How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

by Benedict Carey

The people who have worked hardest to turn the spacing effect into a practical strategy for everyday learning have one thing in common: They’re teachers, as well as researchers. If students are cramming and not retaining anything, it’s not all their fault. A good class should make the material stick, and spaced review (in class) is one way to do that.

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“I get sick of people taking my psych intro class and coming back next year and not remembering anything,” Melody Wiseheart, a psychologist at York University in Toronto, told me. “It’s a waste of time and money; people pay a lot for college. As a teacher, too, you want to teach so that people learn and remember: That’s your job. You certainly want to know when it’s best to review key concepts—what’s the best time, given the spacing effect, to revisit material? What is the optimal schedule for students preparing for a test?”

The researchers compared all twenty-six different study schedules, and calculated the best intervals given different test dates. “To put it simply, if you want to know the optimal distribution of your study time, you need to decide how long you wish to remember something,” Wiseheart and Pashler’s group wrote. The optimal interval ranges can be read off a simple chart: Have a close look. These numbers aren’t exact; there’s wiggle room on either side. But they’re close.

Hvor lang tid kn du firventes at huske viden su har laert

the test is in a week, and you want to split your study time in two, then do a session today and tomorrow, or today and the day after tomorrow. If you want to add a third, study the day before the test (just under a week later). If the test is a month away, then the best option is today, a week from today (for two sessions); for a third, wait three more weeks or so, until a day before the test. The further away the exam—that is, the more the time you have to prepare—the larger the optimal interval between sessions one and two. That optimal first interval declines as a proportion of the time-to-test, the Internet study found. If the test is in a week, the best interval is a day or two (20 to 40 percent). If it’s in six months, the best interval is three to five weeks (10 to 20 percent). Wait any longer between study sessions, and performance goes down fairly quickly. For most students, in college, high school, or middle school, Wiseheart told me, “It basically means you’re working with intervals of one day, two days, or one week. That should take care of most situations.” Let’s take an example. Say there’s a German exam in three months or so at the end of the semester. Most of us will spend at least two months of that time learning what it is we need to know for the exam, leaving at most a few weeks to review, if that (graduate students excepted). Let’s say fifteen days, that’s our window. For convenience, let’s give ourselves nine hours total study time for that exam. The ...

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the test is in a week, and you want to split your study time in two, then do a session today and tomorrow, or today and the day after tomorrow. If you want to add a third, study the day before the test (just under a week later). If the test is a month away, then the best option is today, a week from today (for two sessions); for a third, wait three more weeks or so, until a day before the test. The further away the exam—that is, the more the time you have to prepare—the larger the optimal interval between sessions one and two. That optimal first interval declines as a proportion of the time-to-test, the Internet study found. If the test is in a week, the best interval is a day or two (20 to 40 percent). If it’s in six months, the best interval is three to five weeks (10 to 20 percent). Wait any longer between study sessions, and performance goes down fairly quickly. For most students, in college, high school, or middle school, Wiseheart told me, “It basically means you’re working with intervals of one day, two days, or one week. That should take care of most situations.” Let’s take an example. Say there’s a German exam in three months or so at the end of the semester. Most of us will spend at least two months of that time learning what it is we need to know for the exam, leaving at most a few weeks to review, if that (graduate students excepted). Let’s say fifteen days, that’s our window. For convenience, let’s give ourselves nine hours total study time for that exam. The ...

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1901 book Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals,

Bog der skal laeses

“gene.” No, my mistake was misjudging the depth of what I knew. I was duped by what psychologists call fluency, the belief that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember right now, they’ll remain that way tomorrow or the next day. The fluency illusion is so strong that, once we feel we’ve nailed some topic or assignment, we assume that further study won’t help. We forget that we forget. Any number of study “aids” can create fluency illusions, including (yes) highlighting, making a study guide, and even chapter outlines provided by a teacher or a textbook. Fluency misperceptions are automatic. They form subconsciously and make us poor judges of what we need to restudy, or practice again.

