Friday, July 31, 2009

Summary: Seven Secrets to Creating Brilliant Students

Seven Secrets to Creating Brilliant Students:

1.Learn A Little Every Day
2.Reinforce Facts With Spaced Repetition
3.Actively Recall Facts
4.Build Knowledge Nets
5.Seek Associations
6.Share What Is Learned
7.Never Stop Learning

Secret #1: Learn A Little Every Day

If you want to have brilliant students, learn a little every day. There is a second part to this secret, learn a little at a time. Specifically, learn about four new facts from a single subject at a time and no more than five.

Secret #2: Reinforce Facts with Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition is a learning system that uses regularly increasing intervals of time between reviews of a previously learned piece of information. With every successful review, the interval increases, but if the student makes a mistake at a review, the interval decreases.

Secret #3: Actively Recall Facts

To make a memory as strong as possible, brilliant students actively recall the memory. Answering a direct question is one way to facilitate actively recall.

Secret #4: Build Knowledge Nets

A knowledge net is a set of carefully chosen facts a students has already learned with the goal of making it easier to rapidly learn and recall even more information on that subject. The net helps the student catch facts and hold them in memory - without studying.

Secret #5: Seek Associations

Brilliant students actively seek to make new associations with knowledge as soon as they acquire it. They do this by actively looking, reading, and researching to try to find knowledge they can associate with something they have learned.

Secret #6: Share What Is Learned

Sharing what is learned with other people (siblings, parents, friends) helps cement knowledge. It provides positive feedback to the student in the form of social bonding and requires that the student actively recall the information, thus further reinforcing the knowledge.

Secret #7: Never Stop Learning
Brilliant students develop a lifestyle of learning; they read books, look things up and visit museums. After you help your students implement the first six secrets, don't be surprised when they also start to develop a lifestyle of learning.

Beyond Secrets: The HomeSchool Advantage

HomeSchool Advantage was created to ensure that every homeschooled child can be a brilliant student. Our system provides an automated way to help students build knowledge nets. With our system, students learn a little every day using spaced repetition and active recall. This material comprises a set of basic knowledge nets that will help your students learn more and to do so more effectively. Our system can make your child a brilliant student.

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Read the foundational white paper "Seven Secrets to Creating Brilliant Students" has been published. To request a copy fill out the form at http://www.homeschooladvantage.com/users/about or leave me a message here.