You're listening to the Parents of Hardworking Teens podcast, episode 141. How to stop research being such a massive time sap for your teen. I see so many students spending so many hours on research for assignments, inquiries, investigative reports. And I want to share with you three ways to make that research smarter and faster and how those two things go together to produce a better quality output, a better quality report or inquiry so they get a higher result and do it in half the time.

Hey, VIPs, how are you? I hope you and your teens are doing super well.

It is really starting to warm up here in Queensland this last week. We've had like a 33 degree day. I think we've got like 35 degrees here tomorrow as I record this. And even though I have definitely acclimatised since coming from the UK, I've been in Australia for over 15 years now, but this kind of heat in spring is still like a kind of nice novelty to me because I've got 29 years of grey and drizzle and cold and wind and rain to undo. So I guess that novelty will stay with me for a few more years yet. And I know, I know, I know that is not how the weather always is in England. I know it can be beautiful. I know I'm stereotyping, but I'll be honest, unfortunately, that is a lot of how I remember it. But the good thing is that it means I'm in an almost constant state of gratitude for the climate that I live with here. And that surely is a good thing. So I'm sticking with it.

Now, today we are going to talk research. Researching facts, information, sources, studies, journal articles and this is following on intentionally and smoothly from our previous episode, which was all about how to figure out the focus of an assignment. I know that assignments are not all research tasks, but assignments are usually where research shows up. And these can take many different forms like inquiries, investigations, research reports, depth studies, personal interest projects analytical or explorative studies. And I'm sure there's plenty more besides.

There's a lot of fun and fabulous names given to these things these days. So if I've missed one that I can add to that list, then do let me know. But basically, we're talking about assessment tasks where your teen has to go and do a load of Googling or journal searches or these days, probably asking AI to go find some of that information for them as well, because they need to find the info, the sources, the stats, the data, the case study examples about whatever topic it is that they are researching, that they're studying.

Now, perhaps it's to answer an inquiry question, or perhaps it's that they have to come up with their own inquiry question and then answer it. Maybe it's some sort of contention that they have to then go and investigate around and then respond to.

But whatever it is, they need to go and find the information, other people's research. It's like secondary research really for them. Data, stats, evidence to support whatever points it is that they are making. And the biggest issue that I see with this, no matter what form or whatever type of assignment task it is, is that research is taking up so much of students' time. And that's not necessarily a problem in itself, but it is if it's maybe not a topic that your teen is particularly interested in.

Maybe it's taking time away from other assignments or tasks or assessments they need to be working on. So there's like an opportunity cost. And maybe it's just taking time away from other things in life. Their other commitments, their sports, their music, their hobbies, their friends, just time to relax and chill out and recharge and basically, it's just skewing that life balance. And a lot of the time, that time that is being taken up by the research is because students are struggling to either find the information that they're after, and that's an issue in itself, which I will touch on and cover here on this episode.

It's also because of the opposite issue, which is that they struggle to really sift through or distill or make sense of all of the information they find if they find almost like too much of it. There's so many rabbit holes they could go down. They end up getting a bit overwhelmed or a bit swamped.

Now, let me give you the good news straight up. Both of those issues, either struggling to find the information thereafter or having too much information and taking so much time to get through it all, basically the idea that things are taking so much time, all of these issues are solved by the same strategies. So just like I've mentioned before with the study success formula, knowledge plus application equals success, having the skills of application and all that is involved in that, they make study both easier and faster.

Okay, so they make study easier and smoother and they produce a higher result. If any of you have ever seen the video from Tara and Kevin, I might put a link to it on the resources page for this episode. The resources are always at the website. So www.rocksolidstudy.com/study. I'll put a link to that. It's quite an old case study now, but it's just a great example of them saying, "Hey, look, we've got the best of both worlds. We've made Tara's study easier and smoother, and she does now have more time for things, and she has also gotten better results," which wasn't actually what they came for. They just wanted to make her life a little bit easier and speed up and take back some time from her study because she was already getting good results.

And the strategies and the skills meant that, yes, her life balance was a lot better, but also even those very, very good results were turned into excellent, great results. And I have to say, this episode has really been born out of some other examples of either consults and conversations or work that I have been doing with other students and their parents over the last few months. And one that was probably over a year ago now.

But I always remember speaking with them. It was one of my 10-week grade transformation program students and her mum. And they were describing the very common situation that I hear about a lot where the daughter, the student, had put in loads, and I am talking loads, of time and effort into a research project only to get a mediocre result.

And I can't remember the exact topic now, but it was something like the banana industry. It might've maybe been for geography or maybe it was like some kind of business studies, but I'm sure it was something like that. But the topic does not stick with me as much as the situation that this mum and her daughter found themselves in because they also shared with me the actual finished assignment. So I could see what was happening because the mum here was really struggling with trying to help her daughter sort of pull back on things. Which is why she'd enrolled in the 10-week grade transformation. Because her daughter was a student who just wanted to do her very best and could very easily get sucked into these big assignments and research tasks. And they would just sort of consume her. She would be worrying about them. She would be spending hours and hours and hours trying to find all of the information she could because she was trying to do everything she could to make sure she got a great mark.

So we ensured through the 10-week program that that effort and time was being channeled into the right things and that those things, those areas of focus would then turn into the grades and results that she was after and was capable of. But did that in a way that required less time, less late nights spent studying and a way better life balance. And holy moly, that project, when they sent it me through.

There was so much information. Believe me, it was huge, scarily huge. It's probably like, I will say the worst example I've seen of this. And I know that sounds really harsh to say worst. I don't mean that in a really negative way here about the student or their work. I'm saying worst in the perspective of return on effort ratio, because I could see how many days, hours, weeks had been put into this finished piece. There was so much information here.

I really kind of wish that it had a word or page limit on the task because it would have maybe have gone some way to have prevented all that wasted time and effort. But it was a year nine assessment. Very often they don't have those sorts of limits like the senior assignments do where they have word limits or page limits or are done under time limits. And I don't think any teacher would have thought a student would go as far as this student did.

And I can tell you that if the teacher is anything like me, they would have been absolutely scouring that project to find any evidence of the marking criteria that they possibly could. Because this student ended up, this project ended up with a C minus.

Now, what I mean is they're writing about the topic as opposed to responding to what the task was asking them to do, the command, the purpose of that task.

Now, if you haven't heard me talk about this before, or you could use a refresher, then definitely go check out episode 114. It's literally called Don't Write About, Respond To. I'll put a link to it in the show notes and on the resources page, because this is where I give you detailed breakdowns and explanations of how questions are worded and why it's so important that your teen understands what those words require in relation to what the purpose of that assignment is. It's a super tactical episode and it's really critical that your teen understands and that you, if you're supporting them, understand what's really going on with these kinds of things.

Because my aim here is to not just even out that return versus effort relationship, but actually to invert it, to maximize the return to effort ratio. And it is definitely possible to do that. It's totally possible because like I said earlier, there are techniques and tactics and strategies that create both a faster, smarter research process and produce a higher quality project or assignment, a higher grade, a better result at the same time. And I've been honing and refining these recently because I've had a couple of different students that I've worked with, one in year 10 and one in year 12, who I've been working with in one-to-one coaching sessions lately. This is an option for students who are in my coaching groups.

And so over the past month or two, I've been able to put some of these strategies into action and we've been using them, refining them, honing them, developing them. So I want to share with you here today what some of those strategies and actions are and I'm actually gonna be delivering them in detail with the how-to, the actual steps, the actual systems, not just what they are to all of my group coaching and other one-to-one students in a workshop. It's gonna be on the 2nd of November. It's the Smarter, Faster Research Workshop - How to get better information in half the time and actually understand what you find. And what I've decided is to make tickets available for any other students who would also like to attend. And because I'm going to be running this workshop anyway, I'm making tickets really low priced.

They're just $70. And that includes not just the live workshop where your teen can come and work with me, but also the recording of that workshop so they can refer back to it at any time. And I have included three additional bonuses of trainings, resources, and a personal accelerator call with me. So these all perfectly complement the workshop and mean that your teen can really optimize everything in it for themselves and their subjects and their assignments personally.

So here are the three skill sets that are going to make research smarter and faster for your teen in any assignment or inquiry task or research investigation.

Okay, the first one is assignment dissection.

This is where we figure out the true focus of the assignment, of the inquiry, of the investigation, because it is rarely what it looks like on the surface. So it's really important to determine what that is before your teen embarks on any kind of research about the topic. We wanna know what that assignment really requires of them. We wanna know what's gonna get the marks and what isn't going to get the marks.

Think back to that banana industry investigation. There was so much information that was completely accurate, correct, detailed. It just was not required in that level of detail and to that extent in that task. And the parts that were required, the focus area, just wasn't given attention by that student.