Fluency. Vi glemmer, at vi glemmer

“We know that if you study something twice, in spaced sessions, it’s harder to process the material the second time, and so people think it’s counterproductive,” as Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College, told me. “But the opposite is true: You learn more, even though it feels harder. Fluency is playing a trick on judgment.” So it is that we end up attributing our poor test results to “test anxiety” or—too often—stupidity.

Vi misforsyaar hvordan vi laerer

The harder your brain has to work to dig out a memory, the greater the increase in learning (retrieval and storage strength). Fluency, then, is the flipside of that equation. The easier it is to call a fact to mind, the smaller the increase in learning. Repeating facts right after you’ve studied them gives you nothing, no added memory benefit. The fluency illusion is the primary culprit in below-average test performances. Not anxiety. Not stupidity. Not unfairness or bad luck. Fluency.

Laeringsindsigt

“If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.” And

“A curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition.

“In general,” he concluded, “the best results are obtained by introducing recitation after devoting about 40 percent of the time to reading. Introducing recitation too early or too late leads to poorer results,”

“The superiority of optimal reading and retention over reading alone is about 30 percent.”

spend the first third of your time memorizing it, and the remaining two thirds reciting from memory.

It’s a test, and Gates had shown that that self-exam had a profound effect on final performance. That is to say: Testing is studying, of a different and powerful kind.

“Achievement tests or examinations are learning devices and should not be considered only as tools for measuring achievement of pupils.”

assignment: Read the two selections below, four or five times. Spend five minutes on each, then put them aside and carry on with your chores and shirking of same. Both come from a chapter called “Bores” in O’Nolan’s book The Best of Myles: Passage 1: The Man Who Can Pack This monster watches you try to stuff the contents of two wardrobes into an attaché case. You succeed, of course, but have forgotten to put in your golf clubs. You curse grimly but your “friend” is delighted. He knew this would happen. He approaches, offers consolation and advises you to go downstairs and take things easy while he “puts things right.” Some days later, when you unpack your things in Glengariff, you find that he has not only got your golf clubs in but has included your bedroom carpet, the kit of the Gas Company man who has been working in your room, two ornamental vases and a card-table. Everything in view, in fact, except your razor. You have to wire 7 pounds to Cork to get a new leather bag (made of cardboard) to get all this junk home. Passage 2: The Man Who Soles His Own Shoes Quite innocently you complain about the quality of present-day footwear. You wryly exhibit a broken sole. “Must take them in tomorrow,” you say vaguely. The monster is flabbergasted at this passive attitude, has already forced you into an armchair, pulled your shoes off and vanished with them into the scullery. He is back in an incredibly short space of time and restored your property to you announcing that the sho...

En test

all. In fact, testing > studying, and by a country mile, on delayed tests.

But what if, instead, you took a test on Day 1 that was comprehensive but not a replica of the final exam? You’d bomb the thing, to be sure. You might not be able to understand a single question. And yet that experience, given what we’ve just learned about testing, might alter how you subsequently tune into the course itself during the rest of the term. This is the idea behind pretesting, the latest permutation of the testing effect. In a series of experiments, psychologists like Roediger, Karpicke, the Bjorks, and Kornell have found that, in some circumstances, unsuccessful retrieval attempts—i.e., wrong answers—aren’t merely random failures. Rather, the attempts themselves alter how we think about, and store, the information contained in the questions. On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we learn from answering incorrectly—especially when given the correct answer soon afterward. That is, guessing wrongly increases a person’s likelihood of nailing that question, or a related one, on a later test. That’s a sketchy-sounding proposition on its face, it’s true. Bombing tests on stuff you don’t know sounds more like a recipe for discouragement and failure than an effective learning strategy. The best way to appreciate this is to try it yourself. That means taking another test.

