study skills

Why are some study-techniques effective while others are not?
When students return after the Easter break there will be a little over 30 school-days left.

You will have the distraction of the orals, plus possibly some project deadlines.

30 days is not a lot.

A quick re-cap on Study Skills is in order.

Rather than focusing on what does and does not constitute effective study, let’s look at why some techniques are effective, because once you know this you can use it to analyse your own study habits.

Your brain takes in way more information every day than it can possibly retain (what you had for lunch yesterday, what the the weather was like , who you sat beside, who walked by as you were eating, what you talked about etc.

Consequently the brain has developed (evolved) a pretty reliable rule-of-thumb for establishing what is worth keeping. If the information has never been retrieved within a suitable period of time then the brain figures it’s obviously not all that important and allows it to be ‘forgotten’.

The following is a useful analogy

Imagine that your brain and your memory are two separate departments in your head.
Every time you retrieve some information your brain automatically sends a memo to the your memory letting it know that this particular nugget of information seems to be useful and may be worth keeping, if only for a little while. Your memory department duly files this away in the bottom shelf of its long-term storage unit.

The next time it gets retrieved the brain sends another signal to the memory department, but also includes a reminder that this is now the second time that the information has been retrieved so this is definitely not some random piece of information (like what you had for lunch yesterday) and consequently it needs to be stored even more securely this time around.

So every time the information gets retrieved it results in it gets stored more securely in long term memory.

Conversely if you’re studying but using a technique that doesn‘t invoke retrieval of information from your memory, then it’s probably not effective.

And that, in a nutshell, is all you need to know in order to determine whether or not a specific study technique is likely to be effective..

So now can you see why highlighting is not particularly effective?

And reading?

And transcribing notes?

And copying mindmaps?

And making flashcards?

Can you see why testing yourself and teaching others are, by some distance, the two most effective techniques?

Can you see why reading can actually be counter-productive? Not only does it not lead to long-term retention of information, it also unfortunately creates the ‘illusion of knowledge’; you think you’re learning, and if you’re re-reading the information then you probably have a sense of having read it before, so you think you’re reinforcing the learning. But unfortunately this is not the case.

Now of course you do need to read the material to begin with, and you may want to highlight or take notes as you go along. But this is merely laying the groundwork; DO NOT confuse this with the act of storing the information in long-term memory. Ask your thespian colleagues how they learn lines for their plays. You think they go around reading, highlighting and then re-reading the information and then hope for the best, or is it more likely they read the information and then rehearse their lines every chance they get?
There’s a good reason for this. Busy actors can’t afford to spend their time on ineffective learning techniques, no matter how therapeutic they may be.
So whether you call it testing yourself, rehearsing or retrieving information, it all amounts to the same thing – effective learning.

Why are we reluctant to engage with this process?

I guess the whole concept of ‘testing’ has such negative connotations that we avoid it at all costs if we can. Confirmation bias also plays a role here; we tend to engage more with advice which we already agree with, and tend to disregard information which we don’t want to hear in the first place.

There’s also something therapeutic about highlighting; it’s akin to the pleasure you got from colouring in pictures as a kid. Re-reading can also be almost pleasurable (if it wasn’t for the knowledge that there is an impending exam at the end of term), and even writing out notes needn’t be too much of chore, particularly if you can do it while watching tv or listening to music.

But testing yourself? No two ways about it; that’s going to be a pain in the sweet derriere every single time.

Which is why it remains the only effective study-skills technique you should be practicing (unless you’re teaching others).

For more information on effective and ineffective study techniques click on my learningishard website

A quick reminder of how to study effectively: advice to parents

I was putting this together for parents and thought I might as well stick it up here in the hope that it may be useful to others.

With Christmas exams just around the corner for most students, it’s time to issue a reminder that when it comes to studying, most of us do not spend our time effectively.
I am putting together a document listing the key aspects of effective study (and just as importantly, what doesn’t work) and will forward it on when complete.

In the meantime I just want to stress what doesn’t work: rewriting notes of any description should not be confused with learning; it may be first step, but then you need to follow up with a technique that does work.
I say this because most of the homework we set simply requires students to find the relevant information from their textbook and then write this information into their copy.
And then we put a tick beside their correct answer, implying that this has been a worthwhile exercise.
It has not.
Information has merely been copied from one page to another, bypassing (in the main) the brain en route.
This is the single greatest waste of time that we as teachers tacitly encourage.
The funny thing is, if a student is found copying another student’s work they get in trouble, yet in effect this is all they are doing when using the textbook anyway – so why do we bother? Much more effective would be for us to give students much fewer questions, but to have to learn the information rather than just write it down.

