A few years ago, I asked this
question on a final exam in my graduate course on human learning and memory. I
recently came across photocopies of the answers students gave. At first, I was
puzzled as to why I had made those photocopies. But as I looked through them, I
remembered that I had made those copies because I was impressed with how well a
number of students had answered that particular question.
Many of the answers were not
only good answers, but were also characterized by a certain enthusiasm -
triggered, perhaps, by the challenge of trying to tell something useful to an
actual or imagined younger sibling. One student commented, for example, that
"first of all, I would explain to my sister that people are not, in
general, good judges of what's best for them in studying and learning. So, she
should listen to me very carefully, since some recommendations may seem
counterintuitive."
One student wrote the following
preamble to her answer: "I have learned a variety of techniques that I
would share with a younger sibling, but since I don't actually have a younger
sibling, I plan to use the techniques myself."
Following are samples of the
advice my students said they would provide to a younger sibling on taking
notes, studying, and preparing for exams.
ON TAKING NOTES
ú "In taking notes in class and from
readings, to the extent possible, try to listen or read the entire idea, then
write down notes based on what you've heard or read. Often we are tempted to
write quickly to get down as much as possible while the professor is speaking
or while we are reading paragraph by paragraph. Waiting to write down notes
until the entire 'idea' has been presented can be a method of creating meaning
for yourself. You won't be distracted between trying to write and trying to
listen. And you can use the notetaking part of your activity as a way to
organize what you've learned. Summarize it and make it meaningful for yourself
rather than blind verbatim notetaking."
ú "Find out what types of tests you
will need to take in a given course and consider taking notes consistent with
such tests. For instance, rather than only following the outline in class, you
might try, when studying, to reorganize your notes around some central concepts
if it will be an essay test. Try to make the processes you study with similar
to those you will need at test; this is transfer-appropriate processing."
ú "Avoid studying as passive reading
of text and notes. Summarize readings and notes, generate new examples of
material, and group/chunk information into meaningful categories. Doing so will
maximize the encoding/associations to memories already in place and will also
incorporate the benefits of generation - better memory for examples and
structures that you yourself generate."
ON STUDYING
ú "Don't study everything at once;
rather, space out your study sessions. This will allow for some forgetting,
which is necessary for effective relearning. It will also increase how strongly
the info is stored in your long-term memory, because the info will be encoded
multiple times across multiple conditions."
ú "You should space your study of
different topics rather than going through them one at a time until finished.
Spaced study sessions work better than massed study sessions, but if you
socialize too much and have to do it all the night before, mass your study
because massing produces better recall on the short term (try to avoid this,
however)."
ú "Don't always study at your desk
in your room. Why? Contextual variation results in higher recall and lower
retroactive interference. Introduce variety: Study in the library, alone, with
friends, with and w/out background noise, in your room, indoors/outdoors. This
will maximize the # of retrieval cues available for recall of any piece of
info. (& so ^ recall) and result in less cue overload (fewer items of info
associated per cue). (Don't even sit in the same seat every lecture, if you
don't have to.)"
ú "Elaborate on what you study.
Connect it to what you already know. Incorporate it into your general
knowledge. Make it rich and semantic (you won't have a fragment-completion
test)."
ú "Go to lecture. Even if the same
material is covered in the lecture and book, the instructor - if he or she is
good - will provide a different organization of the material. Different
organizations lead to better performance on inference tasks (which are heavily
tested in college, hopefully) than does providing the same organization. And study
with other people. The argument is much the same: You'll benefit from the
different organizations imposed by the other students."
ú "Always read the material in
advance - thus, the lecture serves as study and, to some extent, retrieval
practice. And you will be able to learn more information from the lectures by
association to cognitive structures that the readings put in place."
ON PREPARING FOR AND PERFORMING
ON AN EXAM
ú "Educate your subjective
experience. Make real assessments of what you know and don't know. That means
when you're studying for math and statistics, do the problems without looking
at the answers. With the answer in front of you, you'll feel as though you
could answer the problem, but that may not be true."
ú "Be wary of professors who make
you feel as though you know all there is to know about a subject. Your
impression may be based on the crutch of his or her understanding rather than
on your own."
ú "At the end of each study session,
generate recall questions that could potentially be tested on an exam and then
begin the next study session by answering them. This - number one - has the
tremendous benefit of creating organization of information, fostering elaborate
and complex encoding, and - number two - constitutes transfer-appropriate
retrieval processes for the exam. Answering questions at each study interval
will also potentiate subsequent learning by showing you what you don't know
(educating your subjective experience)."
ú "Use retrieval practice when
studying. That is, test yourself on the material rather than just reading it
over and over, because retrieval practice is more potent than reading, and it
is more like the actual test."
ú "When you take the test, mentally
reinstate your study conditions. Remember where you were, what you did, and so
forth."
It might be a relatively rare
event when an issue of the Observer falls into the hands of a
college-bound high school senior (although APS increasingly has been reaching
out to high school teachers and students, so it's not as rare as you might
think). Nonetheless, I thought it might be useful to make some of my students'
answers available in this column. After all, readers of the Observer
tend to be keenly interested in learning and teaching, and many of us are
parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and friends of college-bound
students. And aside from any concern we may have for a real or hypothetical
younger sibling, it is in our self-interest to learn how to learn.
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March 2001 |
©2001 American Psychological Society
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Observer
Source: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/0301/prescol.html