What do top students do differently? | Douglas Barton | TEDxYouth@Tallinn

Question number one, raise your hand if you would like to see your grades improve across all of your grades in school right now. Who would you like to see their grades go up? Most of the

students

are brilliant. Now my next question is

what

do you think it is? It's going to be the most important thing in getting these grades to go up, so raise your hand if you would say that IQ is going to be the most important thing in getting your grades to go up. Not many people like it, yes, that's good, we talk to the

students

.

Yesterday we covered this for an hour so that you learn quickly, that's good, who knew that hard work will be the most important thing for those grades to increase? Hey, I have about a third of the room, forty percent, maybe that's great, now these are the guys. of questions that might arise in higher education: Have you spent the last 13 years doing research? We started our journey to find out

what

the best students do to get the best results because I think people have always had a variety of explanations for why this happens, some people say. that the best students get the best results because they have a higher IQ, that is, they are simply smarter than anyone else.

Some people say that the best students get the best results because they work harder and the explanations go on and on, and then what do we do? What we wanted to do is basically discover the facts from the fiction, what was true and what was not. To do this, we have spent the last 13 years comparing the habits, techniques and practices of literally tens of thousands of students in Australia, South Africa, the UK to the US and what we have learned in this time are basically three key things : First of all, the best students don't necessarily get the best results because they have a higher IQ or because they are smarter than anyone else.

We find number two. discovered that there is a small set of skills that are statistically significant in explaining why the best students get the best grades; In other words, there is a small set of things that the best students do that no one else does that explains why they get their results and what. The interesting thing is that these are common in all countries, so they are relevant to a student in Sydney, Australia, where I'm from, as they are for a student in London, Cape Town, New York or talent, the third thing and this is probably the most important finding.

In the context of today's presentation is that these skills can be taught and used by students to improve their results and that is what we do today as a company elevate works with a quarter of a million students in 1200 countries there are 1200 1200 schools I sit in four different countries to improve student outcomes and what I found during this time is that there are basically three things that any student needs to know if they are looking to improve their grades right now. The first of these things is that I don't need to worry about IQ, it has been my experience.

Many students worry about whether I'm smart enough or have a high enough IQ to do well, as you said, not many hands answered that question today, however, it's usually between fifty and ninety. The percentage of students will see IQ as the biggest driver of their results. A great example of this. Three years ago in Australia we interviewed 3,000 students before their final high school exams and asked them what would be most important to impact their results. in their final exams an overwhelming majority and when I say overwhelming I mean 90% of the students came back and said that IQ would be the number one factor.

Now the good news is that these students, in the vast majority of students, drastically overestimate how important IQ is. In fact, in our research we found that IQ is not the number one predictor of how well a student will perform; In fact, we found 13 variables that were more effective in terms of predicting academic performance than simply IQ. In particular, we found that it is several times more effective in predicting academic performance than practice tests. We found that top students take more practice tests than anyone else. We found that you can almost perfectly estimate a student's results by looking at the number of practice tests she takes.

We have done this and also found that we could almost perfectly rank a class from first to last, given the number of practice tests they would take over a year. Now, the best thing about practice tests is that you don't have to be a genius to take a practice test, it's completely under your control, just like the other 12 variables. Now let's go one step further, even if we think about whether a student is going to work successfully for a year and do it. Well, what do they need to do right? The first thing is that they will need to be able to self-motivate because they will have to sit down, they will need to work consistently throughout the year, they will also need to be self-disciplined because they will have to eliminate distractions like Facebook or watching six and a half hours of cat videos on YouTube.

They will have to sit down and eliminate all these distractions. The third thing is. They will also have to be resilient because the reality is that all students are going to lose grades throughout the year and when this happens you need to be able to pick yourself up and dust yourself off, not now. No matter how high a student's IQ is, if you can't do these three things, you will always be at a disadvantage. In fact, research by two University of Pennsylvania professors, Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth, whom many people know from their TED talks, found that in a variety of areas self-discipline Trump's IQ than they found in classroom terms found that self-discipline was twice as effective in predicting academic outcomes as IQ alone the second lesson is: don't try to just work hard and I'm going to emphasize the word simply there because normally when I say this I look around at these students whose eyes just They open up and because what they hear is that they don't work hard and they get lost.

I'm glad I came today, so that's not the message. The messages are not simply about working hard and the reason is that in our research we found that hard work was a necessary but not sufficient condition for doing well and I will explain what I mean by that. In our research we found very few students who did well but did not work hard. The reality is that if you want to perform well you have to work hard. The problem is that we found students who worked just as hard as the best students. we got worse results we found students, we even worked harder than the best students and we got and ended up getting bad results and if you think about it, it's actually the number one reason for students' poor performance in school is because they just aim to work like this that all the time we find students who come for the new school year and say something like this, they say this year is going to be different, they say this year I will do better, I am going to work a little.

I'm going to turn in my homework on time I'm going to turn in my homework on time I mean, I study more for my exams, the problem is that then they go back out and keep doing the same thing they were doing before. they just do more and it was Michael Jordan who said it best: if you throw 10 thousand balls and you have bad technique, all you are going to do is become very good at throwing very poorly and that is the problem for these students is that they go out, they acquire skills of advocates study and simply use them more often and then expect a different result in the end.

