3 Tips To Encourage High School Science Students To Study

Keeping your student's minds sharp is a challenge that science educators face every day of the school year. The simple fact of the matter is that high school science students, like students in any other class taught in your school district, don't like to study. More and more, students are finding themselves graduating from high school and moving on to college without ever having studied for a single test in their lives. To help encourage your students to study, here at 3 tips you can put to work in your schoolscience classroom.

Verbal Reminders

Students often forget that they have tests coming up until it is too late. You're all too familiar with students walking in to your classroom and frantically grabbing their books or notebooks as they realize that today is test day. If you continually remind your high school science students that the test is coming, some of them will bother to study, and may even improve their grades because of it. By being told every day that they need to study for the test, you may just get through to some of them.

Study Sessions

Making certain that your students know the test materials doesn't always have to land purely on the student's heads. You can let your students know that they will be having a study session at a certain time before the test. You can hold this study session during a regular school science class session, or you can opt for an after-school event that will give your students the extra time they need to go over everything. This study time will not only drive it home in your students' minds that a test is coming, but will likewise give them a chance to go over any parts of the latest lessons that they may have missed due to absences.

Practice Tests

There is no way to convince your students that they need to study that works better than the surprise practice test. Given to students as the class session starts, the point is best made if they don't know that this test will be a practice session. Instead, they believe they are taking a real, honest test, and that they are doomed to fail. Let them stress over this during the test, and announce the fact that this was only practice afterwards. Of course, this means making a second test that will be the real one for later on, but it will encourage your high school science students to study when they learn that the real test is tomorrow afternoon.

By using these three common techniques, you can get at least some of your students to study. Unfortunately, those students who don't care about high school science simply can't be made to study. As sad as this is, at least those students who take these wake-up calls will bother to study and get their own academic careers on track.