The Importance of Your Involvement Don’t for a minute underestimate the importance of your commitment to your child’s success. Your involvement in your child’s education is absolutely essential. The results of every study done in the last two decades clearly confirm the single factor that overwhelmingly affects a student’s success in school: your involvement—not money, great teachers, a bigger gym, or weekly dance classes. You.
If You’re a Nontraditional Student
If you’re going back to high school, college, or graduate school at age 25, 45, 65, or 85—you probably need the help in How to Study more than anyone! Why? Because the longer you’ve been out of school, the more likely you don’t remember what you’ve forgotten. And you’ve forgotten what you’re supposed to remember! As much as I emphasize that it’s rarely too early to learn good study habits, I must also emphasize that it’s never too late.
What You Won’t Find in This Book
I’ve seen so-called study books spend chapters on proper nutrition, how to dress, how to exercise, and a number of other topics that are not covered at all in How to Study, except for this briefest of acknowledgments: It is an absolute given that diet, sleep, exercise, and the use of drugs (including alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine) will affect your studying, perhaps significantly.
Are You Ready to Learn Something?
The book you are holding in your hands is now in its seventh edition, and has been helping students and parents (and even teachers) for more than 20 years. (The other books in my How to Study Program— Ace Any Test, Get Organized, Improve Your Memory, Improve Your Reading, and Improve Your Writing are also available in new editions.)
There Are Other Study Guides
Though I immodestly maintain that my How to Study Program is the most helpful to the most people, there are certainly plenty of other purported study books out there. Unfortunately, I don’t think most of them deliver on their promises. Inevitably, these other books promote the authors’ “system,” which usually means what they did to get through school. This “system,” whether basic and traditional or wildly quirky, may or may not work for you. So what do you do if “their” way of taking notes makes no sense to you? Or you master their highfalutin’ “Super Student Study Symbols” and still get Cs?
