Middle school, high school, and college entrance exams ー as distressing as the news may sound to you, you can win the battle by using a weapon called preparation. The entrance exam itself is a fair and simple game. It is almost impossible not to pass the exam if you studied twice as hard as everyone else. In other words, the most difficult part of the entire application process isn’t receiving the acceptance letter, but about what you need to do to be fully prepared for battle. How then, you may wonder, can you complete the amount of work that needs to be done in order to be accepted to the most competitive institutions?

In order to answer this question, we, at Hiro Gakuin, practice the ”short term improvement” approach. Instead of making the students study for the purpose of bringing their grades up, we assist them to raise their grades so that they can spend their time preparing for the one exam that really counts.

It is said that the effort one puts into achieving a certain goal is NOT proportional to the strength of one’s own will. The main driving factor that pushes one to work hard is the amount of ”desire” one has towards that goal. It is the ”desire” that counts ー not how determined a person is or isn’t.

According to one psychologist, Bandura, the process of pursuing a goal involves two ”expectations.” First is the expectation to obtain the desirable outcome one feels is entitled to receive. To put it differently, it is the expectation attached to a certain action for it to produce a certain result. For instance, by flicking on the light switch, one believes without a doubt, that the light in the room will turn on. The second expectation is the expectation of efficacy. Efficacy, meaning, the driving force that helps one to make a continuing decision of taking necessary actions needed to achieve a goal. Going back to the example of the light switch, if one feels that there is a great chasm between the state one is in and the goal of turning the light on, the possibility of taking the action of flicking on the light becomes slim. Simply knowing that the action of turning the light on lights up the room, doesn’t necessarily drive a person to do it (Bandura, 1977).

The feeling of efficacy not only affects the decision making process of whether or not to take necessary actions, but also affects one’s durability or the ability to persevere. If the efficacy is high, in other words, if one feels that his actions bear fruit, one is more likely to endure and continue even under great difficulty and hardship. Likewise, if the student feels that the more amount of time he spends studying actually result in a better grade or a higher test score, the student will actually want to study, and will continue to do so even when he cannot always see immediate results. Then, the question is how do we build this feeling of efficacy in the students?

Bandura continues to mention that efficacy is build through ”successful executions.” Here, he means that by conditioning one to a repeated pattern of a certain action and a certain outcome, one will come to believe in one’s own abilities.

Applying this theory, we use the ”short term improvement” method. We believe that by helping students experience improvement in their academic work during a short period of time, they will be able to feel that hard work does pay off. By repeating a short cycle of work and evaluation over and over, in other words, through this repetition of ”successful execution,” the student is able to build their ”personal efficacy,” and eventually come to feel that each work done is one step closer to his or her goal. And this, in turn, helps the student to persevere in their work and lie out and even higher goal in the future.

Some may argue that it is far more important to get the basics down perfectly at first, and then to spend a lot of time slowly developing that knowledge by taking small steps at a time, building up to an evaluation over a long period of time. This may work for some, but for the majority, this method brings down the incentive to work hard. The important thing is to keep the cycle of expectation going, and to never let them stop wanting to turn on the light. The key to continuity lies in conditioning students to expect reward for their work.

In order to make this ”short term improvement” approach a reality, we offer the following: ”detailed and concrete scheduling by a counselor,” ”stress-free and enjoyable lessons,” and ”competent and well-experienced teachers.”

Another psychologist, Hoppe, says that the feeling of success and failure is not defined by a universal standard, but rather, it is defined by a personal one (1931). Even if the student’s grades were to go up a notch, it is up to that individual to perceive that as an ”accomplishment” or ”discouragement.” At Hiro Gakuin, we make sure that we spend enough time with each student in order to evaluate the standard and expectation each student has of themselves. It is only after we take this time, that we carefully plan out a detailed and structured study schedule.

Memorization is also a concern many students have when they are trying to study. One’s memory is said to only retain 58% of the information in 20 minutes. Therefore, most students try to compensate this loss by repeating the material. They construct a study plan that covers the same material as many times as they can, just so that they can place their information in long-term memory. Most of the time, this only makes them dislike the material even more. Instead of these repetitive lessons, we offer ”stress-free and enjoyable lessons.”

Our method of ”stress-free and enjoyable lesson” is simple; we provide the students with access to all of our teachers until the student is able to find one that they feel is fun. We do this for two reasons. According to Rosenberg and Hovland, if there is a positive emotion towards an object, this involuntarily makes them perceive the object as ”good,” which changes their behavior pattern in the direction that tries to obtain more of it (1960). If the student is fond of the time they spend with the teacher, this helps the student to feel positively about studying, causing them to want to study more. What began as just a fun time with the teacher will unconsciously help them perceive studying itself as fun. That is our first reason. In addition to this, researchers say that information coming from a favorable object is more likely to be obtained and understood more easily than information coming from an undesirable object (Chaiken 1979). If the student enjoys his or her time with the teachers, the material that they cover together will be easily obtained and understood, making studying easy and stress-free.

When one attains a new information, it is compared and contrasted with an already existing information in order for it to be understood and assimilated. This comparing and contrasting is highly essential in integrating a new information and is done through a framework called a ”schema.” This schema is personal in its nature, incorporating the new information through a person’s cultural, social, ideological, environmental, and even genetic perspective which differs for each person. This is why each student may draw out a slightly different conclusion out of a same lecture. If such were the case, it is important for the lecturer to make sure that the schema he is using is as close to the most common schema. But in a one to one classroom setting, the more important thing is for the teacher to be able to adjust his schema to meet the needs of the students’. A lecturer of a large audience may consider a successful lecture to be for the lecturer to speak through a schema that 99 out of a hundred students could relate to. However, in a one to one classroom setting, this would be a failure, because the one student whose schema was different from everyone else’s would be at a loss. A successful classroom time with a student in a one to one styled lecture is defined by the ability for the lecture to understand the schema of any student who may come through the door.

This is why, at Hiro Gakuin, we make sure that we take time to learn the specific schema of a student. We ask ourselves repeatedly, what style of learning and explanation comes through most naturally for this student? What area is the easiest for the student to learn, and what areas are more difficult, and why? Instead of teaching in a way that is easiest for the teacher, we make sure that the teachers are teaching in a way that is most easily learned by each student. Instead of teaching in a way that the majority could understand, we make sure that each and every student in the minority understands. We spend time getting to know each student; we make sure we learn his or her schema; we make sure we prepare a special learning plan for each student; we make sure each student is encouraged by being able to visualize their efficacy.