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It's that time of year when many students start to worry about how they're doing in their classes.
Commonly, students approach instructors with similar complaints: They're spending a lot of time studying and don’t understand why that isn’t leading to good test performance. As instructors, my colleagues and I often hear things like, “I re-read my notes several times,” or “I looked at the material and felt like I understood it when I was looking at it, so I don’t understand why I did so badly on the test.” Usually, it's not that students aren’t spending time studying (although sometimes that’s an issue too). Rather, it's that they're simply not doing the right things with their time.
What are the right things?
The answer isn’t intuitively obvious. In fact, one of the problems with figuring out how to study and learn is that our intuitions about it often lead us astray. Not only is our moment-to-moment sense of how well we are learning something frequently wrong, but it often leads us to believe the exact opposite of what actually does help learning. For example, consider this study of how people learn about a particular artist’s style of painting. The researchers compared such learning when different paintings by the same artist were presented together sequentially with when the paintings by one artist were interleaved among paintings by different artists. Although the interleaved presentation method led to better learning of an artist’s style, people thought that they were learning better when paintings by the same artist were presented together. In short, people’s intuitions about what was best for their learning were the exact opposite of what actually helped learning.
This disconnect may be one reason why people tend to do things like highlight, underline, or re-read things, all of which have been deemed relatively ineffective by Dunlosky and colleagues in this Scientific American MIND article and described elsewhere. It may also be a reason why people believe that teaching to their preferred learning style helps learning (see this article), or why people rely on how well they feel like they understand something in the moment, while they are looking at it, as a gauge of how well they learned it. It feels in the moment like this is a good indicator of learning, when in fact, it's actually not a good indicator. As described below, being tested on the material later, while not looking at it, is a better indicator.
So what methods actually are beneficial to learning?
It turns out that two of the most effective methods are testing and spacing. Testing is just like it sounds—test yourself on the material, preferably often! Spacing refers to spreading studying out over time in multiple sessions rather than cramming it all into one or two sessions.
Combining testing and spacing is a great way to become a super-learner.
Of course, getting students to understand and believe in science-based methods is one of the challenges to getting them to be better learners. It's hard to overcome intuition, and intuition often leads people to believe that merely looking at or re-reading the material is effective (when setting it aside and being tested on it is actually much more effective), and that massing repetitions together in a session is more effective than spacing them out. Teaching students this is a goal of my colleagues (Ed DeLosh and Matthew Rhodes) and I in developing a university-wide freshmen course on applying the science of learning to studying better.
But believing is only half the battle. Actually implementing these techniques in daily life is the other. In my freshmen seminar on applying the science of learning to developing study skills, students usually come to believe (after some initial resistance) that testing and spacing are very effective methods. Still, many of them admit that they fail to actually use these techniques despite coming to understand that they should. Students get busy, time flies, and then suddenly the exam is upon them and they find themselves cramming at the last minute and not having time to effectively test themselves.
So, how can people overcome the tendency to not plan ahead enough to take full advantage of testing and spacing to maximize learning?
A great way to force yourself to implement testing and spacing into your everyday learning is to utilize standard apps that you probably already have at your fingertips. Most calendar apps will allow you to type questions in for yourself to appear at particular times on particular days, as if they were scheduled events. You can schedule these questions so that their reminders appear for you at times when you know you’ll have a moment to try to answer them. You can think of questions to ask yourself at the time that you are first learning the material, such as during class or while reading a textbook; just type the questions into your calendar app to appear at later-scheduled times. As you are carrying your device with you throughout your day, you will be prompted to answer your own questions that you had previously come up with. You can even set them to repeat several times a week so that you have to answer them repeatedly, and spaced across time. This will allow you to combine testing and spacing to achieve higher levels of learning.
Instructors can help by pausing now and then to encourage students to think up questions to test themselves on later, or even to suggest specific questions.
Other apps and systems utilize or have utilized these principles of testing and spacing, such as some flashcard apps for learning foreign language vocabulary, or the SpacedEd system for learning described here, here, and here. For ideas on how to push your extreme learning even further, see this blog post on cuing memories during sleep.
