We open this series of articles by stressing that everything below, concerning how to improve studying in primary school, must be put into practice through the cooperation of parents, students, and teachers. Only when all three pull in the same direction does any single technique take root.

The Role of the Teacher

The first thing to address is the teacher’s place in a student’s learning journey. The opening step is for instruction to begin from the points the student already knows well, so that confidence is built up gradually. Learning strategies are especially valuable here, because they place the emphasis on the process of learning and so help a child “learn how to learn.” Through them, students come to understand how learning actually works, independent study is encouraged, flexible thinking is promoted, and points of weakness are worked around. Anyone who applies learning strategies is better able to remember, monitor, and direct their own learning.

It is worth repeating that no single strategy suits every child. A teacher must decide which approach fits the particular student in front of them. Any attempt to impose a uniform “template” of education, especially on primary-school children, is unlikely to produce meaningful results.

Organising Information

For the student, the next recommendation is to use outlines, concept maps, organisational charts, and diagrams to organise information more clearly. Diagrams, for example, help a student recognise the key concepts of a text, group them into categories, and identify the relationships between them through headings. Outlines are particularly helpful for children with dyslexia in making sense of theoretical subjects, where the structure of the material matters as much as the content.

Memory Strategies

Memory strategies come next, since many children with learning difficulties also experience memory problems. These fall into two broad categories: repetition, and visualisation with mental representation.

Repetition strategies include reading aloud, re-reading the text, reading in groups, underlining the main ideas and the keywords that capture the central idea of a unit, and self-questioning of the where, who, when, how, what, and why kind, along with summarising recaps. Noting down the key points of each lesson and working with summaries and keywords are equally useful techniques.

Within visualisation and mental representation, the use of images to form an associative link with the knowledge is recommended. Finally, some other well-known mnemonic techniques are rhyme, the acrostic, and deliberately funny associations that make a fact easier to recall.