Recent research by Angela Duckworth and other researchers has demonstrated that mindfulness practices can help improve executive functioning skills in students by boosting self-awareness, concentration, and gratitude. Mindfulness helps students become more aware of their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, which can lead to better self-regulation and decision-making. Additionally, mindfulness practices can help reduce stress and anxiety, which can interfere with executive functioning skills. Let’s dive into the three main mindfulness practices that students can use to improve their EF skills.

Breathwork

One way to incorporate mindfulness practices into a student’s routine is through breathwork. This doesn’t mean that every high school student needs to become a Shaolin monk, meditating on a mountainside each day at sunrise. Rather, we can help students build mindfulness into their everyday routines. Breathwork involves focusing on one’s breath and using specific breathing techniques to help calm the mind and body. By incorporating breathwork into their daily routine, students can improve their ability to focus and concentrate, leading to better executive functioning skills.

A study published in the journal Mindfulness found that practicing breathwork for ten minutes a day for ten days improved attention and working memory in college students. Additionally, a study published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine found that practicing a specific type of breath work called Sudarshan Kriya Yoga reduced symptoms of anxiety and depression in college students.

Again, this doesn’t have to be a drastic change. Parents and teachers can encourage their students to incorporate breathwork into their daily routines by setting aside a specific time each day for practice. For example, students can practice breath work for five or ten minutes before starting homework or studying. Start with “box breathing”: four-second inhale, four-second hold, four-second exhale, and four-second hold. Students can also try an extended exhale, which helps relieve stress and concentrate the brain on a specific task. For more information on how breathwork affects the brain, check out this article.

Meditation

Another way to incorporate mindfulness practices is through meditation. Meditation differs from breathwork in its intention. While breathwork is a type of meditation, it is not the only kind. When meditating, students may choose to do a body scan or a gratitude meditation, which may involve focusing on the breath but doesn’t require it. Meditation involves sitting quietly and focusing on one’s breath or a specific word or phrase. By practicing meditation, students can learn to control their thoughts and emotions, which can help improve their ability to self-regulate and make better decisions. A recent study published found that just eight weeks of mindfulness meditation training improved executive functioning skills, including working memory and attention, in college students. Additionally, another study published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Functions found that practicing mindfulness meditation for just ten minutes a day for four days reduced symptoms of anxiety and improved mood in college students.

Like breathwork, meditation doesn’t require a huge change. Rather, parents and teachers can encourage students to use meditation as a tool to improve focus and mood. For instance, parents can encourage students to turn to meditation to help re-center themselves during a busy school day. Students could also build a meditation practice around a routine that they already do such as brushing their teeth or getting books from their locker.

Pausing

Finally, pausing is another mindfulness practice that can help improve executive functioning skills. Pausing is more of a habit than a specific tool. Help students build awareness into their daily routines, which will help them master that moment between stimulus and response. Pausing involves taking a brief moment to reflect on one’s thoughts and emotions before reacting or making a decision, but it requires a cue. Students can use a sticky note or an alert on their phone to make pausing a habit.

A study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition found that taking a brief pause before making a decision improved decision-making ability, willpower, and creativity in the long run. The study focused on college students and used randomized daily alerts to help students increase awareness of their mood and energy levels. At five points during the day, the college students would receive the following prompt: “Analyze how you feel and how much energy you have, then ask what would be best right now, work or rest?”

Parents can encourage their students to mimic this study. The school day is more than the time spent in class. Students must develop awareness to manage the length of the modern school day. Incorporating pausing into their daily routine by reminding them to take a brief moment to reflect on their mood, energy levels, or goals can make a huge difference in the long run.

Closing Thoughts

Incorporating mindfulness practices such as breath work, meditation, and pausing can help students improve their executive functioning skills and reach their potential. By becoming more aware of their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, students can improve their ability to self-regulate and make better decisions.

If you want to learn more about how mindfulness practices can help improve executive functioning skills, see our other blog posts about how to help your student improve their executive functioning skills. If you are interested in one-on-one academic coaching for your high school or college student, contact SAOTG to learn more about our services.

