Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits
By Benedit Carey
As you can imagine, I read the whole thing on the spot. I fully recommend the entire article, and it’s not long.
I’d like to comment on a few things in the article. I’ll quote them in the order they appear:
Science and the school system
“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, […] In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.
[…]
[…] many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.
These paragraphs (emphasis mine) show a recurring theme of the article: the school system has not been learning from science. This is, indeed, “striking and disturbing”. But I can’t say I’m surprised. In my encounters with “education sciences” in Germany, I have to say I did not get the impression that they are very scientific. As my friend Sören Kirchner of tologo often remarks, they seem to be more in the business of reinforcing a philosophy than that of empirical science. Because “education sciences” are wedded to the traditional school system (in Germany at least, the educational sciences faculties are where accredited teacher training takes place) they typically seem rather unmotivated to produce true criticism of the beliefs that drive the traditional system. The truly critical — and I am glad to know a few such people in the faculties of a few German universities — are the exception, not the rule.
The traditional school system has stuck to the same basic paradigm since it was conceived during the Industrial revolution. Society is deeply invested in that paradigm, since the vast majority of us have been through that system, and rejecting the validity of their assumptions about learning means rejecting the validity of how we spent many (unpleasant) hours in childhood. Making that kind of concession is not easy. At this point, improving education is a matter of revolution, not evolution.
Context, relevance, context!
“What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.
Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time.
I will have to remember this next time someone tells me that students in a democratic school won’t learn anything properly because they aren’t forced to stick to a topic for 45 minutes in a static context. This research strongly suggests that the constantly changing, dynamic atmosphere of democratic schools is a terrific boon for learning. This seems right in line with the thought that having a relevant context is crucial for learning: when you learn something because it is interesting and relevant to you at that moment, you learn it better. Classrooms have a hard time providing that kind of context. A school where students explore things freely allows that relevance to happen all the time.
Exams, revisited?
[…] cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.
Tests are a learning tool? I guess you really do learn something new every day! I wrote a little about testing in July, and indeed as most people do, I treated testing as mere assessment. I stand happily corrected.
In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.
But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.
It’s good to know that testing can actually help you learn things, but if this is their usefulness, this is not reflected by the way they are treated in schools and universities. I can only emphasize what I’ve said before: the importance of exam grades must be abolished. Then perhaps tests can be useful. Making test grades important only encourages the kind of learning that gets forgotten.
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Summer break has just begun. I managed to get away without any exams this semester, for the first time. In the past weeks, like every end of semester, I find myself thinking what an awful, ridiculous system these exams really are, especially in university. I’d like to try and articulate why.
I can imagine a university where exams are hardly even relevant because people only study things they find interesting, and only so long as they are interested. Such places exist (take Tokyo Shure for example).
However, most officially-recognized undegrad programs are still based on instructors providing students with pre-packaged chunks of information, and then judging whether each student has properly digested the information. This post will be about exams in that context; my point of reference will the linguistics BA program at the University of Leipzig. As far as I know, it’s as good an example as any of a normal undergrad program in science.
Exams are bad experiments
So why are exams a bad idea when you want to check whether a bunch of science undergrads understood what you taught them? Well, one part of the problem should be obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of science: exams are not very good experiments. There is no way to control for interference of irrelevant, extraneous factors. When scientists conduct a study, in any field and with any methodology, they seek to control for irrelevant interferences. For example, when psychologists test hand-eye coordination, they’ll do something like only taking right-handed people with healthy hands and eyes, in order to make sure that the results aren’t skewed by irrelevant differences between individuals.
You can’t do anything like that in exams. For example, one of my exams once took place at a time when I was infatuated with someone. I spent about a quarter of the exam staring into blank space and thinking about things quite unrelated to linguistics. As you might expect, my grades for that semester were not spectacular. This was not a reflection of how well I understood the material in question, but rather a reflection of how capable I was of concentration at the time of the exam.
Exam stress: an antidote for learning
Not only can’t exams control for interference, they create a strongly interfering, totally irrelevant factor: stress.
Exams cause those who take them to get stressed out, usually for weeks in advance.
Google the words “stress” and “learning” together. The first result I got (of some 25 million) was this site, which says “Stress can disrupt learning and memory development”. Huh. That sounds like a great way to lower people’s performance on a test.
