The Academic Approach®

One way that Academic Approach benefits from its partnership with The Economist is by using the magazine’s content to hone our students’ reading comprehension skills. Each week, we offer our students and tutors tips that can be used to make the most out of the magazine.

The exercises that correspond to this week’s issue—subtitled “The Great American Slowdown”—are as follows: Continue reading →

“We of this age have discovered a shorter and more prudent method to become scholars and wits without the fatigue of reading or thinking.” Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1704

Teaching students to think critically seems to be an educational goal that is as broadly demanded and as it is frequently unfulfilled. Generally speaking, all of the parties involved in the ongoing discussion of critical thinking agree that, when acquired, it enables students to thoughtfully weigh evidence, entertain both sides of an issue, advance an argument through substantiated claims, arrive at conclusions through deduction and inference, solve multi-step problems, and so on. Like reading, writing, and arithmetic, critical thinking is

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One way that Academic Approach benefits from its partnership with The Economist is by using the magazine’s content to hone our students’ reading comprehension skills. Each week, we offer our students and tutors tips that can be used to make the most out of the magazine.

The exercises that correspond to this week’s issue—subtitled “All Change?”—are as follows: Continue reading →

As March reaches its end, an already math-crazed nation is set to lose all reason. On the 14th of the month, geometry classes everywhere staged wild Π-Day celebrations. A day later, we were all reminded of the joy of reckoning dates by nones and ides, thanks to the year’s most famous specimen. So much excitement has made everyone mad.

Witness this recently fabricated exchange between two colleagues at, say, the water cooler: Continue reading →

The only thing that tops an octopus tripping the light fantastic across the ocean floor is—let’s face it—a shrimp on a treadmill. This physically fit shrimp not only inspired the Academic Approach staff to hit the gym, but it also caused us to ask whether all shrimp were in such excellent cardiovascular health? . . .Or did we mean all shrimps? Continue reading →

As an Academic Approach instructor and a mother of a daughter in law school, I’ve seen my fair share of learning styles and differences. And throughout my experience and research, one term has shed light on the brain functions associated with thinking and behavior—that term is executive function (EF). It is the group of thought processes which direct planning and organizing goal-directed actions. Discussing these functions has become increasingly popular in educational literature and in learning diagnoses. But what are these mysterious functions exactly? Are they the exclusive property of CEOs? Continue reading →

“I’m so bummed that I scored a 25 on the English ACT.” “I can’t believe my ACT Science score is so low!” “I really need a 29 on ACT Math. How can I ever get my 22 up to a 29? That seems impossible.”

Many a standardized testing conundrum could be resolved easily with some simple knowledge: the knowledge of the test’s scale, that is, how a student’s raw score gets scaled to a score on ACT’s 1 through 36 scale. At Academic Approach we live, sleep, eat, and breath test data and minutiae so that we can distill such byzantine knowledge into bite-sized digestible bits for our clients.

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When you walk past a sign that says “Protective Eyewear Required” you aren’t necessarily moved to comment on its author’s mastery of the English language. This is likely because you have not viewed its dastardly alternative: “100% Eye Protection Required”. . .
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One way that Academic Approach benefits from its partnership with The Economist is by using the magazine’s content to hone our students’ reading comprehension skills. Each week, we offer our students and tutors tips that can be used to make the most out of the magazine.

The exercises that correspond to this week’s issue—subtitled “The new colonialists”—are as follows: Continue reading →

At Academic Approach, we spend our days and nights studying standardized tests—their format, content, grading, scaling, etc.—so we can save you time and distill all this byzantine knowledge down into useful bits. In this post, I will take on ACT format and content.

In the document attached (act-format.pdf) we provide a detailed analysis of ACT format and content, but what’s the bottom line?

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