Know the Format & the Rubric

The AP exam format has changed in recent years, and even more so in the time of remote learning. Students must familiarize themselves with the exam structure they will be taking. The College Board website has detailed information on each exam, including the types of questions and the number of percentage points each question is worth. Students should review this information carefully and plan their study time accordingly. Understanding the scoring rubric for AP exam questions and how the graders evaluate and score responses is also essential. This may differ from how your AP teacher evaluated your work over the school year, so it’s vital to tailor your responses accordingly. Additionally, reviewing examples of full-credit answers from past exams is helpful to see what a good answer looks like and learn how to answer the specific question.

Organize Your Time

Executive function skills such as organization, time management, and study skills are crucial for exam success. Students should create a study schedule allowing ample time to review material, practice sample questions, and get a good night’s sleep. It is also important to allocate plenty of time for setup and readiness on test day. The College Board asks students to log on to the testing system 30 minutes before the start of their exams to verify their identity and ensure that they are ready to begin when the exam timer starts. It is always safer to assume that there will be some bumps along the way, so planning for contingencies is crucial.

Studying for AP exams requires a strategic and efficient approach. It’s not just putting in hours of study time but prioritizing tasks and using time wisely. Take practice tests and use other resources to familiarize yourself with the format and scoring of the exam.

Make Use of Online Resources

The College Board has prepared various resources available for free on YouTube and the College Board’s website. These include exam summaries, practice questions, and online lectures given by College Board professionals. Encourage your student to sign up for a College Board account and review the materials that are provided. Additionally, students can use online AP courses and review sessions to supplement their learning.

Focus on Analytical Skills & Macro Concepts

The AP Exam rubric requires students to demonstrate analytical skills, argumentative analysis, and quantitative analysis. Students must understand the requirements of each test to earn all possible points from each type of question. Encourage your student to practice DBQ-style essay questions and connect evidence to arguments to prove a point. Conducting a balanced review of old and new material is important. Filling in any gaps in your knowledge and reviewing earlier material is critical, but you must also integrate the final lessons of the year. This can be challenging, wildly, if your teacher rushes through certain units at the end of the semester. Balancing these tasks requires careful planning and time management, but it’s essential for success on the AP exams.

With careful planning and preparation, AP exams can be a manageable and enjoyable experience. By doing so, your student will be well on their way to success. For more ideas on how to succeed in school, visit our blog page. To learn more about our one-on-one academic coaching service, reach out today!

Because of this jam-packed schedule, many students work subsistence in more ways than one. They are running on empty when they do their homework, which often means they are operating on a just-in-time homework model, but the sleep quality and quantity is an even more alarming factor. Most students balk at the idea of getting more sleep in an effort to get more done. However, the idea of ‘sharpening the saw’ has plenty of merit. 

Adequate rest ensures that your students maintain sanity while succeeding in school. I know, I know – “my kid has so many expectations placed on them and now they have to do sleeping right?” To keep up with the high demands of school and the world around them, good rest is imperative. A lumberjack should not attempt to chop down a mighty oak with a dull blade, and a student shouldn’t expect to tackle a grueling academic and extracurricular schedule without proper rest. 

Rest isn’t just about sleeping. Students must factor in the total time they spend winding down for the night. As we allude to in our posts, The Danger of Always On and Boredom is Really Important, students need to balance stimuli with genuine stillness. Activities like evening routines, reading a good book after a long day, and finding a prep for tomorrow ritual are critical components of student success. 

Let’s look at a common phenomenon. A student gets into bed, fully intending on sleeping within the next thirty minutes. Three hours later he or she is still staring at the ceiling. Bored beyond belief, the student turns to stimulus again and starts scrolling through Twitter. How did that happen again? 

This is a common phenomenon, especially for busy, stressed students. A few things can happen to hijack sleep: 

• Not allowing yourself to wind down. Distracting yourself rather than actually resting.
• Blue light before bedtime.
• Not enough exercise throughout the day.
• High Anxiety
• Not having an evening routine

Let’s examine those causes more closely.

Winding down

Physically, emotionally and cognitively, students need time to unwind from the day before going to sleep. Students have a lot packed into their school day. It can be easy to continue running on adrenaline even when they get home. Then, add in some pressure like test anxiety, an intense conversation on why their room isn’t clean or homework isn’t done, and a big track meet. Congrats, you’ve got a recipe for lying awake at night, tossing and turning, and eventually giving in to social media or Netflix.