One obvious remedy is to train people so they’re used to taking tests and don’t get so stressed out. This is what traditional schools do, and perhaps why they do it.
For some reason, that really doesn’t work for most people. I’m guessing that the way schools make a big deal out of exams rather trains people to think exams are a big deal and worry about whether they’ll pass. What also doesn’t help much is that the resulting grades are relevant to one’s progress in a degree program as well as one’s chances of getting accepted for further studies or a job.
Exams are bad science
But even if we accept that it’s schools’ job to prepare students for the stress of university exams, what are those exams preparing them for? Surely, it can’t be their future work as scientists. Exams are good preparation for bad science.
A scientist’s job is essentially the opposite of exam-taking.
Exam-taking is swallowing a more experienced person’s presentation of information (course material), then regurgitating small bits of it as closely as possible to the original (“the right answers”). Science is carefully considering information (raw data) and other people’s presentations of information (prior work), carefully deciding whether or not to swallow it, then, optionally, producing a novel presentation of the information (research), which is considered useless if it’s in small bits that are exactly like they were when you got them.
The whole idea of one person telling the beginners how it is and expecting them to accept it is bad science. Obviously, my instructors are far more experienced and knowledgeable than me in their respective fields. Still, it would not be very good if I accepted everything they taught me unquestioningly.
If I take my role as a budding scientist seriously, I should critically examine everything I am taught and decide for myself whether I agree or disagree (and why). Exams tell me the opposite, and it takes real effort to continue thinking critically while I am expected to soon be able to reproduce the instructor’s view.
Worse still, in some introductory courses, the theory being taught is not perfect: instructors use simplified or “toy” versions of the theories being taught, or perhaps just a rather recent theory which is more a work in progress than the final word about anything. Either way, attentive students might notice inconsistencies or incoherences. This is good for undergrads; they can be inspired and take the theories further. That value is diminished by needing to swallow theories whole for a test.
Some suggestions
I could probably think of another point or two against exams, but instead I will dedicate the end of this post to pointing out a few things that might make the situation better:
Abolish the importance of exam grades.
This is the most important thing, but also likely the most difficult. Exam grades should not be available to anyone but the student and instructor. It might make sense to indicate on a degree whether the holder’s grades were consistently above average — this might potentially be an indication of extraordinary ability. But knowing that even the best exams are inaccurate and susceptible to extraneous variables, it does not make sense to prefer B students to C students.
Make feedback the goal of all exams.
Finding out I got a C on an exam doesn’t help me improve. Telling me what the weak and strong points of my exam were, could. I learned a lot on the few occasions where I’ve asked an instructor to go over the exam and tell me what my mistakes were. This value as a learning tool is wasted by not presenting all exam takers with feedback. (Some instructors do this, but all should.)
Make some or all exams optional.
If the goal of exams is to give feedback, then save it for those who want it. Mandatory exams create unnecessary stress. There are plenty of other ways to run a system like the modular European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, in which it is essential to judge whether a student really took part in their courses.
Replace some exams with real work.
Writing a term paper takes more effort than writing an exam, but you learn new things from it and experience something akin to actual academic work. Some disciplines have other “simulations” of real work which could be graded as tests. Sure, this requires more effort per test from the staff, but grading something other than an exam may be a welcome change. And perhaps a system could be created where more advanced students grade beginners’ work and get graded for their grading work (being real academic work practice itself).
Filter students in conversation, not testing.
I get the impression that one of the main reasons I had to take so many exams in the first year of my studies was to filter out students who are not really interested in the program they chose. (I’ve mentioned before that some people choose their major at random here, and if that’s as common as I think, filtering is a good idea.)
I imagine a ten-minute conversation with each student after their first semester could replace some or all of that testing. If the courses didn’t do the trick, simply asking the students if they want to continue with this major, and if yes then why, will get them thinking about those questions themselves. With all of the second chances people are given after failing, it’s their choice anyway; a short conversation could save a lot of exam creation, administration and grading. And of course, this could be done by advanced students as well as by faculty.
Clearly, all change in the university system is slow. Certainly, there are many different changes that can be made. I hope I have provided a few good points of critique and a few good ideas on how to improve the system. Further ideas, comments, and criticism are most welcome in comments.
