Here is an article from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine on
best practices for learning. WH Science Coordinator Mark Stephansky highlighted the more salient points.
The article was written by: Peter C. Brown is a writer and novelist based in St. Paul; Henry L.
Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel are professors of psychology at Washington
University in St. Louis. This essay is adapted from their book,Make It
Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
, to be published by the Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press later this month. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
PEOPLE COMMONLY BELIEVE that if you expose yourself to something enough
times — say, a textbook
passage or a set of terms from biology class — you can burn it into
memory. Not so. Many teachers believe that if they can make learning easier and
faster, the learning will be better. Much research turns this belief on its
head: When learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer. It’s widely
believed by teachers, trainers, and coaches that the most effective way to
master a new skill is to give it dogged, single-minded focus, practicing over
and over until you’ve got it down. What’s apparent from research is that gains
achieved during such practice are transitory and melt away quickly.
In fact, what students are advised to do is often plain wrong. For
instance, study tips published on a website at George Mason University include
this advice: “The key to learning something well is repetition; the more times
you go over the material, the better chance you have of storing it
permanently.” Another, from a Dartmouth College website, suggests: “If you
intend to remember something, you probably will.” Belief in the power of
rereading, intentionality, and repetition is pervasive, but the truth is, you
usually cannot embed something in memory simply by repeating it over and over.
Consider a simple example called the “penny memory test,” which presents a
dozen different images of a common penny, only one of which is correct. As many
times as you’ve seen a penny, you’re hard pressed to say with confidence which
one it is.
- Quiz:
Pennies for your thoughts - http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2014/03/09/how-learn-better-any-age/JCxes7YTWRsqEKu67V5ZNN/igraphic.html
The finding that rereading textbooks is often labor in vain ought to send a
chill up the spines of educators and learners, because it’s the number one
study strategy of most people — including more than 80 percent of college students in
some surveys — and is central
in what we tell ourselves to do during the hours we dedicate to learning.
Rereading has three strikes against it: It is time-consuming; it doesn’t result
in durable memory; and it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as
growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content.
The hours immersed in rereading can seem like due diligence, but the amount of
study time is no measure of mastery.
It turns out that much of what we’ve been doing as teachers and students
isn’t serving us well. But some comparatively simple changes in how we study
could make a big difference, regardless of age. Here are some of the principal
insights that we and other cognitive scientists have gathered from our research
into effective learning:
Learning is deeper and more durable when it costs
effort. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone
tomorrow.
We are poor judges of when we are learning well
and when we are not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel
productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that
the gains from these strategies are often temporary.
Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or
review of new knowledge are common study strategies of learners of all stripes,
but they’re also among the least productive. By massed practice, we mean the
single-minded, rapid-fire repetition of something you’re trying to burn into
memory, the “practice-practice-practice” of conventional wisdom. Cramming for
exams is an example. Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of
fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or
durability these strategies are largely a waste of time.
Retrieval practice — recalling facts or concepts from memory — is a more effective
learning strategy than review by rereading. Flashcards are a simple example.
Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting. A single, simple
quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and
remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes. While the brain
is not a muscle that gets stronger with exercise, the neural pathways that make
up a body of learning do get stronger. Periodic practice arrests forgetting,
strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge
you want to gain.
When you space out practice at a task and get a
little rusty between sessions, or you interleave — that is, alternate between — the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is
harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer-lasting
learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings.
Trying to solve a problem before being taught the
solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt.
The popular notion that you learn better when you
receive instruction in your preferred learning style — for example, as an auditory or visual learner — is not supported by the
empirical research. People do have multiple forms of intelligence, and you
learn better when you “go wide,” drawing on all of your aptitudes and
resourcefulness, than when you limit instruction or experience to the style you
find most amenable.
When you’re adept at extracting the underlying principles or “rules” that
differentiate types of problems, you’re more successful at picking the right
solutions in unfamiliar situations. This skill is better acquired through
interleaved and varied practice than massed practice. For instance,
interleaving the identification of different types of birds or the works of
different oil painters improves your ability both to learn the unifying
attributes within a type and to differentiate between types, improving your
skill at categorizing new specimens you encounter later.
We’re all susceptible to illusions that can hijack our judgment of what we
know and can do. Testing helps calibrate our judgments of what we’ve learned.
In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use
testing as a tool to identify and improve your areas of weakness.
In a “Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson, a bug-eyed kid asks his teacher:
“Mr. Osborne, can I be excused? My brain is full!” If you’re just engaging in
mechanical repetition, it’s true, you quickly hit the limit of what you can
retain. However, if you practice elaboration, there’s no known limit to how
much you can learn. Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning
by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already
know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your
prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be and the
more connections you create that will help you remember it later.
Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example,
the more of the unfolding story of history you know, the more of it you can
learn. And the more ways you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to
your understanding of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the better the
story stays with you. Likewise, if you’re trying to learn an abstraction, like
the principle of angular momentum, it’s easier when you ground it in something
concrete that you already know, like the way a figure skater’s rotation speeds
up as she draws her arms to her chest.
Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hard-wired from
birth and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their
native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain — the residue of
your experiences is stored. It’s true that we start life with the gift of our
genes, but it’s also true that we become capable through the learning and
development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create.
In other
words, the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising
extent within your own control.
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