The Science of Successful Learning. Brown, Roediger, McDaniel. 2014.

Learning is deeper, and longer-lasting, when it's effortful. Many common study and learning strategies, such as cramming, re-reading, highlighting, massed practice (focusing on one skill/topic at a time), do lead to substantial gains in the short term. However, we notice the fast gains, but then fail to notice the slow forgetting.

Instead of massed practice, it is far more effective in the long run (but more difficult in the short term) to space out the practice, and interleave topics and skills, and practice retrieval, especially after some time has elapsed.

By allowing some time to pass between learning a particular thing, it's a little (or a lot) harder for the brain to retrieve it, and make the necessary connections. By working harder, the brain seems to make these connections more durable, and a little easier to recall the next time.

If we don't allow some time to pass, and simply recall the thing very soon after learning it, it's so easy for the brain to recall it that the relevant pathways form but then do not last. It is helpful for learning to recall the salient facts immediately after, but then allow some time to pass before revisiting.

Testing is an especially potent tool for retrieval practice. In a class setting, low stakes, frequent quizzes, are very valuable, and moreso when they count towards a grade, even in a small way.

Retrieval practice could also be done with flashcards, for instance. When learning a new subject or skill, certain facts/skills could be written on flashcards and then shuffled, and part of a study session could be flipping through the flashcards and practicing the things that you're weakest on. As your skills become stronger for certain cards, they can be discarded.

There were a few studies mentioned that I'd like to record:

• beanbag study
• art history
• classifying plants (more of an anecdote)

There are a few educational theories I'd like to record:

• multiple intelligences?
• learning styles
• Bloom's taxonomy

Embrace difficulties: Some difficulties (not all!) during learning make that learning deeper and longer-lasting. For example, trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution is known to improve the retention of the solution after you're shown it.

Illusions of knowing: familiarity with a text or topic can be misconstrued as knowledge and know-how. This can be particularly troublesome for really good, clear and concise explanations, which may give the learner a sense that they know it and it's not that hard. But being able to do it is another thing entirely.

Learning is deep and more durable when it's effortful. 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're 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 gaines from the strategies are often temporary.

Rereading text and massed practice of a skill... are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they're also among the least productive.

Retrieval practice--recalling facts of concepts or events from memory--is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading (e.g. flashcards). A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning than rereading or reviewing lecture notes. While the brain is not a muscle than gets stronger with exercise, the neural pathways that make up a body of learning do get stronger, when the memory is retrieved and the learning is practiced.

When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave 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 a form consistent with your preferred learning style, for example as an auditory or visual learner, is not supported by the emprical research.

When you're adept at extracting the underlying principles or rules that differentiate types of problems, you're more successful at ppicking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations. This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied practice than massed practice.

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.

All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge.

...if you practice elaboration, theres no known limit to how much you can learn. Elaboration is the process fo giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.

Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning.

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] the elements that shape you intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your own control.

For the most part, we are going about learning in the wrong ways, and we are giving poor advice to those who are coming up behind us. A great deal of what we think we know about how to learn is taken on faith and based on intuition but does not hold up under empirical research. The good news is that we now know of simple and practical strategies that anybody can use to learn better and remember longer: various forms of retrieval practice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules.

As an illustration that familiarity doesn't always imply knowledge, consider the "penny test", in which several different images are shown, only one of which is correct. Participants have a hard time identifying the correct one. (I did a quick search to see if there's something similar for Canada, but didn't find anything.)

Study: Endel Tulving, 1960s. Two groups given list of nouns to remember. One group had previously been given a list of nouns, in a different context, without expecting a memory test. All the nouns on the "to remember" list had appeared in the list that was given to the first group. The ability of the two groups to remember the nouns was indistinguishable, so, counter-intuitively, mere exposure to the information (in the first group) did not help the participants remember.

Study: Washington U, 2008, Contemporary Edu Psychology. Two groups read study material. One group rereads the material immediately afterward, the other does not. Both groups take a test immediately afterward, and unsurprisingly the group that read twice did a little better than the group that read only once. However, on a delayed test, the benefits of rereading had worn off and both groups performed the same. In a different situation, a group waited some days before rereading the material. This group performed better on the delayed test. Conclusion: "it makes sense to reread a text once if there's been a meaningful lapse of time since the first reading, but doing multiple readings in close succession is a time-consuming strategy that yields negligible benefits."

"In 1978, researchers found that massed studying (cramming) leads to higher scores on an immediate test but results in faster forgetting compared to practicing retrieval. In a second test two days after an initial test, the crammers had forgotten 50 percent of what they had been able to recall on the initial test, while those who had spent the same period practicing retrieval instead of studying had forgotten only 13 percent of the information recalled initially."

"A subsequent study was aimed at understanding what effect taking multiple tests would have on subjects' long-term retention. Students heard a story that named sixty concrete objects. Those students who were tested immediately after exposure recalled 53 percenbt of the objects on this initial test, but only 39 percent a week later. On the other hand, a group of students who learned the same material but were not tested at all until a week later recalled only 28 percent. Another group were tested three times after initial exposure and a week later they were able to recall 53 percent--the same as on the initial test for the group receiving one test. ...multiple sessioni of retrieval practice are generally better than one, especially if the test sessions are spaced out."

Generation effect: in another study, researchers showed that simply asking a subject to fill in a word's missing letter resulted in better memory of the word (e.g. foot-s__e instead of foot-shoe).

"Studies show that giving feedback strengthens retention more than testing alone does, and, interestingly, some evidence shows that delaying the feedback briefly produces better long-term learning than immediate feedback. ...immediate feedback is like the training wheels on a bicycle: the learner quickly comes to depend on the continued presence of the correction."

