Study skills private tutoring at lycée: what is really worked on?

Study skills tutoring at lycée (upper secondary school) should not come down to learning how to make revision sheets or draw up a nice-looking schedule.

Clarify the goal before choosing study skills tutoring

The first question is not “which method should be learnt?”, but “where does the blockage really lie?”. Two lycée students can say exactly the same thing (“I work a lot but my marks don’t follow”) while their needs are very different.

What you observe	Hypothesis to check	Priority work
Homework is often done at the last minute	Shaky planning or poor estimation of time	Break tasks down, set priorities, plan realistic slots
The lesson is reread several times but quickly forgotten	Revision that is too passive	Self-testing, active recall, spaced revision
The student knows the lesson but cannot get started on an exercise or an essay	Difficulty recognising the task and choosing a procedure	Reading instructions, steps of reasoning, subject-specific method
The same mistakes come back from one test to the next	Little analysis after correction	Categorise mistakes and decide on a corrective action
The blockage appears mainly in one specific subject	Possible subject-specific gap	First check knowledge and skills in that subject

This distinction avoids a common mistake: calling everything that does not work a “lack of method”. A student can be perfectly organised and still not understand functions in maths, how to build a commentary in French or a mechanism in economics. In that case, subject-specific support is often more relevant than general study skills tutoring.

Conversely, when the same difficulties appear in several subjects (work done late, revision by rereading only, instructions poorly analysed, no review of mistakes), a methodological need becomes more plausible.

When is study skills tutoring at lycée useful?

It is particularly worthwhile when the student has part of the necessary knowledge but does not yet know how to manage their work effectively. This might be a lycée student who piles up tasks without any order of priority, who spends a lot of time “working” without checking what they can actually recall, or who changes method before every test.

Research on metacognition provides a useful framework for understanding what we are trying to develop. The Education Endowment Foundation distinguishes in particular three operations: planning your learning, monitoring what happens during the work, then evaluating the result to adjust the strategy. It also stresses that these approaches benefit from being taught explicitly and anchored in real subject content.

This is an important point for private tutoring: study skills should not be treated as a set of abstract tips. Learning to plan an essay, check a line of reasoning in maths or prepare for a history test means working on real school tasks. The tutor can then help the student identify what can be transferred from one subject to another.

Study skills tutoring is less suitable, on the other hand, if the main difficulty is a lasting failure to understand the lesson, a significant lack of prerequisites in a subject or very targeted preparation for a subject exam. In those situations, it can complement subject support, but it must not hide the main need.

Which criteria should you compare to choose the right tutor?

The right tutor is not the one with the longest list of memorisation techniques. They must be able to link an observable difficulty to a strategy that can be tested, then check whether that strategy genuinely improves the student’s work.

• A concrete diagnosis: they ask how the student works today, look at their marked work, instructions, planner or materials, and do not jump straight to a standard method.
• Work on real tasks: the week’s schedule, a chapter to learn, an exercise to prepare, a marked assignment, an oral presentation to structure.
• Explicit strategies: the student must understand what to do, when to do it and why.
• A goal of independence: the tutor gradually reduces the help instead of making the student dependent on permanent support. This is a central issue for a strong student who wants to go deeper without over-training.
• Observable criteria for progress: homework started earlier, revision spread out, mistakes better identified, the ability to explain their method without help.

Before choosing, one simple question often makes it possible to tell structured support from generic talk: “What would you do during the first two sessions to understand the problem and check that your method works?” The answer should talk about observation, trial, adjustment and concrete school situations.

On NOEO, families can browse tutors and exchange messages with them before booking a session. The point is not to find a profile that necessarily carries the label “study skills”, but a tutor able to diagnose the real need and work explicitly on the student’s habits.

A concrete example: a study skills tutor or a subject tutor?

