Study Habits for Students: Start Early, Stay Strong

Picture this: It’s Sunday evening and your child is scrambling through worksheets and old notes scattered everywhere, panicked about a test first thing Monday. They haven’t touched the material since it was handed out and this isn’t the first time you’ve seen this happen. Sound familiar?I am a subtitle/hook

Many students approach studying as a sort of last-minute activity rather than as an integral part of schooling and that’s a problem. Real academic confidence and independence comes from strong study habits built over time, not panic sessions under pressure. In this guide, we’ll show you how to build a love of learning and create routines that make studying feel natural for the rest of your academic journey and not just for tests.

Being great at studying is not about knowing the most techniques and tools like flashcards, to-do lists, or Anki. Healthy study habits start with a good mindset. Children who are naturally curious, confident, and interested in learning are more likely to develop habits that last. So it’s imperative that when children are still young, they are encouraged to love learning instead of finding it as some arbitrary obstacle for the next twenty years of their life. 

You may have heard of the term resilience and how valuable it is for dealing with adversity. And school is incrementally hard by design because learning is by nature, difficult! So fostering academic resilience is vital for long-term growth and engagement with learning in students. In fact, a study published in Scientific Reports reports that academic resilience significantly contributes to academic success, particularly in challenging circumstances like domestic, socioeconomic, or health issues (Shengyao et al., 2024). Students who exhibit this resilience tend to stay motivated longer, recover quicker from failure, and outperform peers who lack that mindset, regardless of background. 

So how are parents and educators supposed to help nurture that resilience? There’s no straightforward answer, but the best way forward is consistently reinforcing a love of effort, progress, and problem-solving. It’s important to praise your child’s strategies and persistence, not just their performance. Too often, kids become disillusioned with schooling because their framework for success is based on outcome and not effort. Allow them to struggle, don’t feel the need to step in to fix their frustration. Encourage open-ended questions, hands-on work, opportunities for them to make their own decisions like choosing what to read, or investigating a topic they have a genuine interest in. These practices will help demonstrate to children that learning is not just about finding answers but about the process of growing.

Over time, this shift in their thinking will lead to healthier study habits. Children who are encouraged to become curious, independent learners will have an easier time engaging with school because they want to. Building this attitude will act as a robust foundation for long term academic and professional success.

If you ask most kids what studying means to them, you’ll probably hear something like, “It’s what you do the day (or a couple days) before a test.” That idea? That studying is some emergency burst of effort right before something big? This idea is the sort of common misconception that can really damage a student’s success. Real studying doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a recurring activity that should be worked on little by little, over time. 

Spaced practice refers to spreading out review over days, or weeks even. Research shows that spacing out review leads to significantly better long-term retention than cramming or massed practice (long intense sessions of studying). Not that that should really be a surprise to anyone. According to a widely cited study from Psychological Science in the Public Interest, students who used spaced repetition remembered up twice as much information after one week compared to the students who tried cramming it all at once (Dunlosky et al., 2013). The same study also indicates that although spaced practice is one of the best evidence-based learning strategies, it’s also one of the least used by students.

Instead of asking your kid “Have you studied yet?”, try asking “What did you review today?” If we want to help kids shift their mindsets about studying, it’s important they recognize how much less effort the work will feel as 10-20 minutes a few times a week. Studying is a lot like working out. You can’t take a few weeks off away from any exercise and expect to still lift your heaviest weight. You’ve got to ease into it! In the same sense, you can’t expect to be able to remember everything you’ve learned if you haven’t been touching it at all over a long period of time. The reps matter. 

Retrieval is the name of the game. Studying or review is not just about looking over your notes over and over again. You have to try to access the information in your head. That means using techniques like self-quizzing, summarizing into your own words, or teaching to someone else. Teaching to someone else is also known as the Feynman technique and is a personal favourite of mine. These techniques are proven to strengthen memory, reveal knowledge gaps, and turn passive review into active learning. Learning to balance study with both passive review and active learning is a surefire way to ensure you learn and retain information as efficiently as possible. Building this sort of rhythm early on (especially when stakes are low and grades matter much less) helps students understand that studying doesn’t have to feel like punishment or some emergency response. It can just be a part of learning.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither were strong study habits. If you’re ready to give your child the tools to feel confident, organized, and independent, our expert tutors are here to help. Click here to schedule a call with one of our education experts to see how TutorShark can best help your child.