Knowing how to study is something that is too often taken for granted in education. Yet, given a stable home environment, most difficulties that students have can be traced to ineffective fundamental study habits. Stellar uses the study technology developed by American educator L. Ron Hubbard. It is a proven method of study—a technique of how to study any subject successfully, and it is effective at all levels of education.

There are four areas of emphasis:

• Making sure each student has a personal purpose for learning a subject. Studying because you have to is an easy way to kill a child’s natural desire to learn. Studying because you want to and have a personal reason to makes it fun and develops a passion for learning that lasts a lifetime.
• Make sure each student fully understands all of the subject’s terminology. Trying to study past words that are not fully understood or incorrectly understood blocks a student’s comprehension and sets him up for failure. It can make a student feel stupid and make him want to give up. Fully clarifying the definitions of words can change a subject from impossible to easy in a very short time.
• Making sure each student can relate what he is studying to an application in the real world. Lack of application can make any subject seem boring and can make studying seem pointless and exasperating. That’s why we place so much emphasis on students actively demonstrating application at every step along the way in every subject.
• Making sure each student fully masters a step in learning before going on to the next step. Studying any subject involves climbing a series of gradient steps. The only way to succeed at any step is to master the steps that came before. Moving a student forward before he or she is ready is a guarantee of failure.

These four principles underlie everything we do at Stellar, no matter what subject is being taught. But there is one more factor that is vitally important:

Making sure each student develops logic and judgment to study intelligently and think effectively. Of all the subjects we teach, the subject of study itself is the most important because it unlocks the door to a lifelong education that extends far beyond graduation day. Your child will be seeking information all his or her life and will be bombarded with data from advertising, news media, entertainment, new technologies, social media, and thousands of other sources every day. Knowing how to sift through this bombardment to spot relative degrees of truth and to separate the important from the unimportant is vital to using information intelligently in life.