How do you teach a student to work faster?

Question

I'm teaching a student who is quite good - whenever we work on problems together, they tend to get most of the solution pretty easily. Occasionally they might need hints, but it's uncommon for them to make no progress on a problem. They are not a top student and will not be winning any competitions, but they are a good student.

However, they tend to do surprisingly poorly in exams. Talking to them afterwards, it seems that they are constantly under time pressure, sufficiently so that they barely have time to finish the exam (and no time to check their answers).

How does one teach a student to work faster? The only way I can think of is to repeatedly do a question while timing oneself with a stopwatch. However, one would have to spread this out over weeks (or the solution is still fresh in memory), and that's not realistic since the syllabus keeps moving on.

Answer 1

How do you teach someone to run faster, or lift heavier, or jump higher?

For the most part, you don’t. Sure you have to show them the proper technique, yet the highest impact is training and not teaching. Teaching only shows them a specific technique, training is what builds the general power and resilience.

Likewise, get slow students to train being faster. That is not about specific tasks but rather the skills behind any related tasks - even as the syllabus moves on, training with the current task builds the general skill to handle other tasks faster as well.

Depending on how your class is structured, you can tailor this to individual or all students:

• Do more than one exam so that students are in the exam situation more but with lower impact.
• Have frequent no-stakes tests with limited time. This may be something you do in class and grade if you have the time, or something students get to do on their own.
• Encourage students to do parts of their homework on the clock. Effectively they will be inserting mini-exams for themselves into the regular schedule.
• Encourage students to do other activities that have time constraints. This can be academic challenges or, say, playing chess with a time limit.

The general idea here is that students train being in situations of limited time. Whatever you can think of that achieves this should be helpful. However, as with all training, keep in mind that they have to do it - you can encourage and guide them but they have to go the way themselves.

Answer 2

I think it would be important to take a closer look at the student's behavior when taking an exam (or possibly in individual practice problems). Where are they losing time? Are they just globally slow at everything? Or are there particular operations that cause them to lose time? Slowness may just be a symptom of a deeper problem that needs to be addressed.

I can illustrate with two related anecdotes.

Even in 3rd grade, I hated memorizing. I stubbornly refused to memorize the multiplication tables since multiplication was taught as just repeated addition. If I could translate my thoughts back then into my vocabulary today, my attitude was "Why memorize that which I can derive from first principles?" But the tests were timed and I failed most tests because I couldn't add fast enough. To this day, I'm irked that the teacher didn't pull me aside and try to understand my problem. She could obviously see the columns of digits that I was laboriously adding in the margin.

Fast forward about 20 years to freshman physics in college. For me, I loved being able to start with first principles (say, Newton's 3 laws) at the very beginning of a chapter, and then being able to prove their consequences (such as the path of a projectile being a parabola). That's how I handled exams. With few exceptions, I would start with first principles, derive the equations I needed to solve a problem, then solve the problem. I failed to finish most exams because I ran out of time. Finally, one day it hit me like a ton of bricks: Oh my god, the professor doesn't want me to understand the foundations of physics. He just wants me to memorize the list of equations in the chapter summary and then mindlessly plug and chug on exams. Once I understood the game, my performance on exams improved.

I'm not saying that "failing to memorize" is this particular student's problem. Only that if you have the time and resources, it would help the student to diagnose the slowness problem more thoroughly. Where are they losing time? If it's global slowness, then (as others have already suggested) drilling is probably the best prescription. But it may be a more focused issue that is causing problems.

On exams, are students expected to show their work? If so, that might be a good place to start to see where they are losing time or going through unnecessary steps.

Have you asked the student for their perspective? You had mentioned that "Talking to them afterwards, it seems that they are constantly under time pressure." I think you could inquire deeper. The exams are timed. They are under time pressure. But we don't know if feeling time pressure is cause (e.g., math or test anxiety) or effect (losing time due to some other problem).

Answer 3

I would consider the possibility that the student just has problems with pressure and "locks up" in some way. This might be especially true if your exams are "high stakes". If that is the case, and it is just a guess on my part, it isn't something you can solve as you aren't trained for that, I'd guess.

Time pressure and uncertainty might make it difficult to quickly come to an answer that "pleases" them.

Perhaps the student should see a counsellor of some kind who can teach them how to overcome it.

The thing in your post that led me to this guess is that they do fine with you when there is little pressure. They might even be taking cues from your facial expression and such when they have made a good choice and don't feel they need to consider other possibilities and go back and forth to choose an answer.

You could even describe the symptom to a trained psychologist/counsellor and get their advice.

Answer 4

Not holistic, but one approach taught for exam taking is to quickly skim the whole exam, then tackle the easier problems first.

This:

• gets them done;
• gives a positive boost for the rest of the exam;
• helps context switch the brain towards the subject area (ie. warms it up for future questions);
• and lets part of the brain mull over how to solve the trickier ones seen during the initial scan.

