Brain First Learning for an AI World

COLLEGE & CAREER

Executive Function & Study Skills for College Students

Students arrive on your campus having survived K–12 without ever being taught how to learn. That gap is systemic, it is invisible, and it is yours to close — because no one else is left.

The Hot Potato Line: elementary, middle, and high school each assume the next stop will teach students how to learn. College is the last stop — no next teacher before the workplace.

Where This Began

Nobody taught me how to learn. So I went looking.

I struggled all the way through K–12, quietly convinced I was stupid. I paddled hard — harder than almost anyone around me — and my grades never reflected the effort. So when it came time for college, I wasn’t excited. I was terrified.

Then a voice in my soul said, “There’s got to be a better way…”

So I started mining for one. Most of the “skills” and “strategies” I found were useless — too complicated to remember, or so much work they defeated their own purpose. But a few made intuitive, logical sense. They worked with my brain instead of adding to its load.

And everything flipped. I went from mediocre grades in high school to straight As in college. I graduated summa cum laude. And here is the part that still stops people: those As were far, far easier than the mediocrity of my K–12 years.

Then came the anger.

I realized I could have been using these skills since fifth grade. Thirteen years of school, and every teacher assumed someone else had covered it. Elementary passed it to middle school. Middle school passed it to high school. High school passed it to… no one. I had to find these skills myself, by accident, at the very last stop.

That’s not a story about negligent teachers. It’s a story about The System — a system where learning skills are everyone’s assumption and no one’s assignment. I couldn’t change my own past. But I could change the future for other students. That is the entire reason SOAR® exists — and it has been my work as a learning specialist for twenty-five years since.

The hot potato stops at college. You are the last stop. After you, there is no “next teacher” to pass it to — only a workplace that assumes the skills are already there.

The Paradox

If these skills are so powerful, why isn’t everyone teaching them?

It’s a fair question. It’s the question — and the honest answer is the paradox at the center of this work.

These skills are simple. That is precisely why The System never taught them. Nothing this foundational ever got a department, a dedicated course, or a teacher whose job it was. Reading has a department. Math has a department. Learning itself — planning, prioritizing, managing time and attention, monitoring your own comprehension — belongs to no one. So it was taught by no one.

You see the result on your campus every day:

  • Students who can’t turn a syllabus into a plan
  • Students discovering an exam exists the week (sometimes day) it happens
  • Many who had IEPs, 504 plans, and structured support all the way through K–12 — and now sit in your office unsure what to ask for, because no one transferred the skills, only the accommodations

They are not unmotivated. They are not lacking intelligence. They are simply operating reactively because no one ever taught them to operate proactively — and no one can survive college in a purely reactive state.

This is the systemic gap. It is invisible on a transcript. It is enormous in a retention report.

The Learning Success Pyramid

The Learning Success Pyramid: the layers The System skipped

THE LEARNING SUCCESS PYRAMID

Confidence → executive function → learning.

Traditionally, The System simply throws content at students from the top down — it never builds learning skills from the bottom up. Learning isn’t something we teach; it’s the natural by-product of executive function skills.

The SOAR Learning Success Pyramid: confidence at the base, executive function in the middle, learning at the top

Learning is built in three layers: confidence at the base, executive function in the middle, learning at the top. Traditional education skips the bottom two and throws information at the top — then measures students on how well the information stuck.

For thirteen years, your incoming students were measured at the top of the pyramid while the foundation underneath them was never built. The students who succeeded did so because they intuited the bottom layers on their own, or someone at home supplied them. The students struggling in your office are not missing ability…

They are missing infrastructure. This is why tutoring alone keeps disappointing everyone. Subject tutoring patches the top layer — this week’s chemistry, this paper’s thesis. The leak reseals; the foundation is still missing; the student is back next month with a new subject and the same problem.

When we teach the middle layer — executive function — the whole structure holds: the planning, prioritizing, self-management, and self-monitoring skills that have always been called “study skills.” Confidence rises because competence is real. Learning accelerates because it finally has something to stand on.

We don’t have to rebuild students. We have to finish the foundation The System left incomplete.

The Evidence

This is the most documented — and most overlooked — lever in college retention

The research here is not new, thin, or ambiguous. It is decades deep — and it points one direction.

