Bad study skills are endemic in the student population. Sometimes it’s hard to trace the reason for this deficit in knowing how to learn. Yet, it’s easy to see how a student’s failure to achieve in school can play a role in developing bad study skills. Failure is a part of every day life, yet kids and teens are often stopped cold by academic underachievement. While adults can conquer failure and move on, failure can block a student’s progress in school, and can virtually wipe out learning techniques that have been taught to them. These failures pose a threat to learning and can cause even good students to adopt bad study skills or none at all. While their parents understand that we all can learn something from failure, adolescents and older teens view failure through the skewed eye of youth.

Once a student understands that they can turn their failures into a determination to do better, it becomes easy for them to again be open to grasping new learning techniques. If they know how they learn, young people can get past the frustration of failure and can comprehend how they can learn best. There are three key learning techniques to finding out how our brain takes in information. The first is deciding what our best learning style is. The second is finding whether our focus is external or internal. Finding the specific areas where we are already smart is the final thing to know.

Evaluating specific learning styles, focus, and smart areas isn’t easy. Academic summer camps for youth and teens can help by showing students how to map what kind of learner they are and how to relate that knowledge to better their study skills. Specialized help can guide students into proper identification of their individual personal learning styles, which are different for every person. If people learn by seeing, they are visual learners. Auditory learners take in information by hearing. Those who move or touch things to learn are kinesthetic learners.

After they identify how they are learning, students need to understand personal focus. It’s important for teens to know in what situation they will focus the best. An easy test is to ask them whether they learn better with others around them or alone. Learning techniques, such as these, are multifaceted and usually are only made clear when a student can concentrate on this information without distraction. This can happen in summertime at academic camps, which provide a concentrated course that produces multiple changes in a teen’s confidence, study skills, and learning ability.

Learning techniques don’t stop here. Before they’re finished, student need to understand that they are smart, but perhaps not smart in the same way as their peers might be. The ways people are smart can be demonstrated in a list of eight things, which vary from person to person. If you see someone putting together a puzzle, it’s likely they are spatially smart. Good storytellers, or those who tell jokes well are showing they are linguistically smart. People who care about other people’s opinions and feelings are displaying an aptitude for interpersonal skills. People who play a musical instrument reveal musical intelligence. Finding patterns in the stars is a sign of those who are nature smart. A good actor, mimicker, and role-player is bodily smart. Those who are gifted in the intrapersonal area spend time alone thinking things through. Finally, people with a talent for figuring out the reasons for things are mathematically smart.

Failure often puts kids and teens in a position to fail in the future. It’s tough to get them to want to concentrate on their schoolwork and to know they can put the failure behind them and be achieve better things. When students are introduced to different learning techniques, they are empowered to advance. That process improves their study skills, and their life skills, resulting in better grades and fewer incidents of failure. Then, when failures do come, students know how to use them to improve their lives rather than stopping them cold.

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