundation, even the most engaging lessons can fail to stick.

“When you ask students why they study a certain way, their answer is usually ‘I just sort of figured it out on my own’ or they got some advice from YouTube or a friend,” said psychology professor Daniel Willingham in a 2023 interview with Edutopia. 

To help students build better habits from day one, teachers can take a few minutes to discuss study strategies, or model them directly in class. High school science teacher Alison Stone, for example, explicitly names strategies like spaced practice and retrieval when using them with students, and encourages them to apply the same tools at home.

Willingham shared his top study strategies with journalist Caroline Smith for a recent KQED MindShift article. Drawing from that conversation—and Edutopia’s own archives—we’ve curated seven research-backed study tips worth teaching this year.

WEED OUT DISTRACTIONS

Students often underestimate just how distracting their devices can be: KQED reports that “69% of teens and tweens believe checking social media won’t impact their work.” Research suggests the opposite is true: Studies reveal that cell phones promote a habitual “checking behavior,” and that once students turn their attention to their phones due to a notification, they often “engage in a chain of subsequent task-unrelated acts” on their device. 

Even a miniscule three second distraction—the same time it takes to silence a cell phone—can lead to twice as many errors when performing a sequence of tasks that require focus, according to a 2014 study, while another reveals that simply having a phone on your desk can decrease performance, regardless of whether you’re looking at it.

How to teach students: Willingham urges students to choose a study space in their home that’s free from devices like phones, televisions, and video game consoles.

Early on in the school year, neurologist and teacher Judy Willis recommends asking students to try a little exercise. When they get home to study, have them make a list of all the things that distract them—like cell phone notifications, the television, and particular websites—and have them note how many are present when they typically study. Then, have students complete identical academic tasks on back-to-back nights—the first time with their distractions, and the second night without them. 

When students track how long it takes them to complete the task on both evenings, they’ll “no doubt find evidence” that their distractions “waste time and diminish success.”

THINK LIKE AN EDUCATOR

In a 2024 study, students who were asked to explain a concept to a classmate saw “greater and more complex brain activity” and performed nearly 50 percent better on a test of the material than students who simply restudied. Asking students to teach a topic to a peer—a real one, or an imagined one—can reveal gaps or contradictions in their own understanding of the material.

How to teach students: There are plenty of peer-teaching activities you can try out in class, like think-pair-share exercises and jigsaw lessons. After these activities, explain to students the benefits of what they just experienced, and encourage them to try teaching the material to a friend or family member when they’re reviewing for a test.

In the absence of peers, research suggests that explaining a concept out loud to yourself, an animated character on a screen, or even a rubber duck can have similar effects. For more of a two-way conversation, students can now turn to AI, directing a chatbot to ask them probing questions that poke holes in their understanding of a subject, or asking the bot to create a multiple choice, short-answer, or fill-in-the-blank quiz on the material and grade their responses.

NO MORE CRAMMING

Most students wait for the night before the exam to start studying. This is ineffective: Staying up late cramming leaves students exhausted for the test, and “research shows there is very rapid forgetting when students cram,” Willingham told Edutopia.

It’s critical students learn the value of “distributed practice”—spreading studying out over multiple days (or multiple weeks) rather than all at once, Willingham says. In a 2021 study, middle schoolers who solved a dozen math practice problems over the course of three weeks scored 21 percentage points higher on a follow-up test than their peers who completed all 12 problems in one sitting.

How to teach students: Introducing students to planners can help. “Teaching students to use a planner means not only teaching them to write down the dates of big exams and projects, but also reminders and scheduled work or study times for chipping away at the task,” Smith writes. Research supports this: In a 2017 study, students who were explicitly encouraged to plan ahead for a test—and walked through the various study resources available to them—scored a third of a letter grade higher than their peers who did not receive this guidance.

Try modelling effective planning as a group activity. Eighth-grade teacher Catherine Paul, for example, asks students to list their active assignments and their respective deadlines on the board. During a class discussion, they rank-order the assignments in terms of their priority, factoring in their deadlines and how much time each is likely to take. 

