The habit that stops good students getting great grades

A student sits down to revise An Inspector Calls. They spend an hour at the desk and come away with fifteen quotations written out neatly and, mostly, memorised.

Was that a good hour? It looks like one, because it produced something you can see: a page has been filled, the quotations are there to be checked, and the student is tired in the way that real work makes people tired.

The answer depends on a question nobody asked the student: what did they think they were revising for? If they believed the exam rewards knowing quotations, that was a good hour. If the exam rewards building an argument about why the writer chose those words, it was close to a wasted one. The student has no way of knowing which, because the hour felt productive.

We call this a habit rather than laziness, because laziness would be easy to spot. What is happening here is more logical, and far better hidden.

Same text, different expectation

In 1976, two researchers in Sweden, Ference Marton and Roger Säljö, ran an experiment that has been cited very widely since.

They gave students a text to read. One group was told they would be asked questions demanding “a thorough understanding of the meaning”, while the other group was told they would face “detailed factual questions”.^[1] The text was the same for both groups, and only the expectation was different.

What do you think the second group did with the same text? The students expecting factual questions started reading differently, hunting for facts they could recall and no longer trying to follow the argument. The researchers’ conclusion is the sentence worth pinning above a desk:

Students did adapt their way of learning to their conception of what was required of them.^[1]

Nobody told those students to learn shallowly. They worked out what seemed to be wanted, and then they gave exactly that.

Marton and Säljö called the two modes surface-level and deep-level processing.^[2] Surface means working on the words themselves, by remembering and reproducing them. Deep means working on the meaning: what is being argued, and why. From the outside both look like studying, but only one of them moves a grade in English.

In English, quotations are only the start

In most subjects, surface learning gets a student a decent way: memorise the formula, apply the formula and collect the marks. English is the subject where surface learning runs out soonest.

Your child can memorise every quotation in the play and still be unable to do what the top band asks for. The top band wants a clear argument: why the writer made those choices, and what those choices do to a reader. The quotations are only the raw material that such an argument is built from.

So a student can revise diligently for months, in a way that would work in another subject, and arrive at the exam with a full head and a middling grade. Nothing along the way will have warned them.

Students learn what gets rewarded

Students do not invent this habit. They learn it from what gets rewarded.

Researchers studying computer-based tutoring watched students do something they named “gaming the system”, which means working out how to get the tick without doing the thinking.^[3] Students clicked through hints until the answer appeared, or guessed rapidly until something was accepted. Calling that cheating misses the point, because it is efficiency aimed at the wrong target.

Students are also very good at reading targets. If the mark comes for filling the page, they fill the page. If a teacher with thirty books to mark writes “good detail” on the answer with the most quotations, they learn that quotations are the currency. And if the tick arrives before anyone has asked “but why did the writer do that?”, the lesson they learn is that nobody was going to ask.

None of that is a criticism of teachers, since thirty students, one marker and one evening is simple arithmetic. But it does mean that a student can be rewarded, week after week, for exactly the habit that will cap them at a 6.

Four signs you can spot at home

You can usually see the habit without reading a single essay, by looking for four signs.

Revision that produces objects. Neat notes, colour-coded quotations and a beautiful mind-map give the hour something to show for itself, which is precisely why it feels as if it worked.

Fluent retelling. Ask what happens in the story and you get a confident, accurate summary. Ask why the writer told it that way and the answer thins out fast.

Answers that arrive very quickly. A very fast answer has usually been retrieved from memory rather than thought about.

“I’ve done it.” The work is treated as a thing to complete rather than a skill to improve, so once it is finished, it is finished, even though nothing about it has got better.

Every one of those four signs belongs to a conscientious student. The habit does not look like a problem, which is exactly what makes it expensive.

Change what they think is being asked

You cannot fix this by telling a student to “think more deeply”. They do not know what you mean, and a student who did know would already be doing it.

What changes the habit is changing what they believe is being asked. That is exactly what the 1976 study showed, and its lesson is oddly hopeful, because students adapt fast once the target moves. Three things move the target.

1. Ask the “why” question every single time. Instead of “what does this quotation show?”, ask “why did the writer choose that word, when they could have chosen another?” Asked consistently, this question retrains what a student thinks the subject is for, while asked occasionally, it changes nothing.

2. Stop rewarding volume. If a longer answer reliably gets a better response than a sharper one, your child will keep writing longer answers. A child who does this is responding correctly to the signal, not being difficult.

3. Show them what the standard actually is. Of the three, this one does the most work. Most students have never seen a genuine grade-9 paragraph next to their own, and until they do, “better” is an abstraction. Afterwards it becomes a target, and usually a much smaller gap than they feared.

That third point is why we give away a full annotated model answer rather than an extract, and why the marking we send back names the specific element that fell short instead of grading the whole piece. A student who can see the difference can aim at it.

One question, tonight

If you want to test for this in thirty seconds, pick something your child has studied and ask them one question:

“Why did the writer do it that way?”

If the answer comes back as what happens, the revision has been surface-level, however neat the notes are. Treat that answer as a signal rather than a failure, because a surface habit can be fixed.

If you would like to see exactly where your child stands against the exam criteria, our free assessment takes five minutes and gives you a predicted grade plus the specific skills holding them back.

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