Making It Stick

Dogears from Make It Stick. Note to self – formatting on blog seems to have gone AWOL…

The Illusion of Mastery

V common

“The fact that you can repeat the phrases in a text or your lecture notes is no indication that you understand the significance of the precepts they describe, their application or how they relate to what you already know about the subject.”

Getting better at memory

• Frequent low-stakes test help.
• Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is a potent tool for learning and durable retention.
• Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning
• Repeated retrieval makes for more durable and more broadly accessible learning
• Self-testing is better than rereading
• Corrective feedback after test needed to avoid storing misunderstandings

“Students in classes that incorporate low-stakes quizzing come to embrace the practice. Students who are tested frequently rate their classes more favourably”

Mixed practice

“a group of eight-year olds practised tossing beanbags into buckets in gym class. Half of the kids tossed into a bucket three feet away. Half of the kids tossed into a bucket two and four feet away. After twelve weeks of this they were all tested on tossing into a three-foot bucket. The kids who did the best by far were those who’d practiced on two- and four-foot buckets but never on three-foot buckets.”
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/1979-20698-001

“a baseball player who practises batting by swinging at fifteen fastballs , then at fifteen curveballs, and then at fifteen change-ups will perform better in practice than the player who mixes it up. But the player who asks for random pitches during practice builds his ability to decipher and respond to each pitch as it comes his way, and he becomes the better hitter.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8084699

Embracing Challenge

Effortful learning (e.g. in spaced practice) benefits learning more

massed practice makes students feel they are learning more

mixed practice makes them feel they are struggling
feelings do not translate into results.

Fear of failure stops learning (cf. http://thefailcon.com/)

Beware the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Humans are amazingly good at persuading themselves of things, regardless of veracity, not least as in the Dunning-Kruger effect

“Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence”

“Our susceptibility to illusion and misjudgement should give us all pause, and especially so to the advocates of “student directed learning,” a theory now current amongst parents and educators.”

Tips for Students

Practise retrieving new learning from memory

Quiz yourself on what you know regularly.

Set aside time throughout a course to: a) review what learned that week, b) see how it fits into what learned previously in course

Don’t reread (even though feels more productive)

Struggle/effort a sign that you are strengthening the memory (like weight lifting)

Space out retrieval practice
Don’t do it all at once
Massed practice feels better but spacing out (e.g. once a week, then once a month) more effective.
A useful method is interleaving topics (see next)

Interleave different problem types
e.g. don’t repeat the same type of problem again and again to learn it

Try different types of maths problems rather than block practising one.

Other useful study strategies:
Elaboration
Relate what you are studying to what you already know, explain how it relates to life outside class, look for metaphors
Generation
Try answering the problem before being shown how to do it
Reflection
Combination of elaboration and spaced retrieval practice. e.g. weekly “what went well, what struggling with , what possible next time
Calibration
Aim is to avoid illusions of mastery. Find a dashboard/objective feedback to see how you are doing a target problems
Mnemonic Devices
Memory palaces, acronyms et al.

Tips for Teachers

Explain to students how learning works
especially
a) some kinds of difficulties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered
b) when learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten
c) not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. When learning takes effort it actually changes the brain, increasing intellectual ability.
d) you learn better when you wrestle with a problem before learning the solution
e) achieving excellence means you need to surpass current ability
f) striving leads to setbacks – setbacks give clues how to adjust – adjustment leads to progress.

Teach students how to study
(see tips for students)

Create desirable difficulties in the classroom
– low stakes testing but make testing count towards grade even if on small scale
– design quizzing to reach back to concepts covered earlier in the term
– space/interleave/vary problems
– create study tools that incorporate retrieval practice, generation and elaboration (see above)

Be transparent
Explain why testing the way you are etc

Other strategies
Testing groups:
– students in a group asked what topics they’re not sure on
– one person comes to board and has to explain it
– others test student by asking questions to help her to the larger concept

Free Recall
10 minutes with a blank piece of paper writing down everything they can remember from class
Then compare it to class notes and make list of what forgot.

Summary sheets
Cheat sheet on a topic to explain how things are connected

Learning Paragraphs
5 sentences in which e.g. adding fractions is like …