When a teen lacks confidence in studying for their exams, a "leadership nudge" from a supportive parent becomes essential, says parenting coach Joseph Driessen.

When a teen lacks confidence in studying for their exams, a "leadership nudge" from a supportive parent becomes essential, says parenting coach Joseph Driessen.

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Preparing for exams is quite different to absorbing knowledge at school on a day-to-day basis, he tells Kathryn Ryan.

The first question to ask a teen with exams on the way is how they feel about them, he says.

If you get a nondescript answer ask a "more interesting" question about their potential results: "What mark do you think you could actually get if you could get the best mark possible from working really hard?"

Going through the subjects individually and asking whether they reckon they could get Excellence, Merit or Achieved in each one is a good way to bring a young person's perceptions of their own abilities to the surface, Driessen says.

"The very fact that you're interested and sitting down talking, kind of saying 'tell us what do you think you could get?' gets that feeling out in the open.

"It's surprising how accurate children actually are in their assessment of where they're at because they've been sitting and working for three full years. They've realised that some of their neighbours find it easy to get really great marks, other neighbours are really struggling."

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The next question to ask is, Driessen says, how much study time the teen thinks it will take to achieve the academic result they're going for.

To do this, you can look at the texts and resources together to see what they really need to know from each - i.e. all 12 chapters of such-and-such a textbook or just five of them.

Then you need to work out when are they going to actually do the study, he says.

If they do half an hour of homework every night normally, ahead of exams you could suggest this goes up to an hour and a half, including an hour for revision. If that sounds like a lot, it could be split up into smaller bits - half an hour before dinner, half an hour after dinner and half an hour before bed or early in the morning.

"Just relax and talk it through and say, well, let's, let's see if we can make a plan on how to do that. Some kids are really great, they just write a little masterplan of when they're going to do it or when they're going to start."…

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