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January 20 - June 19, 2019
One of our first and most important tasks as teachers is to help students develop a rich body of knowledge in our content areas—without doing so, we handicap considerably their ability to engage in cognitive activities like thinking and evaluating and creating.
Students who don't bother to memorize anything will never get much beyond skating over the surface of a topic.
Knowledge is foundational: we won't have the structures in place to do deep thinking if we haven't spent time mastering a body of knowledge related to that thinking.
Tell students to study for a test, and most of them will pull out their notebooks or textbooks and read them over and over again, despite scads of research telling us that this is just about the least effective learning strategy for mastering a new body of information.
Put as simply as possible, the retrieval effect means that if you want to retrieve knowledge from your memory, you have to practice retrieving knowledge from your memory. The more times that you practice remembering something, the more capable you become of remembering that thing in the future.
“The kids scored a full grade level higher on the material that had been quizzed than on the material that had not been quizzed”
A year later the research group tried this same experiment in eighth-grade science courses at the same school, and the results were even stronger: “At the end of three semesters, the eighth graders averaged 79 percent (C+) on the science material that had not been quizzed, compared to 92 percent (A–) on the material that had been quizzed” (p. 35).
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the positive results of the experiment extended far out in time: “The testing effect persisted eight months later at the end-of-year exams” (p. 35).
But I can't leave this paragraph without highlighting these results one last time: a brief (and ungraded) multiple-choice quiz at the beginning and end of class and one additional quiz before the exam raised the grades of the students by a full letter grade.
You will have to remind them that you are not conducting a scavenger hunt for answers or a race to see who can find the answer most quickly. You are helping them remember information, and this will benefit them only if they take the time to draw the information from their brains and not their notebooks.
For this reason I advocate filling out the course schedule section of your syllabus with as much detail as possible. Include phrases or even sentences that describe what will happen in the different units of the course so that students can keep the syllabus as a living document that guides them throughout the semester.
Whatever type of memory tasks you will ask of your students on your high-stakes assessments (such as midterms and exams) should appear in the retrieval practice you use. If you ask students to remember names and dates of key thinkers in your field on your final exam, make sure they are getting practice in remembering those thinkers throughout the semester.
SMALL TEACHING QUICK TIPS: RETRIEVING Memory retrieval works especially well in brief classroom interventions. You can find room for retrieval in almost any class period or learning session, even if it takes only a minute. But my favorite opportunities for retrieval appear in the opening and closing moments of class, or in the form of regular quizzes or writing exercises. Give frequent, low-stakes quizzes (at least weekly) to help your students seal up foundational course content; favor short answers or problem solving whenever possible so that students must process or use what they are
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predictive activities prepare your mind for learning by driving you to seek connections that will help you make an accurate prediction.
In other words, when you are forced to make a prediction or give an answer to a question about which you do not have sufficient information, you are compelled to search around for any possible information you might have that could relate to the subject matter and help you make a plausible prediction. That search activates prior knowledge you have about the subject matter and prepares your brain to slot the answer, when you receive it, into a more richly connected network of facts.
First, when students are asked to make predictions or given pretests on course material, in the ways that happened in Bjork's experiment, they have a clearer understanding of what their final assessment might look like—and that, in turn, might improve their subsequent study activities and preparation strategies. As Bjork pointed out, “Taking a practice test and getting answers wrong seems to improve subsequent study, because the test adjusts our thinking in some way to the kind of material we need to know” (Carey 2014b).
No doubt wrong answers can stick or lead to confusion if they are left uncorrected. So although prediction activities must have quick follow-up responses, I have seen no specific formula for how immediately the feedback has to arrive. It seems likely that the sooner it arrives the better—if not in the same class session as the prediction activity, then at least by the next class period.
If their reading covered a specific economic theory, for example, you might open class by describing a specific historical context and asking them to explain what that economic theory would predict will happen in that context.
How Learning Works
Ideally, you will both ask for the prediction and give them the opportunity to explain why they made it; doing so will require them to examine their thinking and might help them recognize fluency illusions. Even more ideally, after you give them the answer you might ask them to explain why their predictions did or did not hold true.
This (curious) result suggests that heightening our curiosity not only makes us interested in the answer to the question but also just generally stimulates our brain to pay closer attention and remember what it encounters.
interleaving, and it involves two related activities that promote high levels of long-term retention: (a) spacing out learning sessions over time; and (b) mixing up your practice of skills you are seeking to develop.
the power of spaced learning. Benedict Carey wrote in How We Learn that “nothing in learning science comes close in terms of immediate, significant, and reliable improvements to learning”
we use spaced learning to allow some time for the forgetting of learned material to set in, we are forced to draw material from our longer-term memory when we return to it. Spacing out learning thus forces us to engage at least partially in memory retrieval.
Our brains need time to undertake the processes of encoding, consolidating, and organizing newly learned material, and the gaps between spaced learning sessions allow it that time. If you have ever slogged your way through some difficult learning exercise, left it in frustration, and then—hours or days later—returned to it with a mysteriously firmer grasp of it than you had previously, you have experienced the phenomenon described by the authors of Make It Stick
the Mixers had to learn not only how to plug and chug the mathematical equations but also how to identify the type of problem they were seeing and to select the formula that would work for that problem. They could not work on autopilot, as a student might do in a class session in which he learns Formula A and then applies it to Problem Type A for an extended period of time, knowing that Formula A will always work for Problem Type A, and every problem he will see in the session will be Problem Type A.