  • A college study-skills course measurably changed who stayed and who graduated. At The Ohio State University, researchers tracked 351 students who took a for-credit learning-and-motivation-strategies course against 351 matched peers over seven years. Struggling students who took the course were roughly 45% more likely to graduate. Average-ability students were six times more likely to return for their second year.1 This is independent corroboration from a major research university — not a SOAR study — and it is exactly the mechanism this page describes: teach the skills, and students stop drowning.
  • Across 70 studies and more than 2,400 secondary students, explicit study-skills and strategy instruction produced a large average effect for the category.2 The method works at scale, across content areas, and most powerfully when skills are taught explicitly — with guided practice and feedback — rather than assumed.
  • The same skills are what employers have been demanding for decades. The SOAR curriculum aligns with 100% of the 40 career-readiness behaviors in the NACE sample framework3 — communication, problem-solving, self-management, adaptability. The skills that close your retention gap are the same skills that make your graduates employable. One intervention. Both outcomes.
  • And it is already working at the postsecondary level — unsolicited. One of the nation’s top pharmacology graduate programs adopted SOAR on its own initiative, knowing the original curriculum was designed for grades 6–12, because the strategies stood on their own merit. Their students demanded it — because for the first time, they were being taught how to learn. (NOTE: That was our second edition. The third edition was built with adult learners squarely in view.)

SOAR is now in use in 5,100+ schools across 53 countries, twenty years into adoption.

A Fair Question

“How will my college students receive this?”

If you’re picturing a workbook with cartoon backpacks, the concern is reasonable. Plenty of “study skills” material was written for fourteen-year-olds, and college students can smell it instantly.

SOAR was built differently, on purpose:

  • The writing is professional-grade. SOAR is written at the readability of major newsrooms — the same deliberate clarity The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal use, because clarity is a feature of serious writing, not a concession. Nothing about it is dumbed down. It is cleared up.
  • Students are addressed as professional peers. That has been the standing rule across every edition: we speak to students as capable adults, regardless of age, because that is what they are becoming and how they deserve to be treated. The voice that respects a sixth grader does not patronize a twenty-year-old — it lands even better.
  • The content was built to hold up in a workplace. When we present these strategies live, parents in the audience routinely ask for the program for their own offices. The pharmacology graduate students who demanded it were among the most academically elite learners in the country. The material has been received — eagerly — at every level from middle school to graduate school to the workplace.

And underneath all of it: every student, at every age, is fascinated to learn how their own brain works. That is the through-line of SOAR. Not tips. Not tricks. The mechanics of their own mind, made visible and usable. Relevance that deep — to the course they’re taking now, the career ahead of them, and the brain they will use every day of their lives — is what genuine engagement looks like.

Human Skills for an AI World

AI didn’t create the learning gap. It pulled back the curtain on it.

BEHIND THE FINISHED ASSIGNMENT

The output was always standing in for the thinking.

When the output can be generated in seconds, what remains to measure — and to teach — is the thinking that produced it.

A theater curtain holding graded assignments is pulled back, revealing the executive function thinking circuit behind them: plan, question, organize, prioritize, connect

Your students are asking whether there will be a job waiting for them. Your institution is asking harder questions than that. Both anxieties trace to the same root.

For decades, education measured outputs — tests, essays, projects — and trusted that outputs reflected learning. AI just ended that arrangement. When a machine can generate the output in seconds, the output no longer proves anything about the student. What’s left to measure, and to teach, is the thing the output was always standing in for: the thinking process itself.

Here’s the part that works in your favor. The thinking process is exactly what study skills and executive function instruction has always taught:

  • How to plan an approach
  • How to evaluate sources — and your own comprehension
  • How to direct a tool instead of being replaced by one, because AI generates the output, but a human still has to direct it, judge it, and own it

In an AI world, comprehension matters more — not less. The institutions that thrive in the next decade will be the ones that can demonstrate they build thinkers, not output-producers. The skills AI can’t replace — communication, judgment, adaptability, learning how to learn — have topped employer demand lists for decades. That demand didn’t appear with AI. AI simply made it impossible to ignore.

This is what makes learning skills load-bearing for a college right now. They are not student-support garnish. They are the clearest answer your institution has to the relevance question every prospective family is now asking.

Fitting Your Campus

Flexible implementation: built for however support happens on your campus

Some campuses run a dedicated student-success course. Others deliver support through advising, a learning center, or tutoring. SOAR works in both structures — by design:

  • Running a dedicated course? Teach the curriculum in sequence and it unfolds as a designed progression — each skill nesting into the next, like Russian dolls, from foundational self-management through advanced learning strategies. A full course arc, ready to deliver, with the structure already engineered.
  • Running an advising office, learning center, or tutoring operation? Every lesson is also built to stand alone. A student who can’t manage a syllabus gets the planning lesson — today, in one session, prescriptively. No prerequisites, no “complete modules 1–4 first.” Your staff matches the lesson to the student in front of them.

