Helping your Child Learn How to Learn

For some of us more "mature" parents, we watch our children learning or 'studying' but it seems different to how we did it when we were young. Professor Barb Oakley has been in New Zealand in recent times and her expertise is in people "Learning how to Learn". It focuses on the neuroscience of learning and promotes the skills of recall and retrieval of facts. Barb Oakley is interested in recent research which suggests that IQ scores in developed countries have begun to decline as we rely more on external aids such as AI to answer for us, and we forget to engage our brains to build strong internal frameworks in order to learn. She states that we need to practice remembering to build our knowledge base.

There is a book and/or a free online course that parents may want to encourage their children to participate in (and work alongside them supporting them). The book is called "Learning How to Learn. A guide for Kids and Teens". It is focused on how to succeed in school without spending all their time studying. If reading is not their thing, there is also a course using videos to help.

The course is Learning how to Learn for Youth and is a slightly different version than the one that exists for adults that some of our staff have engaged in. It requires about 6 hours of time so is a great holiday project for our young people.

There is also an adult version of the course if you are interested in developing your own learning skills as a lifelong learner. It can be found through the link above.