Question number one, put up your hands if you would like to see your marks at all your grades at school improve at the moment. Who would like to see their marks or grades go up? Most of the students, brilliant.
Now, my next question is, what do you think's going to be most important in getting these marks to go up? So, can I get a show of hands, who would say IQ is going to be the most important thing to get your marks to go up? Not many people, okay, that's good.
We spoke to the students for an hour yesterday and we covered this, so you're all fast learners, that's good. Who would say hard work is going to be most important in getting those marks to go up? Okay, we've got about a third of the room, 40% maybe.
Fantastic. Now, these are the types of questions that my my team and I at Elevate Education have spent the last 13 years researching. We started our journey to find out what the top students do to get the top results, because I think people have always had a range of explanations for why this happens.
Some people say that the top students get the top results because they've got higher IQs. That is, they're just smarter than anyone else. Some people say the top students get the top results because they work harder, and the explanations go on and on.
And so, what we wanted to do was basically work out fact from fiction, what was true and what wasn't. To do this, we've spent the last 13 years benchmarking the habits, techniques, and practices of literally tens of thousands of students across Australia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the US. And what we've learned in this time is basically three key things.
First of all, the top students don't necessarily get the top results because they've got higher IQs or because they're smarter than anyone else. Finding number two, we found that there's a small set of skills that is statistically significant in explaining why the top students get the top marks. In other words, there's a small set of things that the top students do that no one else does that explains why they get their results.
And what's interesting is that these are common across countries. So, they're as relevant for a student in Sydney, Australia, where I'm from, as they are for a student in London, Cape Town, New York, or Tallinn, for that matter. The third thing, and this is probably the most important finding in the context of today's presentation, is that these skills can be both taught to and used by students to improve their results.
And that's what we do as a company. Today, Elevate works with quarter of a million students across 1,200 countries 1,200 1,200 schools, sorry, in four different countries in order to move up students' results. And what I found across this time is there's basically three things that any student needs to know if they're looking to move up their marks right now.
The first one of these things is that you don't need to worry about IQ. It's been my experience far too many students worry about, am I smart enough or do I have a high enough IQ to do well? As we said, not many hands went up to that question today.
However, normally it's about 50 to 90% of students will see IQ as being the biggest driver of their results. A great example of this, three years ago in Australia, we interviewed 3,000 students before their final high school exams, and we asked these guys, what is going to be most important in impacting your results in your final exams? An overwhelming majority, and when I say overwhelming, I mean 90% of students came back and said IQ would be the number one factor.
Now, the good news is is that these students and the vast majority of students drastically overestimate how important IQ is going to be. Indeed, in our research, we found that IQ is not the number one predictor of how well a student will perform. In fact, we found 13 variables that were more effective in terms of predicting academic performance than simply IQ.
One of these factors in particular we found to be multiple times more effective to predict academic performance, and that was practice exams. We found the top students do more practice exams than anyone else. We found you can almost perfectly estimate a student's results by looking at the number of practice exams they've done.
And we also found that we could almost perfectly rank a class from first all the way down to last just given the amount of practice exams they would do across a year. Now, the great thing about practice exams is that you don't have to be you don't have to be a genius to do a practice exam. It's completely within your control, as are the other 12 variables.
Now, let's take it a step further though. Let's think about if a student's going to work successfully across a year and do well, what do they need to do? Well, the first thing is they're going to need to be able to self-motivate, cuz they're going to have to sit down, they're going to need to work consistently across the year.
They're also going to need to be self-disciplined, cuz they're going to have to cut out distractions like Facebook or watching six and a half hours of cat videos on YouTube. They're going to have to sit down and cut out all these distractions. The third thing is they're also going to need to be resilient, because the reality is is that every student's going to lose marks across the year, and when this happens, you've got to be able to pick yourself up and dust yourself self off.
