that needs more work. But few students practice these strategies, and those who do will need more than encouragement if they are to practice them effectively: It turns out that even when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the lasting benefi t. For example, when students are presented with a body of material to master, say a stack of foreign vocabulary fl ashcards, and are free to decide when to drop a card out of the deck because they’ve learned it, most students drop the card when they’ve gotten it right once or twice, far sooner than they should. The paradox is that those students who employ the least effective study strategies overestimate their learning the most and, as a consequence of their misplaced confi dence, they are not inclined to change their habits.
The football player preparing for next Saturday’s game doesn’t leave his per for mance to intuition, he runs through his plays and mixes it up to discover the rough edges and work them out on the fi eld well before suiting up for the big game.
If this kind of behavior were anywhere close to the norm for students in their academics today, then self- directed learning would be highly effective. But of course the football player is not self- directed, his practice is guided by a coach. Likewise, most students will learn academics better under an instructor who knows where improvement is needed and structures the practice required to achieve it.19
The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us. When we have reliable reference points, like cockpit instruments, and make a habit of checking them, we can make good decisions about where to focus our efforts, recognize when we’ve lost our bearings, and fi nd our way back again. Here are some examples.
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Tools and Habits for Calibrating
Your Judgment
Most important is to make frequent use of testing and retrieval practice to verify what you really do know versus what you think you know. Frequent low- stakes quizzes in class help the instructor verify that students are in fact learning as well as they appear to be and reveal the areas where extra attention is needed. Doing cumulative quizzing, as Andy Sobel does in his po liti cal economics course, is especially powerful for consolidating learning and knitting the concepts from one stage of a course into new material encountered later. As a learner, you can use any number of practice techniques to self-test your mastery, from answering fl ashcards to explaining key concepts in your own words, and to peer instruction (see below).
Don’t make the mistake of dropping material from your testing regime once you’ve gotten it correct a couple of times.
If it’s important, it needs to be practiced, and practiced again.
And don’t put stock in momentary gains that result from massed practice. Space your testing, vary your practice, keep the long view.
Peer instruction, a learning model developed by Eric Mazur, incorporates many of the foregoing principles. The material to be covered in class is assigned for reading beforehand. In class, the lecture is interspersed with quick tests that present students with a conceptual question and give them a minute or two to grapple with it; they then try, in small groups, to reach a consensus on the correct answer. In Mazur’s experience, this pro cess engages the students in the underlying concepts of the lecture material; reveals students’ problems in
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reaching understanding; and provides opportunities for them to explain their understanding, receive feedback, and assess their learning compared to other students. Likewise, the pro-cess serves as a gauge for the instructor of how well the students are assimilating the material and in what areas more or less work is needed. Mazur tries to pair students who initially had different answers to a question so that they can see another point of view and try to convince one another of who is right.
For two more examples of this technique, see the profi les of the professors Mary Pat Wenderoth and Michael D. Matthews in Chapter 8.20
Pay attention to the cues you’re using to judge what you have learned. Whether something feels familiar or fl uent is not always a reliable indicator of learning. Neither is your level of ease in retrieving a fact or a phrase on a quiz shortly after encountering it in a lecture or text. (Ease of retrieval after a delay, however, is a good indicator of learning.) Far better is to create a mental model of the material that integrates the various ideas across a text, connects them to what you already know, and enables you to draw inferences. How ably you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging comprehension, because you must recall the salient points from memory, put them into your own words, and explain why they are signifi cant— how they relate to the larger subject.
Instructors should give corrective feedback, and learners should seek it. In his interview with Errol Morris, the psychologist David Dunning argues that the path to self- insight leads through other people. “So it really depends on what sort
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of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often fi nd there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. ‘I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on.’ ” Think of the kids lining up to join the softball team— would you be picked?21
In many fi elds, the practice of peer review serves as an external gauge, providing feedback on one’s per for mance. Most medical practice groups have morbidity/mortality conferences, and if a doctor has a bad patient outcome, it will be presented there. The other doctors will pick it apart, or say
“You did a good job, it was just a bad situation.” Mike Ebersold argues that people in his fi eld should practice as a part of a group. “If there are other neurosurgeons around you, it’s a safeguard. If you’re doing something that’s not acceptable, they’ll call you to task for it.”
In many settings, your judgment and learning are calibrated by working alongside a more experienced partner: airline fi rst offi cers with captains, rookies with seasoned cops, residents with experienced surgeons. The apprentice model is a very old one in human experience, as novices (whether cobblers or attorneys) have traditionally learned their craft from experienced practitioners.
In other settings, teams are formed of people with complementary areas of expertise. When doctors implant medical devices like pacemakers and neural stimulators of the type that treat incontinence or the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, the manufacturer has a product representative right in the operating room with the surgeon. The rep has seen many
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surgeries using the device, knows the kinds of patients that will benefi t from it, knows the contraindications and adverse events, and has a hotline to the engineers and clinicians on the company’s staff. The rep tracks the surgery to make sure the device is implanted in the correct position, the leads are in-serted to the correct depth, and so on. Every part of the team benefi ts. The patient is assured of an appropriate and successful surgery. The doctor gets product and troubleshooting expertise at her fi ngertips. And the company makes sure its products are used correctly.