Imagine a student in Première (the second year of lycée) who works every evening but prepares for her tests mainly the night before. She rereads her chapters, highlights a lot, then realises during the test that she recognises the lesson without being able to recall it precisely. In maths, she also has a few technical difficulties, but the same revision problem appears in history and in SVT (Life and Earth Sciences).

The wrong diagnosis would be: “she doesn’t work enough”. The amount of work is already there. Instead, two issues need to be distinguished:

• a cross-subject problem with preparing for assessments: timetable, active recall, spaced revision, checking what has really been memorised;
• a possible subject-specific need in maths, to be dealt with separately if certain concepts are not understood.

In this case, study skills support can make sense, provided it starts from the upcoming tests and the lesson materials. The review by Dunlosky and his co-authors published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest ranked practice testing and distributed practice among the techniques with high overall utility, while simple rereading was among the techniques rated as less useful.

This research does not prove that study skills tutoring, in itself, improves school results. Rather, it helps choose what the student should learn to do between sessions: test themselves, space out their reviews and check what they really know.

How often should sessions take place?

There is no universal frequency. The right pace depends on the goal, the student’s current level of independence and the number of situations that need to be observed between two sessions.

As a practical benchmark, one session a week at the start can make sense when a working week needs to be put back in order, several assessments need preparing and changes need to be observed quickly. But the session is only worthwhile if the student can apply the method between appointments. A high frequency without practice risks simply adding another constraint to their timetable.

Sessions can then be spaced out once the student can prepare their own schedule, choose a revision strategy, analyse their mistakes and ask for help more precisely. Conversely, a one-off need can justify a few closely spaced sessions around a transition (starting Seconde, the change of pace in Première, preparing for an assessment period) without automatically setting up long-term support.

The ministère de l’Éducation nationale (the French Ministry of Education) points out that support at lycée takes students’ needs into account and can aim at remedial help as well as deepening knowledge or guidance on future choices. For private tutoring, the most useful logic remains the same: start from the need observed rather than imposing the same format on everyone.

Follow-up between sessions matters as much as the session itself

A method is only acquired when it survives the tutor’s absence. Between two sessions, the student therefore needs an action precise enough to be checked: prepare three revision slots, turn a chapter into questions, redo an exercise without looking at the correction, or analyse the mistakes in a piece of marked work.

Follow-up can stay very simple. For each goal, you can note:

1. what the student is going to try;
2. on which real task;
3. when;
4. how they will know whether it worked better.

On NOEO, this continuity can draw on the journey before, during and after the session. The session takes place in NOEO Live; the student then finds their documents, the replay of the session when it has been recorded (available for 3 months) and the session report sent by the tutor. They can also create a Learn pack from an eligible session to get a study sheet, flashcards and a quiz. The pack is not generated automatically: creating it is up to the student.

The most important thing is not to accumulate tools, but to keep a usable record of the strategy tested and of what needs adjusting. The journey is described in detail on the How does NOEO work? page.

If your question is more about the format of online academic support as a whole (choosing a tutor, how sessions run, advantages and limits), the complete guide to online private tutoring covers that decision more broadly.

Mistakes to avoid

Turning study skills into a collection of tools. An app, Cornell notes or a mind map is not a method in itself. You need to start from a specific problem and check that the tool solves it.

Confusing visible work with real learning. A very neat exercise book, colourful revision sheets or hours spent rereading can give an impression of seriousness without enabling the student to recall the information or use it.

Changing systems too quickly. A strategy needs to be tested on several comparable tasks before being abandoned. Otherwise, the student spends more time organising their organisation than learning.

Planning everything for the lycée student. The aim is to gradually hand decisions back to the student: estimating a workload, choosing a priority, checking their level of mastery. A perfect schedule built by the adult but never taken on by the student does not solve the problem.

Waiting only for a higher mark. Marks remain important, but they also depend on the level of the test, the subject and one-off factors. At first, indicators closer to the method are often more useful: does the student start earlier? can they test themselves without notes? do they spot their mistakes? can they explain what they will do differently next time?