Later in this chapter, we tell how the biology professor Mary Pat Wenderoth encourages elaboration among her students by assigning them the task of creating large “summary sheets.” Students are asked to illustrate on a single sheet the various biological systems studied during the week and to show graphically and through key words how the systems interrelate with each other. This is a form of elaboration that adds layers of meaning and promotes the learning of concepts, structures, and interrelationships. Students who lack the good fortune to be in Wenderoth’s class could adopt such a strategy for themselves.
GENERATION has the effect of making the mind more receptive to new learning.
What is it? Generation is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution.
For instance: On a small level, the act of fi lling in a missing word in a text (that is, generating the word yourself rather than having it supplied by the writer) results in better learning and memory of the text than simply reading a complete text.
Many people perceive their learning is most effective when it is experiential— that is, learning by doing rather than by reading a text or hearing a lecture. Experiential learning is a
Make It Stick ê 209
form of generation: you set out to accomplish a task, you encounter a problem, and you consult your creativity and store-house of knowledge to try to solve it. If necessary you seek answers from experts, texts, or the Web. By wading into the unknown fi rst and puzzling through it, you are far more likely to learn and remember the solution than if somebody fi rst sat you down to teach it to you. Bonnie Blodgett, an award- winning gardener and writer, provides a strong example of generative learning in Chapter 4.
You can practice generation when reading new class material by trying to explain beforehand the key ideas you expect to fi nd in the material and how you expect they will relate to your prior knowledge. Then read the material to see if you were correct. As a result of having made the initial effort, you will be more astute at gleaning the substance and relevance of the reading material, even if it differs from your expectation.
If you’re in a science or math course learning different types of solutions for different types of problems, try to solve the problems before you get to class. The Physics Department at Washington University in St. Louis now requires students to work problems before class. Some students take umbrage, arguing that it’s the professor’s job to teach the solution, but the professors understand that when students wrestle with content beforehand, classroom learning is stronger.
REFLECTION is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds layers to learning and strengthens skills.
What is it? Refl ection is the act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned in a recent class or experience and asking yourself questions. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experiences does it remind you of? What might you need to learn for better
Make It Stick ê 210
mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results?
For instance: The biology professor Mary Pat Wenderoth assigns weekly low- stakes “learning paragraphs” in which students are asked to refl ect on what they learned the previous week and to characterize how their class learning connects to life outside the class. This is a fi ne model for students to adopt for themselves and a more fruitful learning strategy than spending hours transcribing lecture slides or class notes verbatim into a notebook.
CALIBRATION is the act of aligning your judgments of what you know and don’t know with objective feedback so as to avoid being carried off by the illusions of mastery that catch many learners by surprise at test time.
What is it? Everyone is subject to a host of cognitive illusions, some of which are described in Chapter 5. Mistaking fl uency with a text for mastery of the underlying content is just one example. Calibration is simply the act of using an objective instrument to clear away illusions and adjust your judgment to better refl ect reality. The aim is to be sure that your sense of what you know and can do is accurate.
For instance: Airline pi lots use fl ight instruments to know when their perceptual systems are misleading them about critical factors like whether the airplane is fl ying level. Students use quizzes and practice tests to see whether they know as much as they think they do. It’s worth being explicit here about the importance of answering the questions in the quizzes that you give yourself. Too often we will look at a question on a practice test and say to ourselves: Yup, I know that, and then move down the page without making the effort to write in the answer. If you don’t supply the answer, you may be giving in to the illusion of knowing, when in fact you would have diffi -
culty rendering an accurate or complete response. Treat prac-
Make It Stick ê 211
tice tests as tests, check your answers, and focus your studying effort on the areas where you are not up to snuff.
MNEMONIC DEVICES help you to retrieve what you have learned and to hold arbitrary information in memory (Chapter 7).
What are they? “Mnemonic” is from the Greek word for memory, and mnemonic devices are like mental fi le cabinets.
They give you handy ways to store information and fi nd it again when you need it.
For instance: Here is a very simple mnemonic device that some schoolchildren are taught for remembering the US Great Lakes in geographic order, from east to west: Old Elephants Have Musty Skin. Mark Twain used mnemonics to teach his children the succession of kings and queens of En gland, staking the sequence and length of their reigns along the winding driveway of his estate, walking it with the children, and elaborating with images and storytelling. Psychology students at Bellerbys College in Oxford use mnemonic devices called memory palaces to or ga nize what they have learned and must be prepared to expound upon in their A-level essay exams. Mnemonics are not tools for learning per se but for creating mental structures that make it easier to retrieve what you have learned.
Brief stories follow of two students who have used these strategies to rise to the top of their classes.
Michael Young, Medical Student
Michael Young is a high- achieving fourth- year medical student at Georgia Regents University who pulled himself up from rock bottom by changing the way he studies.
Make It Stick ê 212
Young entered medical school without the usual foundation of premed coursework. His classmates all had backgrounds in biochemistry, pharmacology, and the like. Medical school is plenty tough under any circumstances, but in Young’s case even more so for lack of a footing.
The scope of the challenge that lay before him became abruptly evident. Despite his spending every available minute studying his coursework, he barely eked out a 65 on his fi rst exam. “Quite honestly, I got my butt kicked,” he says. “I was blown away by that. I couldn’t believe how hard it was. It was nothing like any kind of schooling I had done before. I mean, you come to class, and in a typical day you get about four hundred PowerPoint slides, and this is dense information.”1
Since spending more time studying wasn’t an option, Young had to fi nd a way to make studying more effective.
He started reading empirical studies on learning and became deeply interested in the testing effect. That’s how we fi rst learned of him: He emailed us with questions about the application of spaced retrieval practice in a medical school setting.
Looking back on that stressful period, Young says, “I didn’t just want to fi nd somebody’s opinion about how to study.
Everybody has an opinion. I wanted real data, real research on the issue.”
You might wonder how he got himself into medical school without premed coursework. He had earned a master’s degree in psychology and worked in clinical settings, eventually as a drug addiction counselor. He teamed up with a lot of doctors, and he slowly began to wonder if he would be happier in medicine. Had he missed his calling? “I didn’t think of myself as being especially intelligent, but I wanted to do more with my life and the idea wouldn’t leave me.” One day he went to the biology department of his local university, Columbus State in Columbus, Georgia, and asked what courses he would need to become a doctor. They laughed. “They said, ‘Well, nobody
Make It Stick ê 213
from this school becomes a doctor. People at the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech go to medical school, we haven’t had anybody go to medical school in a de cade.’ ” Not to be put off, Young cobbled together some courses. For example, for the biology requirement, the only thing he could take at Columbus State was a fi shing class. That was his biology course.
Within a year he had gotten what ever medical background was available from the school, so he crammed for a month for the Medical College Admission Test and managed to score just well enough. He enrolled at Georgia Regents.
At which point he found himself very far indeed from being over the hump. As his fi rst exam made all too clear, the road ahead went straight up. If he had any hope of climbing it, something about his study habits had to change. So what did change? He explains it this way:
I was big into reading, but that’s all I knew how to do for studying. I would just read the material and I wouldn’t know what else to do with it. So if I read it and it didn’t stick in my memory, then I didn’t know what to do about that. What I learned from reading the research [on learning] is that you have to do something beyond just passively taking in the information.
