Mapping the Puzzle by Kaleena

Mapping the Puzzle by Kaleena - September 2026 Scholarship Essay

I spent years doing exactly what I was told: reading the chapter, making annotations, reviewing my notes. I could do all of those things and still reach the end of a page unable to explain what I'd just read. After being diagnosed with both ADHD and autism, I started to understand why so many study methods had never worked well for me. My ADHD affects attention, working memory, task initiation, and the ability to sustain focus on things that don't immediately capture my interest. My autistic processing style means I usually need to understand the structure or pattern before the smaller details feel like they belong anywhere. The learning strategy that's had the greatest impact on my academic success has been turning information into structured visual systems that let me see how the pieces fit together.

The strategies that have helped me most didn't come from study skills workshops or academic tutoring. They came from my own classroom. As an ASD teacher, I regularly used graphic organizers, structured task analysis, and visual systems to make expectations and information more accessible. Telling a student to remember, focus, or get organized isn't as useful as creating a system that makes things visible and reduces the cognitive load. After my own diagnoses, I started recognizing that I had built systems to make learning more accessible for others without realizing I needed those same systems myself.

I use tables, matrices, and reading capture sheets to compare ideas side by side. Rather than leave information in the order it was written, I reorganize it according to the questions I'm trying to answer. I might separate a reading into its main idea, key evidence, and implications. When I'm working across multiple sources, I put the same categories next to one another so similarities and differences become easier to see.

This approach helps me accommodate some of the executive functioning challenges from my ADHD. When I try to hold a lot of ideas in my head while reading, new information can push out something I read only a few minutes earlier. Putting information into an external structure means I don't have to use as much mental energy, keeping everything accessible. I can look back, compare ideas, add connections, and notice contradictions without having to reconstruct the entire reading from memory.

Structure also works with the way I process information as an autistic person. I tend to notice individual facts, examples, or distinctions before I accept the larger concept connecting them. After analyzing each piece on its own, I look at how it connects to the others and build toward the bigger picture from there. If details come without an obvious framework, they can feel like unrelated pieces, and I might miss the overarching idea entirely. Once I map out the larger categories and relationships, things become much easier to understand. I'm not memorizing disconnected facts. I'm seeing them as parts of one organized system, which means I can reason from them later rather than rely on rote recall.

Teaching also made me realize the importance of making the purpose of a task explicit and having a clear expectation for what DONE looks like. Students are more successful when they understand not just what to do but why it matters. I apply that same thinking to my own reading. Passive reading is difficult for me because it gives me very little to investigate. I'm much more successful when I turn the reading into an active inquiry. I ask: What is the author actually claiming? What evidence supports it? How does this connect to something I already know? Where does this reading agree or disagree with another source? Once I have something to look for, the reading becomes purposeful rather than passive.

Recently I was introduced to a concept called the literature matrix, a table where research sources are recorded using consistent categories such as the research question, methodology, findings, limitations, and themes. When I learned what it was, I immediately recognized it as something I had already been doing on my own for years. I've used similar tables because comparison becomes so much easier when information is organized and visually accessible. I appreciated learning that my intuitive approach to organizing information had an actual name in formal research methodology, and that it was considered good practice rather than a workaround.

Understanding my ADHD and autism, combined with what I learned teaching students with ASD, has helped me stop believing I simply needed to try harder. Now I ask a different question: what does my brain need in order to work with this information effectively? Usually the answer involves some combination of structure, visuals, and purpose.

For me, the most effective study strategy isn't any one tool. It's the practice of turning information into a system I can see, something that connects the pieces rather than just displaying them. For a long time I thought the problem was that I wasn't trying hard enough. What I've learned is that I was often using the wrong tool for the way my brain actually works. When I build the right structure, the learning follows.