The problem is that all of a sudden they go and take a test and get their results. Back it's the same result as last time and at this point the cycle of disengagement begins because these students say look, I've done everything now, I've even worked hard, I've done everything there is, I just can't do it. and I give up, so the thing is we don't want to just aspire to work hard, we want to work hard doing the right things now, the obvious question then is, what are the right things? In our research we found 13 factors or skills or habits or techniques that differentiated the best students from the average and low performing students.

I want to mention two of these, the two I want to mention are probably two of the most important skills, but secondly, there are also great case studies in terms of illustrating what the best students do

differently

than the vast majority of students, now the first skill I want to talk about is one that I already mentioned today, which is practice exams. Now, as I said before, we found that practice exams were the number. a predictor of how well a student would do in school now to understand why let's take a step back and think about what students are doing before the exams now on the screen right now.

I have a group of year 11 students in the United States. Kingdom and let's work and take a look at what most of these students are doing now above, we have 15% of these students who are taking their notes, in other words, these are the guys who left it. Until the last minute they are sitting trying to finish the notes before the exams. We have five percent of students who are rewriting their notes, so these are the kids who are now trying to write basically, learn them just by writing. they pull them out again and again, we have the overwhelming majority here, about 56% of the students are reading their notes, so in other ways they are sitting reading the notes over and over again until they are in their hands. memory, in other words, we have 76% of students who spend most of their time simply memorizing their notes, either writing them, rewriting them or reading them over and over again.

Why do students do this? students will do this is very intuitive because if everyone in this room thinks about what their number one fear was on the last exam, usually the number one fear is what if I forget something? What happens if I forget a date? a share of facts, what is going to happen and how As a result, these students go and spend all their time on memory-based activities. Now our best students, on the other hand, our best students are a minority, they are in this small group of 11% of students who are taking practice tests at the moment now why do the best students take practice tests?

They do it because they realize something that the vast majority of students don't realize. They realize that an exam is not a memory test. An exam doesn't test how much you can remember. It tells you how to use what you remember to make you better. students can basically go one step further than the vast majority of students while most students can simply remember information the best students can analyze they can evaluate it they can develop arguments but they can give the examiner what he wants when he enters the room exam, which is one of the main reasons why they get the results that they get now in the second skill or before they get to the second skill, could just, to show them how similar these are across countries.

I'll put a group of year 11 students in Australia and what you should notice is that it's almost identical to our UK students, in fact, the percentage of students again, that gold bar there, the percentage of students who are doing The Practice exams are actually exactly the same as our case study in Australia. We have 11 per cent of students in Australia who are doing practice exams, but again it is within this minority that we find our best students. Now let's look at the second skill and This skill also relates to something that I have also mentioned today, which is the concept of self-discipline and research by selling men and Duckworth, now the number one student;

When it comes to self-discipline, it's a study schedule that's the big problem. The problem is that the vast majority of students will create a study schedule and then the vast majority of them will throw it away in the next week and raise their hands. students who have done it before and who have created a timetable just to throw it away very quickly, again, a lot of students and the good news is that you are not a minority, if we are a group of year 11 students in the UK, more 50% of these students have discarded their schedule. in one week, a quarter of them discarded it in a couple of days and then the other quarter discarded it or more than a quarter discarded it within the week.

Now again to understandWhy is it like this, let's take a look. because we have a small group of students who stick to this for more than a month, who stick to it for months and up to a year and again, these are our best students, but to understand why, let's see which one is the most of students obtain different results than the best students. On this slide, I have a group of year 11 students and we are first looking at what the students put in their timetable, so what we find that the vast majority of students will do is they will go out, grab a piece of paper and write this down from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, until Sunday, and then the first thing they'll put in their study schedule is when they're going to study, which again is pretty intuitive, it's called a study schedule, so you think you put study first, so we have about 22 percent of students will do their homework or when are they going to do a dating study.

In other words, they are putting in their workload for that week. We have again an overwhelming majority of 63% of the students, in this case they are putting in specific subjects, so the first thing they could do is on a Monday afternoon. I'll do an hour of French homework and presumably that's because they had French that day and they have to do homework and study for it, so again we have about 85 percent of students who put studying first on their schedule. . Now the problem with that is that these guys have the highest chance of getting kicked out. the calendar, as we have already seen, in a matter of days or a week and the reason is that they become absolutely enthusiastic, they simply study everywhere and forget about the things they love. three days later or three weeks or however long these guys are sitting I'm not doing anything I like to do I'm bored I hate this and as a result, now again they throw out the schedule, our best students are in The minority in this graph are also the guys that when they sit down to create a schedule they do what every other student does in terms of getting their piece of paper and they rule from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday to Sunday, but instead of studying first, these guys do something very different, as you can see, they do it when they are not going to study, so the first thing that is included in these schedules are things like socializing, hobbies, sports, if someone has a job that they could do as well and it is only once they have done these activities that they come back and start to feel the study around it, the most important thing for the best students is, suddenly, because they have all these activities in their schedules, it means that every day they are doing something that they love to do and as a result they are happy and because they are happy they are balanced and it is that feeling of being balanced that then sets the foundation for being productive for the rest of the year, so for any student in the room right now who is looking to improve their grades , there are three things that everyone should consider number one, as we already said, do not overestimate the importance of me being cured. just don't worry about it, it's out of your control number two, don't try to just work hard, but work hard doing the right things, try to model what the best students are doing because the question is do you get the process right in that? moment. school grades or grades or results are going to take care of themselves.

Thank you.