Top students aren't studying more than your child.
They're studying differently.

A landmark review led by Professor John Dunlosky at Kent State University evaluated ten common study techniques against the research evidence. Highlighting and underlining — overwhelmingly the most popular method among students — were rated low utility. Across studies involving groups as different as Air Force trainees, children and undergraduates, highlighting failed to improve results. In one study, students who highlighted while reading actually performed worse on comprehension questions that required them to draw inferences.

At the workshop: students learn what to do with a page instead of highlighting it — and why the "busy" feeling and the "learning" feeling are not the same thing.

Source: Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham, Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, Psychological Science in the Public Interest (2013); summarised in American Educator.

In the same body of research, practice testing earned the highest possible rating. It isn't only an assessment tool — the act of retrieving information strengthens the memory itself. College students who used practice tests earned higher grades. And when middle-school teachers built short practice tests into daily lessons, their students went on to perform better on later tests of the same material — without adding study hours, simply by changing what happened during them.

At the workshop: this is the engine behind the 35 practice questions per topic and the 10 mock exams per subject your child receives — retrieval, spaced out, again and again.

Source: Dunlosky et al. (2013), Psychological Science in the Public Interest; see also the Kent State University summary.

Self-explanation — having a student say aloud why an answer is right, and how it connects to what they already know — was rated as showing real promise. In one experiment on logical-reasoning problems, students who practised with self-explanation went on to solve roughly 90% of the problems on the final test, compared with under 30% in the control condition: about three times better, on problems they had not seen before. That last part matters, because PEP asks children to reason about unfamiliar material, not recite familiar material.

At the workshop: students are taught to talk through their thinking — and the extended-response questions in the study guides are built to make them do it.

Source: Dunlosky et al. (2013), reported in American Educator, Fall 2013.