Now, it doesn't matter how high a student's IQ is. If you can't do these three things, you're always going to be at a disadvantage. Indeed, research by two professors at the University of Pennsylvania, uh Martin Seligman and Angela Duckworth, who who many people know from their TED Talks, they found in a range of areas self-discipline trumps IQ.
They found in terms of the classroom, they found self-discipline was two times more effective in predicting academic results than IQ by itself. The second lesson is don't aim to just work hard, and I'm going to emphasize the word just there. Cuz normally when I say this, I look around this student's whose eyes just open up, and cuz what they hear is don't work hard.
And this thing you got, I'm glad I came today. So, that's it's not the message. The message is don't aim to just work hard.
And the the reason for that is in our research, we found that hard work was a necessary condition, but it wasn't a sufficient condition to doing well. And I'll explain what I mean by that. In our research, we found very few students who did well but didn't work hard.
The reality is, if you want to do well, you've got to work hard. The problem is though, we found students who worked equally as hard as the top students and got worse results. We found students who even worked harder than the top students and get and end up getting poor results.
And if we think about it, it's actually the number one of the number one reasons for student underperformance at school is because they simply aim to work hard. So, all the time we find students who turn up for the new school year, and they say something along these lines. They say, this year is going to be different.
They say, this year I'm going to do better, I'm going to do some work, I'm going to hand my homework in on time, I'm going to get my assignments in on time. I'm even going to do more study for my exams. The problem is though, is that then they go back out and they keep doing the same thing they were doing before, they just do more of it.
And it was Michael Jordan who said it best that if you shoot 10,000 balls and you've got bad technique, all you're going to do is you're going to get really good at shooting really badly. And that's the problem for these students. They go out, they take inadequate study skills, and they simply use them more often, and then they expect a different result at the end of it.
The problem is, all of a sudden they then go and do an exam, they get their results back, it's the same result as last time, and at this point the cycle of disengagement begins. Because these students say, look, I've done everything now. I've I've even worked hard, I've done every single thing there is, I simply can't do it, and I give up.
So, the thing is, we don't want to just aim to work hard, we want to work hard doing the right things. Now, the obvious question then is, well, what are the right things? In our research, we found 13 factors or skills or habits or techniques that differentiated the top students from middle and lower performing students.
I want to touch upon two of these. The two I want to touch upon are they're probably two of the most important skills, but then secondly, they're also great case studies in terms of illustrating what the top students do differently to the vast majority of students. Now, the first skill I want to talk about is one I've already touched upon today, which is practice exams.
Now, as I said before, we found that practice exams were the number one predictor of how well a student would do at school. Now, to understand why, let's take a step back and let's think about what students are doing before exams. Now, on the screen at the moment, I've got a group of year 11 students in the United Kingdom, and let's actually work through and let's have a look at what the majority of these students are of these students who are making their notes.
In other words, these are the guys who've left it right to the last minute, they're sitting down just trying to get their notes finished before the exams. We've got 5% of students who are rewriting their notes. So, these are the guys who are now trying to basically rote learn them simply by writing them out over and over and over again.
We've got the overwhelming majority here, it's about 56% of students are reading over their notes. So, in other words, they're sitting there just reading the notes over and over and over again until it's in their memory. So, in other words, we've got 76% of students who are spending the majority of their time simply memorizing their notes, either writing them out, rewriting them, or reading them over over and over again.
Now, why do students do this? The reason the vast majority of students will do this is very intuitive, because if everyone in this room thinks back to what their number one fear was last exam, generally, the number one fear is, what if I forget something? What if I forget a date, a quote, a fact, what's going to happen?
And as a result, these students go and they spend all of their time on memory-based activities. Now, our top students on the other hand, our top students are in the minority. They're in this small group of 11% of students who are doing practice exams at the moment.
Now, why do the top students do practice exams? They do it because they realize something that the vast majority of students don't realize. They realize that an exam is not a test of memory.
