Best Strategies for Learning

This week’s article summary is What Every Teacher Should Know About Memory, a follow up to the two previous summaries on learning myths, and its focus is on techniques that maximize learning, i.e., storing information into long-term memory

To me, there are two kinds of people: those who always seem to be early and those who always seem to be late. I put myself in the former category, so not surprisingly when I fly, I get to the airport well before I need to. But that’s okay by me because I enjoy people watching, and airports provide a great opportunity to observe a wide cross section of people and their habits.

Last week at Hartsfield-Jackson waiting for my flight as I was coincidentally reading the article below, I noticed a college student dutifully highlighting a thick, daunting textbook. Unfortunately for the student highlighting, which seems productive on the surface, is an ineffective way to learn material.

It’s not that highlighting is a complete waste of time so long as it is a basic first step in narrowing down what’s salient to learn. Subsequent techniques requiring the learner to actively think, process, and assess over time help store that information in long-term memory.

Highlighting or rereading information aren’t effective strategies because they can allow the brain to be passive. For information to stick, learners need to be much more active in piquing the brain’s interest optimally in a multi-modal manner so the data is worthy of being stored for later retrieval and application.

I hope that college student does well on her upcoming test, but if all she’s doing is highlighting, her brain most likely won’t find the material interesting enough to be stored for long.

Joe

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How do our students really learn?

The ability to retain and recall information is central to improving memory, knowledge, and learning.

Two techniques, supported by research, are very effective for improving long-term memory:

• Practice testing. This is where students have to generate an answer to a question. It can include past papers, multiple choice questions or doing practice essay answers. A key, though, is this has to be “low-stakes”, meaning no stress on students and not a judgment on their abilities.
• Distributed practice. Sometimes referred to as “spacing”, distributed practice involves doing little bits of work often instead of a lot all at once (i. e., cramming). Essentially, students remember more if they spread out their learning; for instance, one hour a day for eight days rather than eight hours in one day. This form of studying is effective because it allows time for students to forget and relearn the material, which cements it into their long-term memory.

Two techniques were found to be fairly effective strategies:

• Elaborative interrogation. Asking “why is this true?” or “why might this be the case?” helps students think about the material and make connections to previously learned information. However, this technique does require students to have a good base knowledge for it to work effectively.
• Interleaved practice. Interleaving is where students mix up either the types of problem or different subjects, so as to avoid “blocking” their time on just one type of question. This helps keep things fresh and makes it easier for students to identify similarities and differences between the materials they are studying.

Finally, these two strategies were found to be ineffective in improving students’ ability to recall information at a later date:

• Highlighting/underlining. Despite being the weapon of choice for many students, highlighting material often fails to lead to long-term learning. This is because it’s often done on autopilot, doesn’t help students make connections from previous learned material and doesn’t help them make inferences on what they are learning. By itself, highlighting is not the worst technique – it’s more a case of how students use it, with many excessively over-highlighting, making it more akin to coloring in.
• Rereading. Although students may feel that they have learned something if they can point to a whole chapter they’ve read, it may not be as beneficial as they think. This is because people sometimes end up skim-reading, which doesn’t require them to think very deeply about what it is they are looking at.