Now, there are two things that need to happen in order to do this dissection. First of all, we need to dissect the actual task instructions, but we also need to dissect the marking criteria or the success criteria or the mark scheme, whatever it is that's been provided that your team needs to be working with. This is where I see a lot of students fall down is they don't do enough interrogation of that marking criteria Now, one of the bonuses that I'm including with the Smarter Faster Research Workshop is a video of me breaking down a real life assignment task where I'm explaining each and every part of the dissection and doing it in a skill based way so that your teen can apply it to any topic, any subject that they are studying.

This first dissection skill set is what cuts research time from three hours to 30 minutes or three days to three hours, depending on how big this task is and how much time your teen is taking. It's an essential step that stops them from doing more work than they need to and makes their research way more effective and efficient from the outset.

Now, the second thing that will make your teen's research smarter and faster is to plan their research strategically. So many students just start researching. They start looking for information. They start trying to find data. They start trying to find reports or articles. And they don't really know what they are trying to find. They're sort of searching for needles in haystacks. They're sort of like, if I just keep looking, I'll find some useful stuff.

This is not how we want to go about it. They can, but that's where it takes so long. We want to have much more focused, directed research. And the way to do that is to reverse engineer the whole assignment. This is what gets your teen to ultimate efficiency in their research. And this is the double whammy part, gets them those top end results, has them meeting more of those top criteria.

Your teen needs to figure out and determine exactly what outcomes they need to produce, what evidence they need to provide, and exactly how to hit the top criteria on those mark schemes. Without being clear on not just what those things are, but how to do them and what's required in the research that they're going to do in order to meet those things and produce those things, then they are going to be searching around a little bit aimlessly and this is where, especially in the early stages of an assignment, so much time gets wasted. So we wanna prevent this and this is a critical step to doing that.

Now, the third skillset required for smarter, faster research is to have fast, high quality completion skills. And what I mean by that is that they have proper search skills.

They are using Google super effectively. They can use certain operations like quote marks for having exact phrases, or they can use the minus sign to exclude certain words. They can use filters. They can search within specific websites. They know how to expand or narrow their search based on the results that they then get, or even something as simple as using Google Scholar as opposed to the standard Google search engine.

And then we have AI. I see so many students just typing in or even just copy pasting in the whole of the task instructions into AI and hoping that it's going to give them the information, the sources, the references that they need.

And whilst some of the results that will get churned out are going to be useful, they are certainly not going to have the quality or sophistication that are going to help your teen hit the top criteria. And what it actually means is that they probably end up spending more time than they need to. It actually takes more time in the long run sort of trying to build it from there. It's almost like they've got some pretty terrible foundations and they're trying to build on top of those foundations. And what I want is for them to have very strong, very specific, very tailored foundations  for the specific wording of their task and of their marking criteria. And that requires them to use AI in a much more refined and sophisticated way.

I will share with students in the workshop exactly how to do that. So they are still getting and still doing the work and the learning associated with the task. And they really are using AI as a tool rather than a do this for me type of machine that so many students seem to treat it as.

And when your teen can put those three skill sets together, the assignment dissection, the strategic reverse engineered research planning, and then the fast high quality completion and execution, that's when they'll be able to complete a research assignment with sophistication, with efficiency, with confidence, and do it independently and with a super successful outcome at the end.

I really want to help students stop guessing their way through research and spreading this huge wide net that then means they have to sift and filter through so much information and have them take up so much of their time doing it to instead have them use proven steps, strategies, systems so they can complete whatever task it is in a really timely and really high quality way and have them really understand what they're doing as they go as well. They're not just sort of stabbing around in the dark. I see this happening so much. I want students to be really intentional, be really clear, be really focused and directed on exactly what they're doing, what they are trying to find, why they are trying to find it and how they are going to put all of that together in a really coherent and structured way.

So if you would like your teen to have this training, have these three skillsets in their toolkit, ready to use for whatever research they have thrown at them, then you can go to www.gradetransformation.com/researchworkshop.

They will get full access to the workshop, they'll get all three bonuses. And if you get in before the 2nd of November, they'll be able to come and join us live. And if it's after the 2nd of November, I will have the full workshop available as a recording and still including the three bonuses as well.

So I hope that this helps save your teen many, many, many, hours of research and has them create a higher quality assignment and therefore maximizes that return on effort ratio.

I'd love to see them at the workshop and I'll see you back here on our next episode.

Take care. Bye for now.