Other than that, have the student tackle timed practise exams. Practise, practise, practise. Best of luck!

Answer 5

An alternative approach --- you don't

Examinations can be useful tools for many things, but most work in professions that apply academic skills is done slowly and carefully (with some exceptions). Speed can be useful in some cases, but it might not be all that important after leaving the university. Your student is here encountering a trade-off between focusing attention on substantive mastery of the subject and training for greater processing and writing speed. Both of those skills are potentially useful, but the latter is more important for examinations and less important for solving real-world problems in the professions.

Consequently, one possibility here is for your student to focus on mastery of the subject matter and simply accept that her exam performance will be hampered by her lack of speed, with consequently lower grades. This means that her grades may not fully reflect her level of mastery of the material, but that might be okay. Your student might still be able to perform well in the profession after graduating, and ultimately, she will need to be the one to decide the appropriate trade-off for allocation of her time between learning new material and training for speed. (For the latter, I agree with the answer by MisterMiyagi.)

Answer 6

There may be several different factors at play here — other answers raise other excellent points. But one big possible factor is what’s known in the UK as exam technique — meaning a bunch of general skills that affect exam performance, including good time management, keeping calm under pressure, and so on. Searching the keyword “exam technique” finds lots of good advice on the matter from teachers and academics, e.g. in the Newcastle University Academic Skills Kit, the Sheffield University Study Skills guide, these tips from Dave Pearce at the University of York, and these slides from Seb Savory at Cambridge University. There are many more good tips in those than I can repeat here — they’re good reading both for students, and (even more) for instructors, as a source of ideas to offer students. But the core points that come up most often fall mostly into time management and stress management.

Time management: The goal here is to make sure you’re using the time effectively. Big-picture wise, the main aim is avoid spending a lot of time stuck on hard problems, if there are easier problems that would give you more points in the same time.

So to do that, it’s usually good to skim through the whole exam for a few minutes at the start — to give this, say, 5–10 mins for a 3 hour exam. This lets you pick out which questions look easiest, so you can attempt those first. It also primes you with the rough areas of all the questions, so that your subconscious can start recalling relevant background for them all.

After that first skim, then you usually want to start with the questions that looked easiest, and proceed to harder problems after. If a problem turns out harder than expected — or if e.g. 1(a) and 1(b) are OK, but you can’t see how to do 1(c) — then don’t spend too long stuck on the hard part, especially if you’re not making progress; recognise you’re stuck, move on to another question, and come back to those skipped parts later. Get low-hanging fruit locked down first!

Stress management: The main goal here is to keep yourself calm and avoid panicking — let the pressure focus your mind, but not distract or paralyse you. There are various tactics for this, practical and psychological — of course, different things will work for different people. Practically, things that often help include breathing deeply if you catch yourself starting to panic; having a water bottle or similar to sip from; and getting some moderate physical exercise beforehand (to taste, not necessarily strenuous, but at least say a few minutes of mindful walking before the exam). Psychological tips can include reminding yourself that you’ve been able to do practice problems on this material outside the exam, for reassurance; simply reminding yourself that being calm is useful, to help consciously aim for calm; and many more.

But the common thread throughout is to have perspective on the exam and yourself — don’t let it seem overwhelmingly intimidating; don’t idealise it and see it as an eternal perfect judgement on your abilities; don’t think of it in isolation from the rest of your day and your well-being. You’re human, the examiners are human, your fellow-students are human; remember that, and do what you can to use and show your konwledge effectively.

Answer 7

The question provides little context, so I will add what I hope is a relevant aspect that I did not see covered in other answers. I would like to think I am a thorough thinker, but I have never been a fast thinker, whether in school or at work. What helped me perform better under time constraints is acquiring tools, practicing the use of these tools, and either following a recipe when to use each tool, or ideally develop a feel for it over time.

Early on in high school, I always struggled with essay questions as I tended to write somewhat disorganized, rambling, wordy answers that took too long to produce. Then I took a one-semester class called "Composition" and benefited greatly from it. I learned some simple general principles on how to organize different types of essays (say, a description, or making arguments pro and con) and how to eliminate superfluous information (such as, every sentence must directly support the thesis or must be discarded). My writing became crisp, even terse, yet covered all relevant points.

In mathematics we similarly have general tools, such as completing the square, synthetic division, or partial fraction decomposition. In my experience, some tools in common use in one country may be rarely taught in another, for reasons unknown to me. Becoming efficient in the mechanics of each tool requires practice, that is, repeated use. Recognizing when to use each tool is more difficult, and here recipes can help, especially in the initial stages. These could be either general principles as in Polya's How to solve it, or more specific ones for particular classes of problems.

In my thinking there is nothing wrong with recipes. Their utility is demonstrated in cooking, where various disparate concurrent activities need to be orchestrated to produce a meal, often in a set amount of time. With increasing proficiency recipes then lose their significance.