Students use a variety of techniques to study and learn, and perhaps they are influenced by advice from parents and teachers. Study one subject at a time. Study in the same quiet space. No distractions. Stick to a set schedule.
Similarly, educators are often admonished that they should adjust their teaching methods to fit individual learning styles and the attention spans of younger students. Instructors who stand in front of the class and lecture, for instance, are sometimes made to feel like Luddites, or humanoids from antiquity who should get with the program or limp off to oblivion.
Some teachers allow students to choose their own method of testing, under a well-reported assumption that the human brain consists of relatively discrete lobes and hemispheres that should be accommodated with customized pedagogy.
Well, it turns out all this is flat wrong, according to an article in the "Mind" segment of a recent issue in the New York Times, by science journalist Benedict Carey.
Mr. Carey surveys the extant research on the subject—studies and surveys that often display surprising characteristics. It's not a bad strategy, for instance, for students to study in short bursts that are interrupted frequently with other activities. (The author doesn't say so, but the idea resembles the phenomenon many individuals experience with crossword puzzles. It helps for some reason to put the puzzle aside when stumped, and return later for the correct information to kick in.)
The article does confirm a few prevalent tips for students that many probably know already, based on personal experience. For instance, cramming right before an exam does not lead to long-term retention of information. And frequent self-testing prior to the real thing seems to help a great deal.
Here's an excerpt from the NYT piece:
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” 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.
Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. “We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”
But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, 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.
Distractions in and out. That's our worst enemy. We should knock that out by exploring more teaching techniques that will help our students fully understand the subject matter. It's a daunting task to keep their attention; good thing there are technologies which can be used to catch and keep their attention. :)
Posted by: Dolly Paolucci | July 27, 2011 at 03:59 PM