And so on. You’ve just taken a test on which you’ve guessed, if you’re anything like me, mostly wrong. Has taking that test improved your knowledge of those twelve capitals? Of course it has. Your friend gave you the answers after each question. Nothing surprising there. We’re not quite done, though. That was Phase 1 of our experiment, pretesting. Phase 2 will be what we think of as traditional studying. For that, you will need to choose another twelve unfamiliar nations, with the correct answer listed alongside, and then sit down and try to memorize them. Nigeria—Abuja. Eritrea—Asmara. Gambia—Banjul. Take the same amount of time—two minutes—as you took on the multiple-choice test. That’s it. You’re done for the day.

English: The act of guessing engaged your mind in a different and more demanding way than straight memorization did, deepening the imprint of the correct answers. In even plainer English, the pretest drove home the information in a way that studying-as-usual did not.

If you’re studying just the correct answer, you don’t appreciate all the other possible answers that could come to mind or appear on the test.” Taking a practice test provides us something else as well—a glimpse of the teacher’s hand. “Even when you get wrong answers, it seems to improve subsequent study,”

You can teach facts and concepts all you want, but what’s most important in the end is how students think about that material—how they organize it, mentally, and use it to make judgments about what’s important and what’s less so.

Pretesting is most helpful when people get prompt feedback

“is that on the basis of preliminary data, giving students a pretest on topics to be covered in a lecture improves their ability to answer related questions about those topics on a later final exam.”

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Testing—recitation, self-examination, pretesting, call it what you like—is an enormously powerful technique capable of much more than simply measuring knowledge. It vanquishes the fluency trap that causes so many of us to think that we’re poor test takers. It amplifies the value of our study time. And it gives us—in the case of pretesting—a detailed, specific preview of how we should begin to think about approaching a topic.

“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.” Pretend that the book already exists. Pretend you already know. Pretend you already can play something by Sabicas, that you already inhaled the St. Crispin’s Day speech, that you have philosophy logic nailed to the door. Pretend you already are an expert and give a summary, a commentary—pretend and perform.

trying as hard as I can to quote from the paper its main points. Many teachers have said that you don’t really know a topic until you have to teach it, until you have to make it clear to someone else. Exactly right.

You have to let go of your first ideas, reexamine every detail you’re given, and try to think more expansively.

that incubation is often—perhaps entirely—subconscious. The brain is scanning the environment, outside of conscious awareness, looking for clues.

“selective forgetting.” A fixating (misleading) word temporarily blocks other possible answers, they argued,

Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod included thirty-seven of the most rigorous studies and concluded that the incubation effect is real, all right, but that it does not work the same in all circumstances. Sio and Ormerod divided incubation breaks into three categories. One was relaxing, like lying on the couch listening to music. Another was mildly active, like surfing the Internet. The third was highly engaging, like writing a short essay or digging into other homework. For math or spatial problems, like the Pencil Problem, people benefit from any of these three; it doesn’t seem to matter which you choose. For linguistic problems like RAT puzzles or anagrams, on the other hand, breaks consisting of mild activity—videogames, solitaire, TV—seem to work best.

Sio and Ormerod found that longer incubation periods were better than short ones, although “long” in this world means about twenty minutes and “short” closer to five minutes—a narrow range determined by nothing more than the arbitrary choices of researchers. They also emphasized that people don’t benefit from an incubation break unless they have reached an impasse.

We already take breaks from problem solving anyway, most of us, flopping down in front of the TV for a while or jumping on Facebook or calling a friend—we take breaks and feel guilty about it. The science of insight says not only that our guilt is misplaced. It says that many of those breaks help when we’re stuck.

Speciale bog

The weight of this research turns the creeping hysteria over the dangers of social media and distracting electronic gadgets on its head. The fear that digital products are undermining our ability to think is misplaced. To the extent that such diversions steal our attention from learning that requires continuous focus—like a lecture, for instance, or a music lesson—of course they get in our way. The same is true if we spend half our study time on Facebook, or watching TV. The exact opposite is true, however, when we (or our kids) are stuck on a problem requiring insight and are motivated to solve it. In this case, distraction is not a hindrance: It’s a valuable weapon.