The single greatest way to learn is by testing yourself.
There are a myriad number of different ways this can be achieved, but chances are that if you’re not testing yourself then you’re not engaged in committing the information to long-term memory.

Not all school-work is about memorisation; a lot of it is about learning new skills, and how to do that effectively depends on the skill, but the bottom line is still the same; if you’re not testing yourself then you’re not likely to remember it.

Secondly, a student has no business studying for more than about 20 minutes at a go. After this they need to take a short break.
At the beginning of the session they need to clearly lay out what they hope to accomplish during that session.
And at the end of that 20 minutes they need to review their work and determine whether or not they have learnt anything during that time.
How do they do this? Test themselves.

If you are allowed to be part of this process, you don’t need to be an expert in the subject area. Just discuss with the student what the objective for the next 20 minutes is, and then help with testing the student at the end.

The student then gets a short break to check de facebuks or whatever, then gets back to work (all distractions once again removed).

Simples.

Much more on what does (and doesn’t) constitute effective study is to be found on my betterteaching.ie site:
http://www.betterteaching.ie/studentlearning.html

Study Skills: Engagement and Retrieval

This post acts as an introduction to the webpage betterteaching.ie/studyskills and is also the first link on that page.
It also complements a previous post on the same topic: Misconceptions about how students learn  – otherwise known as How to Study Hard and Still Fail.

Why might this post help make me be a better teacher?

  • Teaching students how to study more effectively at home should be a normal part of every teacher’s job description (but isn’t). The benefit of developing a student’s study skills is self-evident.
  • Many of the these skills also relate to how a student learns best in the classroom and so should form an intrinsic part of your teaching methodology.

Key Points

  1. Students don’t know how to study because nobody has ever shown them – and even if they have attended a study seminar, chances are that it didn’t make much difference because we teachers don’t follow up it with them.
  2. This is due in no small part to the fact that we don’t know what constitutes effective study.
  3. All study techniques are not equal
    One half hour of effective studying is much more beneficial than two or three hours of ineffective study.


Students don’t know how to study because nobody has ever shown them. Only we – their teachers – can help in this regard. Our first step is to familiarise ourselves with the knowledge. Knowing how students learn should dramatically alter our approach to our classroom teaching.

The fact that students don’t know how to study may come as a shock, but when you think about it it shouldn’t. After all, nobody has ever taken the time to show them what techniques are effective and just as importantly what techniques are ineffective.

So what constitutes ineffective study?

  1. Highlighting material
  2. Writing out notes from a textbook or copying from teachers’ notes
  3. Reading over material covered in class
  4. Looking at mindmaps
  5. Cramming the night before the exam
  6. Making flashcards

Whaaaaaat?
These are not completely ineffective (and some are slightly more beneficial than others) but by in large they should be avoided. Of the six techniques outlined above, writing out notes is the greatest scoundrel in that it takes an inordinate amount of time, whereas highlighting, though equally ineffective, at least doesn’t waste that much time. It doesn’t help that the student may well believe that he has a good grasp of the material after writing it out; the point is that he is much less likely to remember the material long term using this technique.

Having said that, if you are highlighting or writing out material as a first step in the learning process (i.e. with a view of going back over the material using the effective learning techniques outlined below) then that’s a different story.

So what constitutes effective study?
Answer: anything which involves engagement and/or retrieval

  1. Testing yourself (and following up in an appropriate manner)
  2. Teaching others
  3. And you need to have set specific targets (both short and long-term

The ideal way to go about testing yourself is to first read over the material to confirm that you understand it. Then answer as many questions as you can on the topic, whether they be from the book or from exam papers.

Now you have to go back and check the answers.

The purpose of the test is two-fold; it acts to highlight what you don’t know but also – and this is the key point – it is in the act of retrieving the information that it becomes more securely stored in the long term memory. In short, it’s all about retrieval.

