Deepening Student Understanding

This week's article summary is 5 Indispensable Ways to Deepen Student Understanding.

The essence of learning is saving new content (skills, concepts, facts, procedures) in long-term memory and then retrieving it when needed.

As I wrote in an article summary last year, some of our memories are episodic (resulting from highly emotional experiences in our lives) while most are semantic (resulting from practice and repetition).

Episodic memories are stored naturally (think of an embarrassing moment in high school), yet semantic ones require active effort and practice, i.e., studying.

Unfortunately, most of the study techniques we employ aren’t effective.

If your student experiences were like mine, you used trial-and-error, hodgepodge strategies to try to remember material you were being tested on in middle school, high school, and college. Most of us probably began around seventh grade marking our textbooks with a yellow highlighter and taking copious notes in class. My textbooks were awash in yellow and my notes mimicked what the teacher said or had written on the chalk board. When it came to study for a test, all I did was keep rereading my textbook highlights and notes. It was a very passive, inefficient, and ineffective way to try to remember, let alone understand. To survive as a student, I needed to find more effective study techniques.

It wasn’t until college that I started to be much more selective in what I highlighted and wrote down in class. I began to write questions in the margins of textbooks and used more diagrams in my notes so I could connect and make more sense of material covered in class. When it came time to study for a big test, I would use a different colored pen to strip down what I needed to remember to its barest essentials. Then, my final preparation for an exam was pretending to give a speech on what I was studying. Even today, when I’m giving a talk to a large group, I breakdown my comments into the three or four of the most salient points with two or three examples under each point.  

I wish I had been told when I was younger how my brain and memory function and what effective strategies to use.

The article below highlights five research-tested techniques to optimize placing information into long-term memory so it sticks. 

This is a good example of helping our students think metacognitively about how they learn.

 Joe

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For the most part, students aren’t good at picking the best learning strategies—in study after study, they opt for the path of least resistance, selecting the strategies that provide an immediate sense of accomplishment. In a 2018 study, researchers pinpointed the crux of the problem: “Students want to see rapid gains when they are studying,” and they will pick whatever strategy they think will prepare them for tests or exams the quickest, even if it results in surface-level understanding. Speed is valued over comprehension, the researchers found, and while it may result in short-term gains, they tend to be fleeting.

Durable learning—the kind that sticks around and can become the foundation of a growing body of internalized knowledge—comes from hard work and even some degree of cognitive resistance. To get there, students need to tear down and rebuild learned material, breaking problems apart, identifying the most salient points, evaluating the relevance of each idea, and then elaborating on or even excavating novel insights from the original material. 

We scoured the research to find five relatively simple classroom strategies.

THE POWER OF SUMMARY (WITH NO CUTTING-AND-PASTING)

It doesn’t sound like much, but summarizing vastly outperforms activities like rereading. In a 2021 study, students first learned about greenhouse gases and then either wrote a short summary of what they had just learned, read a summary provided by the teacher, or simply reviewed each slide with no additional activity. On a follow-up test, the students who summarized scored 34 percent higher than the students who read a summary and a full 86 percent higher than the students who simply reviewed the original slides. Why is summarizing so beneficial? The researchers explain that it taps into key cognitive processes that encode learning more deeply: Students not only pay more attention to the information but also “mentally organize it into a coherent structure” and then integrate the information into existing knowledge networks, creating more durable memories.

YES, SKETCHNOTES WORK

Making visual sense of a challenging concept is often a richer exercise than traditional note-taking—or you can use it as a productive follow-on activity. Recent studies confirm what teachers know: When kids create concept maps, flow charts, or graphic organizers, they visually reorganize and make sense of learned material while highlighting the relationships between key concepts. When such artifacts are hand-drawn, they have the additional benefits conferred by deep, sensorimotor networks. A 2021 study found that students who filled in their own graphic organizers improved academic performance by 40 percent on a test of factual recall and 155 percent on a test of deeper comprehension.

ASKING GOOD—AND THEN BETTER—QUESTIONS

Getting students to craft high-quality questions of their own might be a better test of student comprehension than any quiz you can devise, a 2020 study suggests.

Researchers discovered that students who studied a lesson and then wrote their own questions outperformed students who simply restudied the material by 33 percent. Question generation promotes a deeper elaboration of the learning content; one has to reflect what one has learned and then extrapolate how an appropriate knowledge question can be inferred from this knowledge. While getting kids to pose simple questions—like yes/no, multiple-choice, or short-answer prompts—can lead to better retention, the deepest learning will require your students to ask tougher questions. Studies have shown that students performed better in recall tests when they were trained to generate cognitively challenging questions. Work with students to identify crucial themes or insights, and model how to write more complex, open-ended questions that start with explain, why, or how. These simple question starters will encourage students to think about the material more deeply, shifting from the details of a lesson to the bigger-picture concepts that help drive deeper learning.

EVEN BAD DRAWING IS PERFECTLY GOOD

In a 2018 study, researchers asked students to study lists of common words, such as trumpet or sailboat, and then either write them down or draw them. When asked to recall those words, students were twice as likely to remember words they had drawn. Importantly, the quality of the drawing is largely irrelevant, and students of all ages and skill levels will benefit from even rudimentary sketches. Why does it work so well? Drawing improves memory by encouraging a seamless integration of elaborative, motoric, and pictorial components of a memory trace. Unlike more passive forms of learning, like listening to a lecture or reading text, drawing weaves multiple memory strands together.

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL

Parents sometimes complain that they don’t want their child “wasting time” by passing their own knowledge on to a peer. But a 2014 study revealed that when elementary students taught math concepts to their peers, they significantly outperformed students who had studied similar materials more conventionally. That’s because good teaching requires you to check for gaps in your own understanding, and students who teach, according to researchers, put more effort into learning the material, do a better job organizing information, and feel a greater sense of purpose. There are numerous ways to create peer teaching relationships:

• Think-Pair-Share: Have students learn about an issue, pair up with another student to discuss it in detail, and then share their thinking with the class
• Three Before Me: Encourage students to ask three of their classmates for help before asking the teacher
• Jigsaw Groups: In small groups, students are assigned different sections of a lesson or topic to study—for example, each student is told to learn about a different organelle in a cell. Students then discuss their area of expertise with other students who were assigned the same organelle before rejoining their original group to convey what they know.