question number one put up your hands if you would like to see your marks and for
your grades at school improve at the moment
who would like to see their marks or grades go up most of the students
brilliant
now my next question is what do you think is going to be most important in
getting these marks to go up so can I get a show of hands who would say IQ is
going to be the most important thing to get your marks to go up
not many people like yeah it's good despite the students for an hour
yesterday we covered this side you're fast line is that's good
who would say hard work is going to be most important getting those marks to go
up
I can we got about a third of the room forty percent maybe fantastic now these
are the types of questions that are my team and I elevate education have spent
the last 13 years researching we started our journey to find out what the top
students do to get the top results because i think people have always had a
range of explanations for why this happens
some people say that the top students get the top results because they've got
higher IQs that is there just smarter than anyone else
some people say the top students get the top results because they work harder and
the explanations go on and on and so what we want to do is basically work out
fact from fiction
what was true and what wasn't to do this we spent the last 13 years benchmarking
the habits techniques and practices of literally tens of thousands of students
across Australia South Africa and the United Kingdom in the US and what we've
learned in this time is basically three key things first of all the top students
don't necessarily get the top results because they've got higher IQs or
because they're smarter than anyone else finding number two we found that there's
a small set of skills that is statistically significant in explaining
why the top students get the top marks in other words there's a small set of
things that the top students do that no one else does
that explains why they get their results and what's interesting is that these are
common across countries
so there is relevant for student in sydney australia where I'm from
as they are for students in London cape town New York of talent for that matter
the third thing and this is probably the most important finding in the context of
today's presentation is that these skills can be both thought so
and used by students to improve their results and that's what we do as a
company today elevate works with quarter of a million students across 12 hundred
countries are 1200 x 1200 school sorry
in four different countries in order to move up students results and what I
found across this time is is basically three things that any student needs to
know if they're looking to move up their marks right now
the first one of these things is that you don't need to worry about IQ
it's been my experience far too many students worry about am i smart enough
or do i have a high enough like you to do well as you said not many hands went
up to that question today however normally it's about fifty to ninety
percent of students will say IQ is being the biggest driver of their results
a great example of this three years ago in Australia we interviewed three
thousand students before their final high school exams and we ask these guys
what is going to be most important in impacting your results in your final
exams an overwhelming majority and when I say overwhelming i'm a ninety percent
of students came back and said I could be the number one factor
now the good news is is that these students in the vast majority of
students drastically overestimate how important IQ is going to be in date in
our research we found that IQ is not the number one predictor of how well
students will perform in fact we found 13 variables that were more effective in
terms of predicting academic performance then simply IQ out one of these factors
in particular we found to be multiple times more effective to predict academic
performance and that was practice exams
we found the top students do more practice exams that anyone else we found
you can almost perfectly estimated students results by looking at the roads
are number of practice exams they've done and we also found that we could
almost perfectly rank a class from first all the way down to last just given the
amount of practice exams they would do across a year now the great thing about
practice exams is that you don't have to be nice guy
you don't have to be a genius to do a practice exam is completely within your
control
as are the other 12 variables now let's take a step throw though
let's think about if the students going to work successfully across the year and
do well what do they need to do it well the first thing is they're going to need
to be out of self motivate
because they're gonna have to sit down there going to need to work consistently
across the year they're also going to need to be self-disciplined gonna have
to cut out distractions like Facebook or watching six and a half hours of cat
videos on youtube
they're gonna have to sit down and cut out all these distractions
the third thing is they're also going to need to be resilient because the reality
is that every student going to lose marks across the year and when this
happens you gotta be at pick yourself up and dust yourself off now it doesn't
matter how high students IQ is if you can't do these three things you're
always going to be at a disadvantage
indeed research by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania art market
selling men Angela Duckworth who many people know from their TED talks
they found in a range of areas self-discipline Trump's IQ they found in
terms of the classroom they found self-discipline was two times more
effective been predicting academic results in IQ by itself
the second lesson is don't aim to just work hard and I'm going to emphasize the
word just there because normally when i say this I look around this students
whose eyes just opened up and because what they hear is don't work hard and
missing you I'm glad I came today
so that's that's not the message the message is don't aim to just work hard
and the the reason for that is in our research we found that hard work was a
necessary condition but it wasn't sufficient conditions are doing well and
i'll explain what I mean by that
in our research we found very few students who did well that didn't work
hard
the reality is if you want to do well you've gotta work hard
the problem is they we found students who worked equally as hard as the top
students and got worse results we found students we even worked harder than the
top students and get and end up getting poor results and if we think about it
it's actually the number one of the number one reasons for students under
performance at school is because they simply aim to work hard so all the time
we find students who turn up for the new school year and they say something along
these lines they say this year is going to be different
they say this year I'm going to do better
i'm going to do some work I'm gonna have my homework in on time you're gonna get
my assignments in on time
I mean you do more study for my exams the problem is though is that then they
go back out they keep doing the same thing now
doing before they just do more of it and it was Michael Jordan who said it best
that if you shoot ten thousand balls and you've got bad technique
all you gotta do is going to get really good at shooting really badly and that's
the problem for these students they go out they take inadequate study skills
and they simply use them more often and then they expect a different result at
the end of it
the problem is all the Sun they then go do an exam they get their results back
it's the same results last time and at this point the cycle of disengagement
begins because they students say look I've done everything now I've even
worked hard I've done every single thing there is
I simply can't do it and I give up so the thing is we don't want to just aim
to work hard we want to work hard doing the right things
now the obvious question then is well what are the right things in our