DON’T FORGET TO TAKE BREAKS

Just like during class, short brain breaks while studying can help boost focus and information processing. In a 2021 study, for instance, students were hooked up to brain scanning machines as they practiced their typing. During breaks, researchers detected brain activity similar to the patterns they observed during the lesson, but highly compressed, suggesting that the students’ brains were rapidly replaying the practice activity in quick succession. In other words, as we reported in 2022, “Stepping away from the activity, it turns out, is not stepping away from the activity at all.”

How to teach students: Consider teaching students the “Pomodoro Technique,” Willingham suggests, which involves studying for 25 minutes straight, interspersed with five to ten-minute breaks that can increase motivation and reduce fatigue.

Equally important is teaching students how to chunk their studying into clear, discrete tasks to take on during timed intervals, rather than approaching it all as one overwhelming block. To help students do this, Smith recommends having them work in small groups before a big exam to brainstorm strategies for dividing up tasks—which encourages peer collaboration and the crowdsourcing of study approaches, while allowing “teachers to give feedback about different strategies’ efficacies.” 

BETTER NOTES = BETTER STUDYING

When taking notes, too many students fall into the trap of trying to transcribe their teacher’s words without really making sense of them. “They think, ‘I actually don’t even need to understand it right now. I'll understand it later,’” says Willingham. This often leads to pages of confusing and hard-to-use notes. In fact, a 2023 study confirms that students’ notes are often “low quality and incomplete,” capturing only 46 percent of main ideas and supporting details.

How to teach students: Prompt students to take fewer notes and focus on meaning as they write. Encourage them to listen carefully and jot down their own thoughts about the material, for example, rather than copying verbatim, which helps ensure they’re actively processing information. Modeling simple strategies—like adding arrows, questions, or margin notes—can also help students draw connections and build understanding, writes education researcher Jane Shore. 

Shore recommends telling students to treat their class notes not as a completed transcript but as a “living document” that they revisit and refine. Students should be actively asking themselves questions and performing independent research to fill in any gaps in their notes that they may have left during class. To incentivize his students to refine their notes, high school history teacher Benjamin Barbour tests them twice: once from memory, and once with the aid of their notes. “As students rewrite their notes, adding more detail, in many cases they don’t even realize that this is studying,” Barbour says.

GIVE YOUR MEMORY A WORKOUT

Many students study by simply rereading their notes or the textbook, but research shows the key to effective studying is to practice active retrieval—pushing yourself to recall and articulate what you learned without external aids. In a 2015 study, for instance, third grade students who reviewed material about the Sun, then answered practice questions about it, scored 34 percentage points higher on a follow-up test than their peers who simply reviewed the material twice.

How to teach students: When studying, encourage kids to close textbooks or notes and work from memory. When they’re done reviewing crucial material, for example, they can do a brain dump of everything they remember and then compare it to the source, or answer practice questions and grade them—which might be included at the end of a chapter or generated with the help of an AI chatbot. 

Flashcards, a longtime student favorite, are also a powerful retrieval tool—if used well. Students often stop reviewing flashcards after a couple of successful recalls, but a 2011 study suggests that students should continue until four or five accurate recalls, which can boost retention by 40 percent.

EMBRACE THE CHALLENGE

Finally, remind students that the easiest study strategies usually aren’t the most effective. “Students gravitate towards cognitive strategies that are the mental equivalent of pushups on your knees,” says Willingham. “It feels like things are going great, and it’s also not that difficult, so it seems like a great strategy.” But approaches like highlighting or passively watching review videos often create the illusion of learning rather than the real thing.

How to teach students: Encourage students to lean into strategies that feel more effortful—like self-testing, peer teaching, and carefully reorganizing their notes—not in spite of the difficulty, but because of it. “Coach students that it feels harder because their brains are working harder and making more connections,” writes science teacher Ian Kelleher. “Because of this, the information and skills they’re learning are going to stick in their memory longer.”