"Picture
your preschooler’s teacher pulling you aside at pickup time to say that your
child was “not taking responsibility” for learning the alphabet. You’d be
puzzled and probably angry. It’s not up to a 4-year-old to make sure he learns
the alphabet. That’s the teacher’s job.
But
as your child gets older, he’ll increasingly be expected to teach himself. High
school seniors must read difficult books independently, commit information to
memory, schedule their work, cope with test anxiety and much more.
These
demands build slowly across the grades, essentially forming a second, unnoticed
curriculum: learning how to learn independently.
For
most American students, that curriculum goes untaught. In a 2007 survey,
just 20 percent of college students agreed that they study as they do “because
a teacher (or teachers) taught you to study that way.”
And
that lack of instruction shows. Students don’t know much about how they learn.
In
one study, researchers asked college students to
select which of two scenarios would lead to better learning. For example,
students were asked to compare creating one’s own mnemonic with using one the
teacher provides. (Creating your own is better, previous research shows.)
mne·mon·ic
noun
noun: mnemonic; plural noun: mnemonics
1.
a device such as a pattern of letters, ideas, or
associations that assists in remembering something, for example Richard Of
York Gave Battle In Vain for the colors of the spectrum (red, orange,
yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet).
For
two of the six scenarios, students picked the worse strategy as often as the
better one. For the other four, most students actually thought the worse strategy
was superior.
How
could they be so misinformed? You would think that after years of studying and
then seeing their test results, students would figure out which methods work
and which don’t.
Students
get studying wrong because they don’t assess whether a method works in the long
run. Instead, they pay attention to whether the method is easy to do and feels
like it’s working while they’re doing it.
By
analogy, suppose I were trying to get stronger by doing push-ups. You watch me
train, and are surprised that I’m practicing push-ups on my knees. When you
suggest that push-ups on my toes are a better exercise, I reply: “I tried that,
but I can do lots more on my knees. And this way they’re not so hard!”
Students
try to learn by doing the mental equivalent of push-ups on their knees.
For
example, student surveys
show that rereading notes or textbooks is the most common way students prepare
for a test. Rereading is easy because the mind can skitter along the surface of
the material without closely considering its meaning, but that’s exactly why
it’s a poor way to learn. If you want to learn the meaning — as most tests
require you to — then you must think about meaning when you study.
Yet,
insidiously, rereading feels effective.
Rereading
a textbook makes the content feel familiar. But judging that content is
familiar and knowing what it means — being able to describe it, being able to
use that knowledge when you think — are supported by different processes in the brain. Because
they are separate, familiarity can increase even if knowledge of the meaning
doesn’t increase. That’s what’s happened when a person looks very familiar but
you can’t identify her.
And
so, as students reread their textbooks, the increasing familiarity makes them
think they are learning. But because they are not thinking about the meaning of
what they read, they aren’t improving the knowledge that actually builds
understanding.
Psychologists
have developed much better ways to study, some of them counterintuitive. For
example, if you’ve only partially learned some material, trying to remember it
is a better way to solidify that fragile learning than studying more.
In
one experiment demonstrating this effect,
students read educational passages of about 260 words (for example, about sea
otters) under one of three conditions. Some students repeatedly read and
studied the text for four consecutive study periods, each lasting five minutes.
A second group read and studied the text for three periods and in the fourth,
which lasted 10 minutes, wrote as many ideas from the passage as they could
remember. A third group studied for one period and tried to remember the
material during the other three.
After
the four periods, students judged how well they had learned the material and,
unsurprisingly, the more students had studied, the more confident they were in
their knowledge.
A
week later, everyone returned for another test, and the results showed how
misplaced student confidence was.
The people
who had studied just once (and recalled the material three times) remembered
the passage best.
The
worst memory was shown by those who had studied the most — and had been the
most confident about their learning.
When
students read textbooks, they again gravitate toward easy methods that,
misleadingly, feel effective. They like to highlight, which adds little time to
reading, and which students assume can guide future studying. But research
shows there’s little benefit to
highlighting over simply reading, in part because students mostly highlight
definitions, not deeper concepts.
Educational
psychologists have developed strategies for effective reading that even middle
school students can use.
Readers are
told to perform a task while they read, for example, to identify conclusions and ask themselves how they
are supported. This task requires that students focus on high-level themes as
well as the details that support them.
Psychologists
have even developed strategies to address one of the most pernicious problems
in schooling: Students cram for tests and rapidly forget what they’ve learned.
In one study, college
students used a flashcard-like program to test themselves on a subset of
concepts from an introductory psychology class they were taking. There were six
practice sessions, each separated by a couple days or more.
On the course
exam, students scored modestly better on the practiced than the unpracticed
content, 80 percent correct versus 69 percent correct.
But the real
payoff came three days later, when students came to the laboratory for another
test of the concepts.
Researchers
expected that students had crammed for the course exam and would have forgotten
most of the content. And indeed, students scored 14 percent correct on the
unpracticed content questions, even though only three days had passed.
But when
tested on the content they’d reviewed in those six brief practice sessions,
students got 66 percent correct. On a follow-up test three weeks later, they
still scored 65 percent correct.
These are
striking results, but studying days in advance of an exam requires planning,
and most college students don’t see the need. When surveyed about how
they decide what to work on, 13 percent of college students mention following a
plan. The most common answer is that they just work on whatever is due next.
This
is another challenge to improving study skills: Students think some tasks are
so straightforward that they don’t require a strategy.
For
example, most of my students see no need for a strategy when listening to my
lectures. It feels like they’re part of an audience, attending a performance.
Who uses a strategy to watch a movie?
And
they’re right; comprehending a movie is easy. True, they must piece together
the individual scenes to understand the plot, but movies are structured as
narratives, and that familiar framework helps. What’s more, movies are honed
and reworked by experts to be easily understood and instantly entertaining.
Just
as movie scenes must be knit together into a plot, a student attending a
lecture must not simply understand facts but understand how they relate to form
a theme or argument. But my lectures are not entertaining stories, devised by
an expert communicator.
As they have
for reading, educational psychologists have developed
strategies for listening that encourage students to relate individual points to
broader conclusions. That helps them discern the organization of the lecture
and thus understand it more deeply.
Or
would, if students knew about this strategy and were persuaded it would help
them. And that seems to suggest an obvious next step: High schools should
require a study skills class.
Carefully
structured classes of this sort show promise, but they would be
more effective if all teachers could help students tune those skills to
their specific classrooms.
Often,
teachers can’t, because they don’t know the
best study strategies. You would think that comprehensive knowledge of how
children learn would be part of teacher education, and most programs do require
a course in educational psychology or child development, but the impact seems
limited. Teachers in training
don’t know the best study strategies, either.
State
lawmakers can help by reviewing teacher licensing examinations. Most require knowledge
of principles of learning, but the expectations are low and many even
refer to scientifically discredited ideas like so-called learning styles.
Most
people hope that schools will encourage each child to become a lifelong
learner, which means teachers must show students how to learn effectively on
their own. That’s unlikely until teachers have that knowledge themselves.
Daniel
T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is
a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently,
of “Outsmart Your Brain:
Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.”"
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