Explain to Students How Learning Works Students labor under many myths and illusions about learning that cause them to make some unfortunate choices about intellectual risk taking and about when and how to study. It’s the proper role of the teacher to explain what empirical studies have discovered about how people learn, so the student can better manage his or her own education.

In par tic u lar, students must be helped to understand such fundamental ideas as these:

• Some kinds of diffi culties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered.

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• When learning is easy, it is often superfi cial and soon forgotten.

• Not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability.

• You learn better when you wrestle with new problems before being shown the solution, rather than the other way around.

• To achieve excellence in any sphere, you must strive to surpass your current level of ability.

• Striving, by its nature, often results in setbacks, and setbacks are often what provide the essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery.

These topics, woven throughout the book, are discussed in depth in Chapters 4 and 7.

Teach Students How to Study

Students generally are not taught how to study, and when they are, they often get the wrong advice. As a result, they gravitate to activities that are far from optimal, like rereading, massed practice, and cramming.

At the beginning of this chapter we present effective study strategies. Students will benefi t from teachers who help them understand these strategies and stick with them long enough to experience their benefi ts, which may initially appear doubtful.

Create Desirable Diffi culties in the Classroom Where practical, use frequent quizzing to help students consolidate learning and interrupt the pro cess of forgetting. Make

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the ground rules acceptable to your students and yourself.

Students fi nd quizzing more acceptable when it is predictable and the stakes for any individual quiz are low. Teachers fi nd quizzing more acceptable when it is simple, quick, and does not lead to negotiating makeup quizzes. (For one example, consider the way Kathleen McDermott, whose work we describe below, uses daily quizzing in her university class on human learning and memory.)

Create study tools that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and elaboration. These might be exercises that require students to wrestle with trying to solve a new kind of problem before coming to the class where the solution is taught; practice tests that students can download and use to review material and to calibrate their judgments of what they know and don’t know; writing exercises that require students to refl ect on past lesson material and relate it to other knowledge or other aspects of their lives; exercises that require students to generate short statements that summarize the key ideas of recent material covered in a text or lecture.

Make quizzing and practice exercises count toward the course grade, even if for very low stakes. Students in classes where practice exercises carry consequences for the course grade learn better than those in classes where the exercises are the same but carry no consequences.

Design quizzing and exercises to reach back to concepts and learning covered earlier in the term, so that retrieval practice continues and the learning is cumulative, helping students to construct more complex mental models, strengthen conceptual learning, and develop deeper understanding of the relationships between ideas or systems. (For an example, read in Chapter 2 how Andy Sobel uses cumulative low-stakes quizzing in his university-

level course in po

liti cal

economics.)

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Space, interleave, and vary topics and problems covered in class so that students are frequently shifting gears as they have to “reload” what they already know about each topic in order to fi gure out how the new material relates or differs.

Be Transparent

Help your students understand the ways you have incorporated desirable diffi culties into your lessons, and why. Be up front about some of the frustrations and diffi culties this kind of learning entails and explain why it’s worth persisting. Consider having them read the profi le earlier in this chapter of the medical student Michael Young, who vividly describes the diffi culties and ultimate benefi ts of using these strategies.

Mary Pat Wenderoth, Biology Professor,University of Washington

Mary Pat Wenderoth introduces desirable diffi culties in her classes to help students master their coursework. She also works at helping students learn how to be effective at managing their own learning— to be the capable student within the professional that they envision becoming. Along that path she tackles yet another challenge, helping students learn to judge where their grasp of course material stands on Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, and how to rise to the levels of synthesis and evaluation.

Bloom’s taxonomy classifi es cognitive learning on six levels. It was developed in 1956 by a committee of educators chaired by psychologist Benjamin Bloom. The six levels range from gaining knowledge (the most fundamental level) to developing comprehension of the underlying facts and ideas, being able to apply learning to solve problems, being able to analyze ideas and relationships so as to make inferences, be-

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ing able to synthesize knowledge and ideas in new ways, and, at the most sophisticated level, being able to use learning to evaluate opinions and ideas and make judgments based on evidence and objective criteria.

Here are some of the main techniques Wenderoth uses.