He was in the back with his friends, the most restless part of the auditorium, where kids were constantly distracting one another. He got the imposed break created by the SEQUENC_ puzzle, which held the audience’s attention for a few minutes. He also had the twenty minutes or so that passed after several students had drawn their first (and fixed) ideas, attempting to put all the triangles onto a flat plane. That is, he had all three types of the breaks that Sio and Ormerod described: relaxation, mild activity, and highly engaging activity. This was a spatial puzzle; any one of those could have thrown the switch, and having three is better than having just one, or two.

I don’t get my best ideas while actually writing.”

Joseph Heler. Author of catch 22

Lewin and Zeigarnik came up with a hypothesis: Perhaps unfinished jobs or goals linger in memory longer than finished ones. If nothing else, Zeigarnik now had her research project. She put the question more specifically: What’s the difference in memory between an interrupted activity and an uninterrupted one?

story: On average, participants remembered 90 percent more of the interrupted and unfinished assignments than the ones they’d completed. Not only that, the interrupted and unfinished jobs were at the top of their lists—the first ones they wrote down. The completed ones, if remembered at all, came at the end. “So far as amount of time is concerned, the advantage should lie with completed tasks, since a subject who completed a task naturally spent a longer time with it than one who did not,” Zeigarnik wrote.

experiment: People remembered about 90 percent more of the small jobs they hadn’t finished.

Running still more trials, Zeigarnik found that she could maximize the effect of interruption on memory by stopping people at the moment when they were most engrossed in their work. Interestingly, being interrupted at the “worst” time seemed to extend memory the longest.

The Zeigarnik effect, as it’s now known, became a foundational contribution to the study of goals and goal formation.

Zeigarnik’s studies on interruption revealed a couple of the mind’s intrinsic biases, or built-in instincts, when it comes to goals. The first is that the act of starting work on an assignment often gives that job the psychological weight of a goal, even if it’s meaningless.

The second is that interrupting yourself when absorbed in an assignment extends its life in memory and—according to her experiments—pushes it to the top of your mental to-do list.

This kind of interruption creates suspense and, according to the Zeigarnik effect, pushes the unfinished episode, chapter, or project to the top of our minds, leaving us to wonder what comes next.

the Bisaldrops remembered twice as many drink-related items as the control group. They were thirsty, and that influenced what they noticed in the office and remembered later, even if they weren’t aware why they recalled those things.

The experiment was a clever demonstration of a fairly straightforward principle of social psychology: Having a goal foremost in mind (in this case, a drink), tunes our perceptions to fulfilling it. And that tuning determines, to some extent, where we look and what we notice. “The results suggest that basic needs and motives cause a heightened perceptual readiness to register environmental cues that are instrumental to satisfying those needs,” the authors concluded. “It

You ate more likel to wnt t build riches when all you see and fel is poverty.

The experiment was a clever demonstration of a fairly straightforward principle of social psychology: Having a goal foremost in mind (in this case, a drink), tunes our perceptions to fulfilling it. And that tuning determines, to some extent, where we look and what we notice. “The results suggest that basic needs and motives cause a heightened perceptual readiness to register environmental cues that are instrumental to satisfying those needs,” the authors concluded. “It

It is not enough to see you having something. You also need to feel the need to have it, in ordsr to tune your yes and mind in to get it.

In dozens of studies going back decades, psychologists have shown that this principle of tuned perception applies not only to elemental needs like thirst, but to any goal we hold foremost in mind.

“Once a goal becomes activated, it trumps all others and begins to drive our perceptions, our thoughts, our attitudes,” as John Bargh, a psychologist at Yale University, told me.

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