Training that simulates the kinds of demands and changeable conditions that can be expected in real- world settings helps learners and trainers assess mastery and focus on areas where understanding or competency need to be raised. Take police work, where many different forms of simulation are used in training. For fi rearms training it’s often video- based scenarios, with a large screen set up at one end of a room where a number of props have been placed to imitate the situation confronting the offi cer, who enters the scene armed with a gun that has been modifi ed to interact with the video.
Lieutenant Catherine Johnson of the Minneapolis Police Department describes a couple of such simulations in which she has trained:
One was a traffi c stop. The training room had the screen at one end and objects around the room— a big blue mailbox, a fi re hydrant, a doorway— that you could use for cover in dealing with what was happening on the screen. I remember walking toward the screen, and the video simulating my coming up to the car as I did that, very realistic, and suddenly the trunk popped up and a guy with a shotgun rose out and shot me.
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Which, to this day, every time I go up to a car on a traffi c stop, I push down hard on the trunk to make sure it isn’t open. And it’s because of that one scenario in the training that I went through.
Another fi rearm simulation was a domestic call, and it starts where I am approaching the residence and there’s a guy on his porch. The instant I show up I see that he has a gun in his hand. I order him to drop it, and the fi rst thing he does is turn and start walking away. And my thinking at that point is that I can’t shoot this guy in the back, and there’s nobody over there that looks to be in danger, so what am I going to do? In the time it takes me to pro cess whether or not I should shoot this guy, he’s already turned around and shot me. Because my reaction was slower than his action. Action beats reaction every time. That’s one mantra that’s drilled into our minds.22
The fi rearms simulations can play out in a variety of ways both deadly and peaceful. There’s not so much a right or wrong answer to the situation as there is a complex set of factors, some of which, like whether the individual on the porch has a criminal history, may be known to the offi cer when she enters the scene. At the conclusion, the offi cer debriefs with her trainer, getting feedback. The exercise isn’t all about technique, it’s about clear thinking and appropriate refl exes—
visual and verbal clues to watch for, possible outcomes, being clear about the appropriate use of deadly force, and fi nding the words after the fact that will account for actions you have taken in the urgency of the moment.
Simulation is not perfect. Johnson recounts how offi cers are trained to take a gun from an assailant at close quarters, a maneuver they practice by role- playing with a fellow offi cer.
It requires speed and deftness: striking an assailant’s wrist with one hand to break his grip while simultaneously wresting the
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gun free with the other. It’s a move that offi cers had been in the habit of honing through repetition, taking the gun, handing it back, taking it again. Until one of their offi cers, on a call in the fi eld, took the gun from an assailant and handed it right back again. In their mutual astonishment, the offi cer managed to reseize the gun and hang onto it. The training regime had violated the cardinal rule that you should practice like you play, because you will play like you practice.
Sometimes the most powerful feedback for calibrating your sense of what you do and don’t know are the mistakes you make in the fi eld, assuming you survive them and are receptive to the lesson.23
6
Get Beyond Learning Styles
All learners are different, and all rising to a great place, as Francis Bacon tells us, is by a winding stair.1
Consider the story of Bruce Hendry, born in 1942, raised on the banks of the Mississippi north of Minneapolis by a machinist and a homemaker, just another American kid with skinned knees and fi re in the belly to get rich. When we talk about self- made men, the story often sounds familiar. This is not that story. Bruce Hendry is self- made, but the story is in the winding stair, how he found his way, and what it helps us understand about differences in how people learn.
The idea that individuals have distinct learning styles has been around long enough to become part of the folklore of educational practice and an integral part of how many people perceive themselves. The underlying premise says that people receive and pro cess new information differently: for example, 131
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some learn better from visual materials, and others learn better from written text or auditory materials. Moreover, the theory holds that people who receive instruction in a manner that is not matched to their learning style are at a disadvantage for learning.
In this chapter, we acknowledge that everyone has learning preferences, but we are not persuaded that you learn better when the manner of instruction fi ts those preferences. Yet there are other kinds of differences in how people learn that do matter. First, the story of Bruce, to help frame our argument.
Active Learning from the Get- Go
Part of the secret to Bruce is his sense, from the earliest age, of being the one in charge of Bruce. When he was two his mother, Doris, told him he couldn’t cross the street because a car might hit him. Every day, Bruce crossed the street, and every day Doris gave him a spanking. “He was born aggressive,” Doris told friends.
At eight he bought a ball of string at a garage sale for a dime, cut it up, and sold the pieces for a nickel each. At ten he got a paper route. At eleven he added caddying. At twelve he stuffed his pocket with $30 in savings, sneaked out of his bed-room window before dawn with an empty suitcase, and hitch-hiked 255 miles to Aberdeen, South Dakota. He stocked up on Black Cats, cherry bombs, and roman candles, illegal in Minnesota, and hitched home before supper. Over the next week, Doris couldn’t fi gure out why all the paperboys were dropping by the house for a few minutes and leaving. Bruce had struck gold, but the paper route supervisor found out and tipped off Bruce Se nior. The father told the son if he ever did it again he’d get the licking of his life. Bruce repeated the buying trip the following summer and got the promised licking.
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