Remember these strategies and principles to help your student wind down for the night:

Limiting blue light

It’s easy to hit the hay, phone-in-hand for a few minutes (or hours) of unsupervised scrolling. That amount of sustained stimulation doesn’t allow your mind to turn off. The blue light from your phone inhibits melatonin production, preventing you from going to sleep. Placing your phone across the room or downstairs before bed will help you fall asleep faster.

Stress

We need some stress in our lives to function well as people. But academic pressures, extra-curriculars, and frustrations peculiar to developing minds strain students. It’s important that your child learns to manage stress with tactics unique to their needs. (I thrived with journaling, mindfulness and time management techniques). As a parent, modeling those behaviors for your child will give them the techniques to manage stress when it counts. Managing stress during the day will prevent them lying awake with anxiety at night.

Physical Exercise

While enrolling your child in sports is not strictly necessary, exercise has obvious benefits for your child’s health. One overlooked benefit of exercise is that it helps us sleep better. A simple walk after dinner or between homework assignments will help your student decompress and sleep more deeply. A word of advice: try to exercise no sooner than 1-2 hours before bedtime. The endorphins released from exercise and raised body temperature keep people awake.

Distraction vs. true rest

As I mentioned above, it’s a strong temptation to bring your phone to bed with you. The low-grade stimulation that surfing the web offers makes it addicting and hard to get to sleep. Doing anything that induces more of a dissociative state than a restful one results in difficulty falling asleep.

Building Routines

Humans, especially children, thrive on routines. It’s comforting to know that once you finish your homework, you can enjoy a nice cup of tea or something sweet, brush your teeth, and crawl into your blanketed bed with a good book, no matter how stressful the day was. I’ve found that having a set bedtime helps me better delineate work and rest. This ensures I get enough sleep most nights. However, Dr. Ratnasoma at the Sleep Medicine Center in Virginia points out that having a set wake up time can make your circadian rhythm more reliable.

Better sleep helps your child perform better in school, maintain good health and be a happier human being. For more ideas on how to help students stay happy and healthy, please check out our other posts or reach out about our academic coaching services, driven by the latest Executive Function research. 

Consider a basketball player training during the offseason. The athlete tries an unconventional approach: only solo practice session in the gym during offseason. This approach has certain privileges: flexibility of training times, personalized intensity, and precisely designed practice drills. However, this approach has one major drawback: no competition. This athlete may become faster and stronger or become the best free throw shooter in the world, but practicing in a gym is very different to playing against real competition. What works in a gym by yourself won’t work when there are five defenders who can adjust to your strengths. 

I’m sure the scenario above sounds absurd to anyone who has engaged in offseason preparation. However, few people see the clear parallel between the fictitious athlete and most modern-day students. Far too many students spend the bulk of their study time absorbing information without the threat of competition. In this analogy, the “competition” are test questions. Practicing performance perfects preparation. Therefore, the hallmark of successful students is creating a test-scenario long before the actual day of the test. 

The principle of powering self-testing is what learning scientists call retrieval practice. This is the use of active recall to better absorb new information—and retain it in the long run, as Roediger & Butler’s research indicated. Self-studying is not as common as it should be. After all, to get results that few get, a student must do what few others will. Self-studying has the added benefit of tracking progress with a tangible barometer. Educational technologies like Quizlet and Kahoot have been successful because of how effective self-testing is as a study strategy. 

The importance of progress checking cannot be overstated. Progress checking provides a practical timeline to studying in a way that no other study strategy can. Students can build an oscillating schedule of preparation and performance over the four days before test day. This might seem like an added burden to a student’s already busy schedule, but a study plan that builds in self-testing actually reduces total study time because of the gains in efficiency. 

Practice tests, either administered by an academic coach or through an AI driven educational technology platform, can focus limited study time on problem areas instead of going over familiar territory. In the long run, keeping track of practice test performance could help these learners recalibrate and find strategies that help them gain back control over their learning process.

Lastly, self-testing reduces test-day anxiety. The strategy is perhaps overused in standardized test preparation, but it is under-utilized in day-to-day academic studying. Students who struggle with nerves on test day can often point to a core fear of the unknown when they sit down to test. Building in self-testing can alleviate this fear. By removing a fear from the realm of the mind into the realm of reality, students reduce the number of uncontrollable variables on test day. 