You spend those first few minutes on questions and review as usual. Then, before moving on to the new material for that day's class, you give them one more new problem to complete right there in class. Make it a quick one so it doesn't eat up too much class time, but doing this will give them one more (distributed) opportunity to practice the problem-solving skill that you introduced in the last class period.
Instead of seeing the broad sweep of British literary history, with its many plots, subplots, and characters, my students see Author A and then Author B and then Author C and so on. They can analyze and remember the main works and features of each author, but they run into trouble when asked to forge connections among writers.
In short, they have knowledge, in the sense that they can produce individual pieces of information in specific contexts; what they lack is understanding or comprehension. And they lack comprehension, even more shortly, because they lack connections.
Neurons form new connections with one another with every new experience we have: new sensations, new thoughts, new actions. As the neurons are connecting to one another in novel ways, growing and strengthening new connections, they are forming networks. The first time neurons link up in a new way, that connection is a temporary or fleeting one; if that connection is used again (because we repeat the thought, or recreate an experience), the link strengthens. The more times the pathway is used, the stronger the connection.
Whatever cognitive skills you are seeking to instill in your students, and that you will be assessing for a grade, the students should have time to practice in class.
If you do have to pause and think every time you are confronted with 5 times 7, you are burdening your working memory with that task and taking up valuable space. As Willingham put it, “It is no wonder that students who have memorized math facts do better in all sorts of math tasks than students whose knowledge of math facts is absent or uncertain. And it's been shown that practicing math facts helps low-achieving students do better on more advanced mathematics” (Willingham 2014, p. 114).
Overlearned tasks are the ones we can perform unthinkingly and continue to perform in the same manner every time, in spite of potentially changing circumstances.
First, the learner must be willing to shift and develop the categories that will guide her through a cognitive task. If the learner is using theory A to guide her through a problem-solving session and finds herself stuck in a dead end, she should have the ability to recognize that theory A might need modification or even need chucking out and replacing with theory B.
Second, the learner must be attentive to new information that might be blocked from view by her usual approach. A rote learner will complete a task the same way every time, not noticing variations in the landscape or challenges within the problem that might help her further develop her skill levels.
Finally, the mindful learner recognizes that perspectives are always limited and that final conclusions are always provisional. She accepts the possibility that new and better approaches to a problem might yet arise, and she remains o...
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reminding them that reading text directly from slides can produce something called the redundancy effect, which can reduce learning, but that too much difference between what's on the slide and what they say also has been shown to reduce learning.
learners benefit from explaining out loud (to themselves or others) what they are doing during the completion of a learning task.
Self-explanation represents one very simple technique for fostering mindful learning during skill-based practice, but it also can help improve comprehension by requiring learners to make connections between their knowledge and their skills.
This meant literally that the learner saw, prior to her attempt to resolve each new step of the solution, a drop-down menu containing several possible principles that might be relevant for that step and that she had to select one of them before proceeding.
Self-explanation helps learners recognize problems in their understanding—whether those problems are gaps in their knowledge or mistaken theories or ideas—and prompts them to take productive steps forward
create or seek out learning management systems or programs that enable or require students to pause at key points during their problem-solving sessions and identify the underlying principle that will guide their next step.
backward fading, in which students were simply observing or reviewing in the first worked-out examples they encountered; in the next set of examples, they had to complete one or two steps on their own; in the next set, they completed still more of the steps; and so on until they were completing the problem on their own.
So it may be that your first efforts with small teaching forms of self-explanation should begin with pointing students to possible principles and asking them to choose.
Asking the student to pause and articulate the reason for her writing choices should help tap into the learning power of self-explanation. As she explains her choices, she might recognize how to improve what she is doing—
self-explanations in problem solving help students connect theory with practice, or principles with concrete steps, or knowledge with doing. But just as we saw with the theory of connections, which the instructor can facilitate but the student must ultimately make, you can provide lots of examples of how principles appear in practice but ultimately the students have to draw these two components together themselves. Consider, then, how you can create opportunities for self-explanation that require students to select or articulate principles as they are making choices, searching for solutions,
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George Orwell wrote, “The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions” (Orwell 1968, p. 141).
One of my favorite formulations of what drives learning comes from Ken Bain's book What the Best College Teachers Do (Bain 2004). He drew on the work of Piaget and other learning theorists to argue that students bring mental models of the world into our classes, and much of our job as instructors consists of destroying any false models they might have, enhancing the partially correct ones, and providing accurate new ones.
As we shall see from Carol Dweck's research (Dweck, 2008), how students think about intelligence and learning significantly impacts their willingness to tackle difficult cognitive tasks, their persistence through such tasks, their enjoyment of them, and even their performance of them.
contrast between two overarching types of motivation: intrinsic or internal motivation versus extrinsic or instrumental motivation. Extrinsic motivators include the rewards that the learner expects to gain from successful learning, such as prizes or accolades or praise or even grades; intrinsic motivators are the ones that drive learners for their own internal reasons, such as love of the material or a recognition of its utility in their lives or of its ultimate value on some broader scale (e.g., their personal or spiritual development).