"Tests that require the learner to supply the answer, like an essay or short-answer test, or simply practice with flashcards, appear to be more effective than simple recognition tests like multiple choice or true/false tests."

Beanbag study (Kerr & Booth, Specific and varied practice of motor skill, 1978). Eight-year-olds, tossing beanbags in buckets. One group practiced with buckets three feet away. Another group mixed it up with buckets two and four feet away (never three feet). After twelve weeks, both groups tested on throwing into buckets three feet away. Second group did far better.

"Spacing out your practice feels less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has set in and you've got to work harder to recall the concepts. It doesn't feel like you're on top of it. What you don't sense in the moment is that this added effort is making the learning stronger."

Interleaving leads to improved ability to differentiate between types of problems.

Artist identification (Kornell & Bjork, Learning concepts and categories, 2008). One group performed massed practice (studied many examples of one painters works), another interleaved. Researchers predicted massed practice would be better, interleaving too confusing. They were wrong: the second group did much better at matching artworks to artists, even for paintings that they had never been exposed to. Commonalities proved less useful than the differences. Despite the results, students preferred massed practice, even after seeing the improved performance from interleaving.

Sleeps plays a role in memory consolidation.

Leitner box: four file-card boxes, in the first are materials that must be practiced frequently becuase you often make mistakes, in the second box are the cards you're pretty good at, and so practice less frequently, and so on. Move the cards back and forth between the boxes as necessary.

Encoding: process of converting sensory perceptions into meaningful representations in the brain. Consolidation: process of strengthening these mental representations for long-term memory.

"Learning, remembering, and forgetting work together in interesting ways. Durable, robust learning requires that we do two things. First, as we recode and consolidate new material from short-termmemory into long-term memory, we must anchor it there securely. Second, we must aqssociate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later. Having effective retrieval cues is an aspect of learning that often goes overlooked."

Surprising: when text on a page is slightly out of focus or in a difficult-to-decipher font, people recall the content better, and when letters are omitted from words in a text, reading is slowed, and retention improves. (Paper: Fortune favors the bold (and italicized), Cognition, 2010).

Desirable vs undesirable difficulties (coined by Elizabeth and Robert Bjork): subtle and depends on the learner and the context.

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes our two analytic systems: System 1 (automatic, unconscious, immediate, intuitive) and System 2 (contolled, deliberate, slower).

Memory can be distorted in many ways, people remember things that were implied but not specifically stated. People who read a paragraph about Hellen Keller recalled the phrase "deaf, dumb, and blind", but another group who read the same paragraph about Carol Harris rarely did.

Curse of knowledge: our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered.

Dunning-Kruger effect: original paper called "Unskilled and Unaware of It".

"Pay attention to the cues you're using to judge what you have learned. Whether something feels familiar or fluent is not always a reliable indicator of learning. Neither is your level of ease in retrieving a fact or a phrase on a quiz shortly after encountering it (but ease of retrieval after a delay is a good indicator of learning)."

"Fluency illusions result from our tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content. For example, if you read a particularly lucid presentation of a difficult concept, you can get the idea that it is actually pretty simple and perhaps even that you knew it all along. As discussed earlier, students who study by rereading their texts can mistake their fluency with a text, gained from rereading, for possession of accessible knowl- edge of the subject and consequently overestimate how well they will do on a test."

There does not (to date) exist empirical evidence that people learn better when taught in a manner to match their learning style. (This is not saying that learning styles do not exist.) It does, however, seem true that all learners learn better when the instructional style matches the nature of the content.

Gardner proposed as many as eight different kinds of intelligence; attractive idea, but lack of empirical validation.

Robert Sternberg distills Gardner's intelligences down to three: analytical, creative, practical. Sternberg's theory is supported by empirical research.

Dynamic testing: Step 1: a test of some kind shows where I come up short. Step 2: practice, reflection, etc. Step 3: re-test, paying attention to what works better now, and where I still need to work.

Structure building: The ability to discern underlying principles, and build mental models and structures in which to incorporate new knowledge, is very important for learning. There appear to be differences in learners' ability in terms of structure building. Can higher structure building be developed?

"Our understanding of structure building as a cognitive difference in learning is still in the early stages: is low structure-building the result of a faulty cognitive mechanism, or is a skill that some pick up naturally and others must be taught? We know that when questions are embedded in texts to help focus readers on the main ideas, the learning performance of low structure-builders improves to a level commensurate with high structure-builders. The embedded questions promote a more coherent representation of the text than low-structure readers can build on their own, thus bringing them up toward the level achieved by the high structure-builders."

Deliberate practice usually isn't enjoyable.

Memory Cues: Mnemonic devices,

Memory palaces: Method of loci; humans remember pictures more easily than words.

The peg method.

• Practice retrieving new learning from memory. "Retrieval practice" means self-quizzing. Ask yourself questions like: What are the key ideas? What terms or ideas are new to me? How would I define them? How do the ideas relate to what I already know?
• Space out your retrieval practice. How much time to space depends on the material. Lots of practice does work, but only if it's spaced.
• Interleave the study of different problem types.
• Practice elaboration: find additional layers of meaning in new material.
• Practice generation: trying to answer a question before being shown the answer.
• Beware illusions of knowing.
• Practice reflection.

Explain to students how learning works.

Excerpt:

• Some kinds of difficulties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered.
• When learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten.
• Not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability.
• You learn better when you wrestle with new problems before being shown the solution, rather than the other way around.
• To achieve excellence in any sphere, you must strive to surpass your current level of ability.
• Striving, by its nature, often results in setbacks, and setbacks are often what provide the essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery.