Helping Students Learn How to Learn
Few undergraduates arrive at the university with a sophisticated portfolio of study strategies. Many believe that reviewing slides, rereading their notes, or highlighting sections of their textbooks is the most effective use of their time leading up to an exam. It’s also common for students (or anyone) to misjudge how well they understand the material they heard in lectures.
A good bit of student overconfidence (and later, dismay) is attributable to “illusions of fluency.” As Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel explain in their book Make It Stick, “When students hear a lecture or read a text that is a paragon of clarity, the ease with which they follow the argument gives them the feeling that they already know it and don’t need to study it.” Unfortunately, in many cases, “when put to the test, they find they cannot recall the critical ideas or apply them in a new context.” Make It Stick provides a useful guide to more effective study strategies, and you can share it with your students. In fact, the majority of the book’s final chapter is written specifically for students, to provide them with effective learning strategies.
Instructors can also use the principles from the book to structure the practice that we provide by way of our course design. Probably the most important is retrieval practice. Students often spend hours rereading (or highlighting every line of) their textbooks, but too often this just contributes to their fluency illusions, since they’re merely recognizing information rather than testing their knowledge. Instead, they need repeated opportunities to retrieve knowledge from their memories and practice applying it. The more often learners retrieve new knowledge, the more readily they will be able to summon it when they need it. Retrieval counteracts the normal process of forgetting, and also provides opportunities for feedback and self-assessment. If students can’t remember, connect, or put to use, they need more work on the material in question.
The timing of this retrieval practice matters. Students tend to favor “massed practice” (or cramming), but what they need is spaced practice—in other words, practice that is distributed over time. It’s actually useful to let forgetting set in just a little and then interrupt it, again and again. Quizzes, in-class activities, minute papers, discussions, and all sorts of in- and out-of-class work can provide opportunities for spaced practice, and can keep students’ attention on the learning we want them to do.
Students also usually prefer to practice a single skill or area at a time, since it seems to lead to faster progress, but it turns out that in the long run, interleaving practice is much more effective than this blocked practice. Mixing up concepts and skills is better preparation for being able to transfer our learning. If we can pass a chapter exam but can’t recognize a particular type of problem outside of that context, we’re probably not going to be able to apply it in the wild.
Elaboration, generation, reflection, and calibration are a few other effective strategies. Elaboration, which calls upon students to explain and explore their understanding of new concepts and make connections between what they’re learning and what they already know, lends itself very well to class activities. Students can practice explaining what they know, posing “why” and “how” questions, making connections to their prior knowledge or to real events, exploring similarities and differences, coming up with analogies or metaphors, etc. This learning strategy also lends itself to interaction during class, as students can do these activities in pairs, groups, and so on.
It’s important to note (and probably to share with your students) that illusions of fluency feel much less demanding than effective learning. Learning is effortful. It can be frustrating. When we listen to an expert explain something clearly and we follow it, we feel smarter. We think we’re learning. When we try to explain something we’re in the process of learning and discover that we can’t do it justice—when we feel uncertain of connections, or how something works, or how to approach a problem—we may feel insecure instead. This means students may perceive active study strategies as ineffective or a waste of their time. But they need to give the more effective learning strategies a chance to work and then observe the results—just like with physical exercise. By the end of the term, students may be surprised by what they now know and can do.
If you’d like some support building effective learning strategies into your courses, we’re here to help! Please get in touch at pro-teaching@fsu.edu to set up a consultation. We look forward to working with you!