research we found 13 factors or skills are habits or techniques the
differentiated the top students for middle are performing students
I want to touch upon two of these are the the - I want to touch upon our aid
they're probably one of the most important skills and then secondly
they're also great case studies in terms of illustrating what the top students do
differently to the vast majority of students
now the first thing i want to talk about is one I've already touched upon today
which is practice exams
now as I said before we found that practice exams were the number one
predictor of how well students would do at school now to understand why
let's take a step back and let's think about what students are doing before
exams now on the screen of the moment I've got a great year 11 students in the
united kingdom and that's actually work through and let's have a look at what
the majority of these students are doing now of the top we've got fifteen percent
of the students who are making their nights in other words these are the guys
have left the right to the last minute
they're sitting down just trying to get the Knights finish before the exams
we've got five percent of students who are rewriting their nights so these the
guys who are now trying to basically wrote learn them simply by writing them
out over and over and over again
we've got the overwhelming majority here it's about fifty six percent of students
are reading over there nights
so in other words sitting there just reading the night over and over and over
again until it's in their memory
so in other words we've got seventy-six percent of students who are spending the
majority of their time simply memorizing then
it's either writing them out rewriting them or reading them over and over again
now why do students do this the raising the vast majority of students will do
this is very intuitive because if everyone in this room things back to
what the number one for you was last exam
generally the number one fear is what if I forget something
what if I forget a date a quite a fact
what's going to happen and as a result these students going they spend all of
their time on memory based activities now tops jeans on the other hand at top
students are in the mine party there in this small group of eleven percent of
students who are doing practice exams at the moment
now why do the top students to practice exams they do it because they realize
something that the vast majority of students don't realize they realize that
an exam is not a test of memory an exam does not test you how much you can
remember it tells you how you use what you remember
so the top students can basically go one step further than the vast majority of
students
where's the majority of students can simply remember information
the top students can analyze they can evaluate they can develop arguments but
they can give the examiner what the examiner once when they get into the
exam room which is one of the large reasons i get the results they do now
the second skill or before we get to the second skill i might just to in order to
show you how similar these are across countries are put up a group of year 11
students in Australia and what you notice is it is almost identical to our
UK students in fact the percentage of students again that gold bar there
the percentage of students are doing practice exams is actually exactly the
same as out out case study in Australia
we've got eleven percent of students in Australia who would do is doing practice
exams but again it's within this minority where we find out our top
students
now let's look at the the second skill out and this skill or cite this relates
back to something I've also touched upon today which is the concept of
self-discipline and the research by selling and duckworth
now students number 12 when it comes to self-discipline is a study timetable
the big problem is the vast majority of students will create a study timetable
and then the vast majority of them or throw it out within the next week or so
and I get a show of hands my students who has done that before he was created
a timetable
I need to throw it out very quickly I get a lot of students and the good news
is is that you're not in the minority
if we look at this is a group of year 11 student in the united kingdom over fifty
percent of the students have thrown out their timetable within awake
a quarter of the most trying it out within a couple of days and then the
other corner of throwing it out or more than a quarter of throwing it out within
the wake now again to understand why this is the case let's have a look
because we do have a small group of students who stick to work for longer
than a month
who's you stick to it for months on end all the way up to a year and again these
are our top students are but to understand why let's look at what the
majority of students do differently to the top students now on this library
group of your 11 students and we're having a look at what students put into
their timetable first
so what we find the vast majority of students will do is they'll go out now
get a piece of paper and now ruled this thing up monday tuesday wednesday
thursday all the way through sunday and then the very first thing they put into
their study timetable is when they're going to study which is again is fairly
intuitive right it's called a study timetable
so you think you put the study in first so we've got it's about twenty two
percent of students will put in their homework or when they're going to do are
quite a quite study hour
in other words they're putting in their workload for that wake we've gotta get
out overwhelming majority and sixty-three percent of students in this
case who are putting in specific subjects so the very first thing they
might do is on a monday afternoon airport in an hour of french homework
and presumably that's because i had french that day and they're going to do
homework and study for it
so again what about eighty-five percent of students who put study in as the very
first thing into their timetable
now the problem with that is that these guys have the highest likelihood of
throwing out the timetable as we've already seen within a matter of days or
within a wake
and the reason for it is is because they go absolutely going home
they just put in study all over the place and they forget about the things
they love doing so 3 days into it or three weeks into I however long
these guys are sitting down going I'm not doing anything I love doing on board
I hate this and as a result they throw the timetable out
now again our top students are in the minority on this graph as well
these are the guys who when they sit down to create a timetable
they do it every other student does in terms of they get their piece of paper
and they roll it up monday tuesday wednesday thursday all the way through
sunday but instead of putting in study first these guys do something very
different
they put it as you can see they're putting when they're not going to study
so the first thing to go into these time two hours of things like socializing
hobbies sports if someone's got a job they might put in the job as well and
it's only once they've got these activities in a then come back and they
begin to feel the study around it
the beat thing for the top students though is all the sudden because they've
got all of these activities in their timetables
it means every day they're doing something that they love to do as a
result they're happy and because they're happy they're balanced and it's that
sense of being balanced
- then lays the foundation to be productive for the rest of the year
so for any student in the room right now he's looking to move up their marks
there's three things you need to consider number one has already said
don't overestimate the importance of x cubed just don't worry about it it's out
of your control number two don't aim to just work hard but instead work hard
doing the right things
aim to model what the top students are doing because the thing is if you get
the process right in the marks or the grades are the results of school
we're going to take care of themselves thanks
yeah