Transparency. At the outset, Wenderoth teaches her students about the testing effect, the principle of desirable diffi culties, and the perils of “illusions of knowing.” She promises to make her instructional philosophy transparent and to model these principles in class. As she explained to us recently, “The whole idea of the testing effect is that you learn more by testing yourself than by rereading. Well, it’s very hard to get students to do that because they’ve been trained for so long to keep reading and reading the book.”6

I can’t tell you how many times the students come to me and they show me their textbook and it’s highlighted in four different colors. I say to them, “I can tell you have done a lot of work and that you really want to succeed in this class because you have blue and yellow and orange and green highlighter on your book.” And then I have to try to tell them that any more time spent on this after the fi rst time was a waste. They’re, like, “How is that possible?” I say, “What you have to do is, you read a little bit and then you have to test yourself,” but they don’t quite know how to do that.

So I model it in class for them. Every fi ve minutes or so I throw out a question on the material we just talked about, and I can see them start to look through their notes. I say,

“Stop. Do not look at your notes. Just take a minute to think about it yourself.” I tell them our brains are like a forest, and your memory is in there somewhere. You’re here, and the memory is over there. The more times you make a path to that

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memory, the better the path is, so that the next time you need the memory, it’s going to be easier to fi nd it. But as soon as you get your notes out, you have short- circuited the path. You are not exploring for the path anymore, someone has told you the way.

At other times, Wenderoth will pose a question to the class and ask them to think about it. She has students write three possible answers on the whiteboard up front and then vote on which answer they think is correct by raising the number of fi ngers that corresponds with the answer on the board. She’ll instruct students to fi nd somebody with fi ngers “different from yours and talk to them and fi gure out who has the correct answer.”

Wenderoth gives her students a new way to think about learning, and she gives them a new vocabulary for describing setbacks. When students trip over an exam question, they’ll commonly accuse the test of containing trick questions. When the student blames the test, she says, it’s not a good meeting ground for solving the problem. But now, students come to see her after a disappointing exam and say, “I have the illusion of knowing. How do I get better?” That’s a problem Wenderoth can help with.

Testing groups. Wenderoth has transformed class “study groups” into “testing groups.” In a study group, the person who knows the most talks and the others listen. The emphasis is on memorizing things. However, in a testing group, they all wrestle with a question together, without opening the textbook. “Everybody has bits of information, and you talk with your colleagues and fi gure it out.” The emphasis is on exploration and understanding.

Wenderoth will ask students in a testing group what ideas they don’t feel really clear on. Then she’ll send one student to

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the whiteboard to try to explain the concept. As the student struggles, perhaps putting up the pieces of the answer she knows, the rest of the group are instructed to test her by asking questions whose answers will lead her to the larger concept. Throughout, all textbooks remain closed.

Free recall. Wenderoth assigns her students to spend ten minutes at the end of each day sitting with a blank piece of paper on which to write everything they can remember from class. They must sit for ten minutes. She warns that it will be uncomfortable, they will run out of ideas after two minutes, but they must stick it out. At the end of ten minutes, they’re to go to their class notes and fi nd out what they remembered and what they forgot, and to focus on the material they forgot. What they glean from this exercise guides their notes and questions for the next class. Wenderoth fi nds that the free recall exercise helps students pull learning forward and develop a more complex understanding of how the material interrelates.

Summary sheets. Every Monday, Wenderoth’s students are required to turn in a single sheet of certain dimensions on which they have illustrated the prior week’s material in drawings annotated with key ideas, arrows, and graphs.

She’s teaching physiology, which is about how things work, so the summaries take on the form of large cartoons dense with callouts, blowups, directional arrows, and the like. The sheets help her students synthesize a week’s information, thinking through how systems are connected: “This is causing this, which causes this, which feeds back on those. We use a lot of arrows in physiology. The students can work with each other, I don’t care. The sheet they bring in just has to be their own.”

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Learning paragraphs. From time to time, on a Friday, if she doesn’t feel she’s overburdening them, Wenderoth will assign students to write low- stakes “learning paragraphs” for which she poses a question and asks students to prepare a fi ve- or six- sentence response. A question might be “How is the GI tract like the respiratory system?” Or “You just got your tests back; what would you do differently next time?” The point is to stimulate retrieval and refl ection and to capture a week’s learning before it is lost to the countless other concerns and diversions of college life. “What I found over the years is, if I don’t do anything before the test, they don’t do anything until the day before the test.” The learning paragraphs also give her science majors practice in writing a passage of clear prose. She reads through the responses and makes a point to comment on them in class so that students know they’re being read.