Aside – how your brain stores information
Your brain is not an empty vessel into which you can pour and store information. In so far as it can be considered to be a vessel of any type it should be seen as being a leaky one. You could also make comparisons to the memory in a computer; it seems to store information in either its hard drive (long term memory) or RAM (short term memory). In both cases there is one critical difference between the computer’s memory and yours; yours is leaky. The challenge for students is to ensure that the information is stored as securely as possible in their long-term memory. So how can they do this? Two words: Engagement and Retrieval.

Why are some techniques ineffective?
The six ineffective techniques outlined above all fail simply because there is little if any engagement with the material. While this is obviously context dependent, writing out notes can often (but not always!) consist of simply transferring material from one page to another with very little thinking going on in the process. The same goes for most of the other techniques in this category.

Consider the following:
Think of how difficult it is to remember the names of a group of people you’ve just been introduced to in some social scene.
If it was just one new name (one item of information) then there’s a good chance that you might remember, but if the number is closer to ten then you have no chance. Why not?
Because the information has passed over you without you having any chance to engage with it.

Think of it from another perspective. Your brain can remember an incredible amount of information, but not an infinite amount. So it needs some signal to determine whether information it is currently exposed to (notation for Boyle’s Law or hair-colour of a passing student) needs to be remembered or not. What signal does it use?
Answer: Engagement.
The more you engage with the material the more the brain realises that this is not just some random factoid than should be discarded as quickly as possible. But what does the word ‘engagement’ mean? I think of it as anything that causes the brain to come out of its ‘Sleep Mode’. Hence testing yourself and teaching (or even better arguing) with others.

So this helps the brain store the information in the first place. But bearing in mind that the memory is a leaky vessel, how do we keep the information there?
Answer: Retrieval.
To go back to the analogy used above, if you’re at the party and were introduced to just one man then you may or may not be able to recall his name one minute later. If however you have  no subsequent dealings with him then you’re much less likely to remember the information a week later. Why not? Because the brain works on the (reasonable) assumption that if you haven’t recalled the information over a relatively long period of time then it’s probably not important. So how do you ensure that the brain keeps the information? By retrieving it every so often (revision tests are therefore ideal). If you’re retrieving it then you’re ‘telling’ your brain that this information is worth hanging on to.

When is the best time to retrieve the information?
The research seems to be still out on this one, but one strong possibility is that the best time for retrieval is when the information is just on the point of being lost (the old ‘it’s on the tip of my tongue’ feeling). Of course there’s no way of knowing when a student is at this point, but it’s not a bad rule of thumb to go by.

This explains why cramming is not an effective learning technique. It may well get you past the short chapter test which you have the following day, but because there was no engagement and no regular retrieval going on, the information isn’t likely to remain in the memory for long.

This of course can serve to open up a bigger debate: from a student’s perspective doing well on a short test without ever understanding the material is still a perfectly valid objective. The challenge is for us as teachers to persuade students of the futility of this. The phenomenon is most easily identified when you look at a student who averages 80% or 90% in class tests at Junior Cert level, but then bombs an end of year exam. Now you (and hopefully they) can understand why.

It’s worth noting that most of this relates to studying factual information. Studying a language or a practical skill does of course rely on lots of practice. But even here you could fall foul of some misconceptions. Practicing without engaging (or without getting feedback) is of limited use. So for example if you want to improve your typing speed, practice by itself will bring your speed up to a certain level but it will then plateau. To increase it further you need to engage with what you’re learning and this is where a typing program comes in.

Spacing and Interleaving
Two other important concepts when studying are Spacing and Interleaving.

Spacing
When learning new material or new skills, spacing the learning episodes over large periods of time will improve the long-term retention.

Interleaving
If studying 3 subjects over one night, it’s much more effective to interleave them rather than studying subject 1 then subject 2 then subject 3 (which is the default but also ‘lazy’ way).

For more information on spacing and interleaving click on the links that I uploaded to the following webpage: http://www.betterteaching.ie/studyskills.html

So how do I use this information in the classroom?
If your subject is fact-based then testing should be a regular feature of your classes. But you need to stress that the function of the test is not to come up with a percentage at the end (in fact this is actually likely to be counterproductive); it is to identify what is and is not known or understood, and also (possibly more importantly) the act of retrieval serves to store the self-same information more securely for the future. So rather than spending the first ten minutes of your class checking and correcting homework (see this link for my post on the dubious benefits of setting homework), and a better policy may be using this time to run a short quiz covering important points from the previous class or classes. Only you can ascertain the best way of doing this, but don’t be afraid to experiment and don’t expect to get it write first time or every time.

