Teaching study skills

Teaching students how to study while learning content is not currently popular, but we think it should be. We attended school in the 1970s and 1980s and were directly taught how to study. We were not expected to do something that we had not been taught, but some students have that experience now. It just doesn’t seem fair to engage students in a summative assessment of their learning if they haven’t been taught both the content and how to study that content. We’re not sure why study skills are less popular in this century. Perhaps new expectations consumed our collective energy and we focused on designing lessons to meet them. Or we focused on the role of learning in a specific discipline. Or we changed our assessments of student learning to be more problemand projectbased, so it seemed that students didn’t need to know as much about studying. To check our assumption about the decreased emphasis on study skills, we searched EBSCO databases of journal articles using the terms “study skills instruction” and “study skills strategies.” The most recent article we found was from 2001, and most of the articles were from the 1980s and 1990s. At least by this reckoning, study skills are discussed less frequently now than they were in prior decades.