 Working alongside hundreds of tutors, you notice something: the best ones are not doing anything secret. They are relentlessly consistent about a handful of techniques that cognitive scientists have backed for decades. None of these techniques cost money, none need a specialist in the room, and every one of them scales down to a five-year-old at the kitchen table. That last point matters for younger learners especially. Elementary-age children have short attention spans and are still building study habits from scratch, so the habits we model now are the ones that stick. A child who learns at seven that studying means "close the book and see what I remember" carries that into every year that follows. A child who learns that studying means re-reading until it feels familiar carries that too. Here are five techniques worth modelling, each with a way to use it in class and a way a parent can try it at home tonight.  1. Test first, read later (retrieval practice)The instinct when studying is to re-read the material until it feels familiar. Familiarity is a trap. Recognising something on the page is not the same as being able to produce it when nothing is in front of you. Good tutors flip the order: close the book, try to recall the thing first, then check. In a classroom that looks like a quick, no-stakes "what do you remember from yesterday?" before you reopen the topic. The point is that the effort of pulling information out is what strengthens the memory, not the comfort of seeing it again. Teachers who want the research and the classroom-ready activities in one place will find Retrieval Practice a genuinely useful free resource. With younger learners:Instead of reading the spelling list a fifth time, cover it and have the child write the words they remember, then fill in the ones they missed. Turn the flashcard around so the child answers before peeking. Ask for three things they remember from the story you read last night, before you open the book again. A six-year-old who tries to recall four of the week's five spellings and then looks up the last one will hold them far better than one who read the list over and over. The missed word is not a failure, it is the one that just got flagged as needing attention. At home: swap "read your chapter again" for "tell me what you remember, then we will check what you missed." 2. Spread it out (spaced practice)Cramming works just well enough to be tempting and just badly enough to hurt results. The same total study time, split across several short sessions on different days, produces dramatically better long-term recall than one long push. This is one of the most consistently supported findings in the whole of learning research, summarised well by The Learning Scientists, a group of cognitive psychologists who translate the evidence for classroom use. Spacing is almost made for younger children, because short bursts suit short attention spans anyway. Five minutes of number bonds every morning beats a single half-hour battle on Sunday. A one-minute recap of yesterday's spellings over breakfast is enough to count. In class: a two-minute review of last week's topic at the start of a lesson does more than it looks like it should. At home: twenty minutes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday beats an hour on Thursday. Worth telling parents directly: the forgetting that happens between sessions is not wasted time, it is the mechanism. Each time a child pulls the material back after nearly forgetting it, the memory gets stronger.  3. Make them explain it (the teaching test) Ask a child to teach you the topic as if you know nothing about it. The moment they stumble, or wave their hands, or say "you just do it," is the exact spot they do not really understand. Strong tutors use this constantly, because it turns a vague "I get it" into a precise map of what still needs work. With younger learners: children love playing teacher, so lean into it. Let a seven-year-old explain how to add two numbers, or why the caterpillar turns into a butterfly, to you or to a favourite stuffed animal. Where the explanation goes fuzzy, you have found the gap, and so has the child. It feels like a game rather than a test, which is exactly why it works at this age. At home: a child who can explain how they got an answer, out loud, in their own words, walks into the next lesson knowing they know it rather than hoping they do. 4. Mix the problem types (interleaving) Worksheets group problems in neat blocks: ten of type A, then ten of type B. Real life does not. Much of the difficulty in a mixed task is simply recognising which method the question is asking for, and blocked practice removes that step entirely. With younger learners: Instead of a page of only addition followed by a page of only subtraction, mix them, so the child has to notice the sign and choose. Mix spelling patterns rather than drilling one rule at a time. Once each type is understood on its own, hand out a jumbled set. Fair warning to pass on to parents: this feels harder and the score often dips, which puts children (and adults) off it. That small struggle to choose the right approach is precisely the skill the real task tests. Blocked practice makes a child feel ready. Mixed practice makes them ready.  5. Ask "why," not just "what"When a child gets something wrong, the weak move is to hand over the right answer. The strong move is to ask why they chose the one they did. The mistake almost always reveals a specific misunderstanding, and fixing that fixes a whole class of future errors rather than just this one question. It is one of the practical principles that runs through The Science of Learning, a short and readable summary written for teachers. With younger learners: if a child writes 12 for 7 + 6, resist correcting it to 13. Ask "show me how you got that." Nine times out of ten you will find they miscounted by one somewhere, and now you can fix the counting habit rather than just this sum. Children this age often catch their own slip halfway through explaining it, which teaches far more than being told. At home: "walk me through how you got that" is a complete tutoring technique on its own, and it needs no subject knowledge from the adult at all. Modelling this without becoming the homework police The point of all this is not to add pressure. It is to make the study time a child already does more effective, so there can be less of it. A realistic version for a younger learner looks like this: Short, spaced sessions instead of marathons. Recall before re-reading. The occasional "teach it to me." A few mixed problems once each type is understood. Curiosity about wrong answers instead of frustration. Start with one. Retrieval practice is the highest-value habit on this list and the easiest to adopt, because it costs nothing but a change in order: close the book and ask "what do you remember?" before opening it again. Model that one consistently, in class or at the kitchen table, and the rest builds from there.  Louis Vanhove is a working tutor and the founder of iTutorOnline, a European online tutoring platform where every tutor is manually verified. He studies computer science at the VUB in Brussels and writes about what actually helps students, based on what he sees working across hundreds of tutors.   When your child says they’re “studying,” what are they actually doing, and do you think it’s helping them truly remember what they’ve learned? What study habit did you learn as a child that you now realize may not have been as helpful as you thought? Do you think struggling a little while learning can actually be good for children? How do you know when the struggle is productive versus discouraging? What is one study habit you hope your child or students develop now that they’ll still rely on years from today? Please leave your comments below. Your feedback is always appreciated. 
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