Once I became aware of the importance of engagement  in student learning (otherwise known as ‘deep processing’) it changed how I try and teach every single lesson of every single day.

I give a version of this post to students but include a series of questions at the end (it helps them to engage).
🙂

Ask and you shall receive

Misconceptions about how students learn

Otherwise known as “How to study hard and still fail”

We’ve all come across the student who works hard in class and puts in the hours at night doing homework but never quite does well in class tests. Or perhaps it’s the student who does ok in class tests but then bombs the end-of-term exam and can’t understand why. The following may help in this regard.

Rate the following study techniques on a scale of 1 – 5 for effectiveness (5 being the most effective)

1.      Highlighting important material

2.      Writing out notes from a textbook or copying from teachers’ notes

3.      Reading over material covered in class

4.      Testing yourself

5.      Looking at mindmaps

6.      Creating mindmaps

7.      Making flashcards

8.      Testing yourself using flashcards

9.      Cramming the night before the exam

We’ll come back to these in a minute, but in the meantime here’s another task for you:

You have a Science test on Friday.
You have given yourself two hours to prepare for this over the course of the week, consisting of a half hour on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night.
Which of the following four options is the most effective and which is the least (try it yourself before looking for the answer)?

Study  Study  Study  Study

Study  Study  Study  Test

Study  Study  Test     Test

Study  Test     Test     Test

The key to how the brain remembers information is retrieval. The more times it has to retrieve certain information, the more it ‘realises’ that this information must be important and therefore it stores it more securely (think of it as the brain’s hard-drive).

Care to re-evaluate your answers to the tasks above?

For study techniques the most effective option is testing yourself.
This is not only so that you can check your answers to see what you got wrong, but also (and this is the bit most people don’t realise) because the mere act of retrieving the information results in that information being stored more securely from then on.

What about highlighting important material?
You might as well be watching the Simpsons

What about reading over your notes (and your teacher may even have told you to do this for homework)?
You might as well be watching the Simpsons

Making flashcards?
You might as well be watching the Simpsons

Using flashcards?
Here you are testing yourself in a way that requires retrieval of information, so yes – very effective.

Mindmaps?
Interestingly, the research here shows that using mindmaps is relatively ineffective (no retrieval) but making them in the first place can be beneficial once you’re not merely copying it from elsewhere. If you have to think about how various concepts are related then the brain is constantly retrieving information, but once it’s done then it is of little further use. It may however help another student see the connections if he cannot make them for himself. So reading somebody else’s mindmaps may be a useful starting point on the journey of learning, but it’s not much more than that.

Writing out notes
Lots of students like to do this but unfortunately – you’ve guessed it; you might as well be watching the Simpsons.

 

I may be guilty of exaggerating slightly for effect and there may be contexts where some of these techniques are more useful than I’m suggesting here, but it’s only to emphasise the main point; students (and teachers) labour under some serious misconceptions when it comes to study.

So all study techniques are not equal.

And just because Moira is spending three hours up in her room every night ‘studying’ does not mean that this will automatically translate into good grades. It may also explain why her friend Jane, who only spends one hour a night studying, can outperform her when it comes to exams.

You have been warned.

A few points which we left dangling:

  • Why aren’t students aware of this?
  • To what extent are teachers aware of this, and if not why not?
  • How can we get students to change their study techniques?
  • What can teachers do to encourage students to change how they study at home?
  • What can teachers do in class to incorporate these ideas?
  • Why is it so hard for teachers to change their teaching styles to adapt to new ideas?

For another day.

Also for another day: how effective is cramming?

Finally, back to Friday’s Science test.
Most students go with option one.
Option 4 is the correct answer.

This is the second in a series of blogposts to accompany the new website betterteaching.ie. Over time, every webpage on the site will have an introductory post at the top. This post acts as an introduction to the Student Learning page. The various ideas above have been sourced from the posts on that page, in particular the work of Daniel Willingham is worth reading. It will take time to browse through all the information, so it may be worthwhile to bookmark the page and come back to it when free.

The following is one of a series of videos which discusses various study strategies, and in particular the importance of ‘deep processing’ when learning material or as the speaker says; how to study hard and still fail.