Same curriculum. Both delivery models. The structure serves your program; your program doesn’t bend to the structure.

Each lesson follows the same three-part build:

  • An investigation that surfaces what students currently do
  • New strategies connected to how the brain actually works
  • Applied practice on the student’s own real coursework — not worksheets about hypothetical assignments

Sessions are short, concrete, and immediately usable, which is exactly what limited contact time requires.

And it meets the standards you’re accountable for — alignments, including the NACE career-readiness framework, documented and available on our alignments page.

The Last Stop

The hot potato stops with you

Every institution before yours assumed someone else would (or should) teach students how to learn. Elementary assumed middle school. Middle school was always upset elementary didn’t. High school assumed it was too late, or not their job, or already done.

It wasn’t done. And now those students are on your campus — bright, capable, and operating without the one set of skills everything else depends on.

You are the last educational stop before the workplace. This is the single highest-leverage position in a student’s academic life. The student who learns these skills with you doesn’t get a better semester. They get a different trajectory — through your institution, into a career, across a lifetime of learning that no longer feels like drowning.

I know exactly what that turn feels like. I had to find these skills by accident, at the very last stop. Your students can learn them on purpose.

The gap on your campus is real, but it is not mysterious, and it is not hard to close. The skills are teachable. The method is proven. The students are ready — more ready than anyone gives them credit for.

We just have to make the invisible, visible!

Susan Kruger Winter, M.Ed., founder of SOAR Learning

About the Author

Susan Kruger Winter, M.Ed.

Susan is a K–12 learning specialist with 25+ years of experience, and a certified K–12 ELA educator. She is the creator of SOAR, the executive function curriculum taught in 5,100+ schools across 53 countries.

More about Susan About SOAR

Common Questions

FAQs from college teams

How do you teach college students how to learn?

Through explicit instruction in executive function and study skills: planning, prioritizing, managing time and attention, and monitoring comprehension. SOAR teaches these as short, logical strategies that support each other; students practice them immediately, on their own coursework, not hypothetical worksheets.

Do study skills courses improve college student retention?

Yes. In an Ohio State University study tracking 702 matched students over seven years, struggling first-year students who took a for-credit learning-and-motivation-strategies course were roughly 45% more likely to graduate, and average-ability students were six times more likely to return for their second year. See the full citation in Research Sources.

Does SOAR align with NACE career-readiness competencies?

The SOAR curriculum aligns with 100% of the 40 career-readiness behaviors in the NACE sample framework, including communication, problem-solving, self-management, and adaptability. NACE does not endorse or certify curricula. Details are on our alignments page.

Is SOAR written for college-level students?

Yes. SOAR is written at professional-grade readability and addresses students as capable adults. It has been adopted from middle school through graduate school, including by one of the nation’s top pharmacology graduate programs.

How does SOAR fit an advising office or learning center?

Every SOAR lesson stands alone: staff can match a single lesson to the student in front of them in one session, with no prerequisites. The same curriculum also runs as a sequenced, full-arc student-success course.

Start with the single most powerful lesson for college students — free. The demo includes our complete lesson on how to read a textbook — and any nonfiction. Even if you do nothing else today, review that one lesson, and you’ll walk away with something significant to share with your students this week.

See a Demo

Click above to: see the software in action, get a digital review copy of the student book, and start a free 14-day trial — no credit card needed.

More for Educators

Start Here·What Is SOAR?·Why SOAR Works·Executive Function·RTI/MTSS·Solutions by Focus·Pricing & Options

Research Sources

1 Tuckman, B. W., & Kennedy, G. J. (2011). Teaching learning strategies to increase success of first-term college students. The Journal of Experimental Education, 79(4), 478–504. The Ohio State University; 351 course participants matched against 351 peers over seven years. Independent corroboration of explicit learning-skills instruction; not a study of the SOAR curriculum. ↩

2 Scruggs, T. E., Mastropieri, M. A., Berkeley, S., & Graetz, J. E. (2010). Do special education interventions improve learning of secondary content? A meta-analysis. Remedial and Special Education, 31(6), 437–449. ↩

3 SOAR Curriculum × NACE 2026 crosswalk: alignment with 100% of the 40 career-readiness sample behaviors. NACE does not endorse or certify curricula. ↩