Remember, successful students develop a mastery mindset toward both preparation and performance. Self-testing is a critical component of both areas. When students embrace self-testing for its direct benefits through retrieval practice, along with the indirect benefits from monitoring progress, they learn how to set their own goals and become unstoppable. Learning how to use practice tests adeptly builds a student’s sense of autonomy, while helping them make the most of precious time. As they discover strategies that work well for them, they earn the confidence to take on tougher challenges. 

For more ideas on study strategies, please check out our other resources. For information on our flagship one-on-one academic coaching program, reach out today!

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management system that encourages short-bursts of productivity rather than long-term discipline against distraction. Using this method, students break their study time into 25-minute chunks separated by five-minute breaks. These intervals are called pomodoros. After about four pomodoros, students should take a longer break of about 15 to 20 minutes.

Although this simple timer trick seems simple, it really works. The goal of the timer is to instill a sense of urgency and immediacy into the work. Procrastination often takes hold because of fear of never finishing and vague deadlines. Distraction also plays its part. Students look at a task and can’t see the finish line, so they choose not to start. The Pomodoro technique turns this problem on its head. Instead of squandering time away aimlessly because of a sense of endlessness, students using this technique have 25 minutes to achieve real progress.

Additionally, the forced breaks help cure that frazzled, burnt-out feeling that most students face. It’s impossible to spend hours in front of your computer without even realizing it, as that ticking timer reminds you to get up and take a breather. And remember, we overwhelmingly support taking breaks to boost productivity. The average person can only give 100% focus for one minute per year of age, according to the Harvard Center for the Developing Child. Spinning your wheels out of a misplaced sense of progress often does more harm than good. Therefore, breaks help bright students get results.

The Pomodoro technique is a systematic way to provide this handbrake. Rather than working for two hours at 60% focus, the Pomodoro technique helps students work for hours at a much higher intensity. Almost any student would take better results in less time than poor results and wasted hours. Encouraging your student to build the Pomodoro technique into his or her studying routine is one of the fastest ways to boost motivation, consistency, and grades.

For more ideas on study tactics and executive function, please head over to our blog page. To learn more about our one-on-one academic coaching and tutoring service, reach out today!

As a parent, the most easily manageable components to provide are a certain mindset and environment that is conducive for a healthy body and mind to learn.  These factors enhance your teen to effortlessly go into a test ready and self-assured. 

1. Environment:

Evaluate if there are routines in place at your home that ensure your teen receives the recommended 8-10 hours of sleep each night. Readjust if need be so the majority of nights they are getting the sleep needed to develop healthy brain activity. Let them rest after a school day and figure out a balance between studying and relaxing. 

A healthy mind starts as well with healthy habits that include enough hydration and eating clean nutritious meals to bolster optimal body function. And finally, for your benefit, practice giving your teen simple directions to follow so they can understand the correlation between real life and test taking directions. This easy tactic can support the way your teen reads or answers test questions and prompts!

1. Mindset: 

Maintain a positive attitude and mindset towards the way you and your teen think about school, tests, and reading. They look to you for guidance and mimic your belief systems. Encourage reading every day, even if it is just a genre they like. Exposure to reading builds vocabulary organically. This can increase confidence and natural ease around reading, tests and school for your teen in order for them to not bat an eye when it comes to test-taking.

From your teen’s control, let’s all recognize that they have, can and will benefit greatly from reading strategies!

The top five strategies that anyone, at any age, for any subject can do are:

1. Activate or think of prior knowledge of the topic before diving into the reading material.
2. Use context clues if the passage is difficult to understand. (Use what you know if you do not know some words.)
3. Look for and be mindful of keywords that seem important or that will show up again.
4. Predict your answer to the question first and match the best answer to your prediction.
5. Re-read or re-write notes in a different color or fun way to remember.

Finally, of course practice makes perfect. Encourage your teen to familiarize themselves with the word usage or language asked in questions for standardized tests and subject course tests. Each test has its own unique framework, voice and pattern. It only takes a small chunk of time and a plan to practice test-taking strategies. Invest in external study material or lean into your support network. Our coaches provide a systematic approach to test taking, so that your student will be ready to conquer standardized tests. 

Through preparation, your student will put his best foot forward. Trial and error exposure will minimize discomfort. We hope this will construct a fresh perspective towards test taking for both you and your teen to approach tests willingly and happily!