Five reasons why my students pass their certification exams - part 3: They study to understand concepts, not to learn the “right” answers
3. TAPA's students study to understand concepts, not just to learn the “right” answers
Taking exams is all about getting the right answers, but why is that not the best strategy for exam preparation? Practice exams can be used to get a good feeling about what you know, but they are not good at telling you what you don’t know. At TAPA Institute, we work with the students to find out what is blocking them from achieving their goals. Sometimes it’s having the wrong material (not all teaching styles work for everyone) or the wrong study plans (we customize that for each student). However, often a student isn't successful because they aren’t studying the right way.
Learning is about developing new synaptic pathways to connect what you’ve understood before to what you need to understand now. This process is managed in many ways, but from birth we have accomplished it by taking bite-sized chunks of information and processing them. As adults we sometimes try to shove trailer loads of knowledge into our brains at once. This is especially difficult when it involves material with complex language structures like accounting certifications. The best approach is to slow down, translate what you are studying into something that makes sense to the you.
As a child, translating for my family members between English and Haitian Creole made me understand how to work around vocabulary gaps that I had in Creole. I needed to find alternate ways of explaining concepts and this practice has helped me in my business. TAPA Scripts have been developed to help the student learn how to digest the complex concepts in the study materials into a language that they can understand. This method is used on the difficult areas, while leaving out the areas where the student is scoring well. This seems like a simple concept, but some students use a lot of energy going over material, taking notes and re-reading these notes.
TAPA Scripts are a novel approach to working with a student. They show students what they should study, translate the material into understandable language and then ask students to show that they understand the concepts. Concept mastery is what allows a student to pass the certification test, because you can never do enough practice exams to account for all the possible questions you could encounter on an exam. When this concept mastery starts to happen it’s a beautiful thing to experience and it makes the whole studying process much simpler.
We will review how concept mastery is used to determine when the student is ready for the exam in the next part of the series. Visit our website www.tapainstitute.com to set up a free consultation for your personalized study!