An exam does not test you how much you can remember, it tests you how you use what you remember. So, the top students can basically go one step further than the vast majority of students. Whereas the majority of students can simply remember information, the top students can analyze it, they can evaluate it, they can develop arguments, but they can give the examiner what the examiner wants when they get into the exam room, which is one of the large reasons they get the results they do.
Now, the second skill Oh, before we get to the second skill, I might just to In order to show you how similar these are across countries, I'll put up a group of year 11 students in Australia. And what you're going to notice is it is almost identical to our UK students. In fact, the percentage of students again that gold bar there, the percentage of students who are doing practice exams is actually exactly the same as our our case study in Australia.
We've got 11% of students in Australia who are who is doing practice exams. But again, it's within this minority where we find our top students. Now, let's look at the the second skill.
Uh and this skill also this relates back to something I've also touched upon today, which is the concept of self-discipline and the research by Seligman and Duckworth. Now, a student's number one tool when it comes to self-discipline is a study timetable. The big problem is the vast majority of students will create a study timetable and then the vast majority of them will throw it out within the next week or so.
And can I get a show of hands amongst the students, who's done that before? Who has created a timetable only to throw it out very quickly? Okay, again a lot of students.
And the good news is is that you're not in the minority. If we look at this, this is a group of year 11 students in the United Kingdom. Over 50% of these students have thrown out their timetable within a week.
A quarter of them had thrown it out within a couple of days and then the other quarter have thrown it out or more than a quarter have thrown it out within the week. Now, again, to understand why this is the case, let's have a look because we do have a small group of students who stick to it for longer than a month, who who stick to it for months on end, all the way up to a year. And again, these are where our top students are.
But to understand why, let's look at what the majority of students do differently to the top students. Now, on this slide I've got a group of year 11 students and we're having a look at what students put into their timetable first. So, what we find the vast majority of students will do is they'll go out, they'll get a piece of paper and they'll rule this thing up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday all the way through to Sunday.
And then the very first thing they put into their study timetable is when they're going to study, which is again is fairly intuitive, right? It's called a study timetable, so you'd think you put the study in first. So, we've got it's about 22% of students will put in their homework or when they're going to do uh quote unquote study.
Uh in other words, they're putting in their workload for that week. We've got again our overwhelming majority, it's 63% of students in this case who are putting in specific subjects. So, the very first thing they might do is on a Monday afternoon, they'll put in an hour of French homework.
And presumably that's cuz they had French that day and they've got to do homework and study for it. So, again, we've got about 85% of students who put study in as the very first thing into their timetable. Now, the problem with that is that these guys have the highest likelihood of throwing out the timetable, as we've already seen, within a matter of days or within a week.
And the reason for it is is because they go absolutely gung-ho. They just put in study all over the place and they forget about the things they love doing. So, 3 days into it or 3 weeks into it or however long, these guys are sitting down going, "I'm not doing anything I love doing.
I'm bored. I hate this. " And as a result, they throw the timetable out.
Now, again, our top students are in the minority on this graph as well. These are the guys who, when they sit down to create a timetable, they do what every other student does in terms of they get their piece of paper and they rule it up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday all the way through to Sunday. But instead of putting in study first, these guys do something very different.
They put in, as you can see there, they put in when they're not going to study. So, the first things to go into these timetables are things like socializing, hobbies, sports. If someone's got a job, they might put in the job as well.
And it's only once they've got these activities in that they then come back and they begin to fill the study around it. The big thing thing for the top students though is all of a sudden, because they've got all of these activities in their timetables, it means every day they're doing something that they love to do. As a result, they're happy and because they're happy, they're balanced.
And it's that sense of being balanced that then lays the foundation to be productive for the rest of the year. So, for any student in the room right now who's looking to move up their marks, there's three things you all need to consider. Number one, as we've already said, don't overestimate the importance of IQ or just don't worry about it.
It's out of your control. Number two, don't aim to just work hard, but instead work hard doing the right things. Aim to model what the top students are doing.
Because the thing is, if you get the process right, then the marks or the grades or the results at school are going to take care of themselves. Thanks a lot.
