My daughter is a junior in high school, which means our family is deep in the college search with campus visits, SAT nerves, Common App deadlines, financial considerations, the best academic “fit,” the whole thing. I’ve spent years researching how college learning actually works, and I can tell you this: knowing the research doesn’t make the process any less nerve-wracking, but it has changed what I’m planning to ask her once she gets there.
Over the past several years, my colleagues and I followed two cohorts of twenty college students through their undergraduate experiences at two different institutions, interviewing them repeatedly about what they were learning and how. Some of that research is the backbone of our new book, Getting Learning Right: The Promise of Higher Education (The MIT Press, August 2026); much of that research informs how I approach the students in my own classes.
Students who get the most from college reflect on how their experiences fit together
One of the things both research and teaching experience have taught me—something I wish more parents knew—is that the question “How are your grades?” is just about the least useful thing you can ask. It’s not that grades don’t matter the way they did in high school (sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t), but grades don’t always capture what might be more important later in life.
Moreover, learning in college doesn’t accumulate neatly, course by course, until a degree’s
worth of knowledge is stacked up and ready to use. Instead, it unfolds unevenly—in moments of friction, surprise, and connection—often between experiences rather than during them. The students who got the most out of college were the ones who actively reflected on how their experiences fit together. That reflection doesn’t always naturally happen, but it can happen during conversations.
Questions parents can ask to help students “connect” experiences
That’s where you come in. One of the central findings in learning research is that knowledge doesn’t transfer automatically from one context to another. A student who spends a semester in a required theater course won’t necessarily think to draw on what they learned about presence and audience when they’re giving their first big work presentation unless something, or someone, prompts them to make that connection. Researchers call this “activating prior knowledge,” and it turns out that one of the most powerful ways to support it is through conversation.
You don’t need to know anything about your student’s coursework to ask the questions that matter. In fact, some of the best questions come from a place of genuine curiosity rather than expertise.
Instead of “How are your grades?” try some of these questions
What surprised you this semester?
Surprise is often a signal that learning is happening because something didn’t match an expectation, which is exactly when the brain starts revising its model of the world.
How does what you’re studying connect to something you cared about before college?
Students thrive when they can tie new learning to existing interests and experiences. Your question can be the nudge that helps them see the thread.
What did you expect from that class (or internship, or project), and how was it different?
The gap between expectation and reality is rich learning territory. Helping students name and examine that gap is one of the most useful things a thinking partner can do.
What do you think you’re getting better at? Not just in a subject—as a person, as a thinker.
This question invites students to step back and see themselves as learners with a developing arc rather than just task-completers moving from assignment to assignment.
If you had to explain what you’ve learned this year to someone who didn’t go to college, what would you say?
This one is harder than it sounds, and that’s the point. The act of translating learning into plain language is itself a form of learning: it forces students to figure out what they actually understand.
Ask where they’ve experienced “friction”
Don’t be afraid to ask about disconnections, too. When your student says something like, “I can’t believe I have to take this random science class when I want to major in accounting,” the tempting responses are to reassure (“just get through it”) or troubleshoot (“maybe you should talk to your advisor”). But the more useful move is to get curious: What feels like the disconnect, as you see it? I
In our research, students who experienced friction—a class that seemed irrelevant,
a reading that didn’t fit—often made some of their most significant learning from those
moments. The irritation or confusion turned out to be the beginning of a student figuring out what they actually valued, how they actually thought, what they actually wanted. A parent who responds to frustration with a question rather than a fix is helping their student do exactly that work.
Ask why they chose to go to college
It also helps to know what your student is there for. When we asked twenty college students from Northeastern University why they chose to go to college, fewer than half mentioned jobs or careers as their primary or only reason. The list of what they also wanted included: to learn for its own sake, to grow and become more independent, to meet people from different places, to figure out who they are, to make a difference in the world.
This matters because the conversations that help students thrive are the ones that take their full range of motivations seriously. A student who’s majoring in something you can’t quite picture them doing may be making more progress than you think if they’re doing what the students in our study did: treating every experience as something to be examined, tested, and woven into a larger story about who they’re becoming whether that’s running their own business or heading for graduate school.
One student we followed, navigating a double major that straddled social science and natural science, described his approach this way: “I find the divide interesting. I find it refreshing to go back and forth.” He wasn’t waiting for college to be obviously relevant. He was actively making it relevant by asking what each experience told him about what he wanted, what he was good at, and where he wanted to go next.
That’s the disposition you want to encourage. And a good conversation—one that asks real questions and listens to real answers—goes a long way toward building it. Plus, all it will cost is time.
More Great Reading:
Your Teen Got Into College, Are They Prepared for the Hard Part?
