fi nding your own way to the objective,” she said.9 The Medical College Admission Test, for example, encompasses four major course blocks: reading, chemistry, physiology, and writing. For each of these blocks, Hunkler created the learning objectives in her head that she deemed most important and then set out to answer them as she studied. “I took a practice test every three days, saw what I got wrong, and adjusted.” Shooting her azimuth. “A lot of students get hung up studying for months, trying to memorize everything, but for me it was more about understanding the concepts. So my azimuth check would be, Okay, what is this question asking, what’s the broader theme here, and does that match up with what I’ve outlined for this section.”
One of this book’s authors (Roediger) attended Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia, for high school.
Riverside used a form of the Thayer method, with students having daily quizzes, problem sets, or assignments to be completed in class. The range of ability of these younger cadets was much more varied than at the elite US Military Academy at West Point, but the Thayer method worked well. In fact, such methods that include daily participation are especially likely to help students who are not prone to work hard on their own outside of class. The Thayer method is a strong encouragement for them to keep at it, and echoes what Mary Pat Wenderoth (above) has found in her empirical studies: that high- structure classes help students who lack a history of using effective learning techniques and habits to develop them and succeed in rigorous settings.
Kathleen McDermott, Psychology Professor,Washington University at St. Louis Kathleen McDermott administers daily low- stakes quizzes in a university course on human learning and memory. It’s a class
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of twenty- fi ve students that meets twice a week for fourteen weeks, minus midterms and a fi nal exam. She gives a four-item quiz in the last three to fi ve minutes of every class. The questions hit the high points of the lecture, the readings, or both. If students have understood the material, they will get all four answers right, but they’ll have to think in order to do it. Anything covered in the course to date is fair game for a quiz, and she will sometimes draw from past material that she feels the students haven’t fully grasped and need to review.
McDermott sets the ground rules very clearly at the start of the term. She lays out the research on learning and the testing effect and explains why the quizzes are helpful, even if they don’t feel helpful. Students are allowed to drop four quizzes across the semester. In exchange, absences need not be justi-fi ed, and no missed quizzes will be made up.
Students initially are not happy about the quiz regime, and in the fi rst few weeks of the term McDermott will get email from students explaining why they had a legitimate excuse for an absence and should be allowed to make up a missed quiz.
She reiterates the terms: four free absences, no makeups.
McDermott says the quizzes provide an incentive for students to attend class and give students a way to contribute to their grade on a daily basis if they answer four out of four questions correctly. By the end of the semester, her students say that the quizzes have helped them keep up with the course and discover when they are getting off track and need to bone up.
“The key with quizzes is to establish very clear ground rules for the student, and make them manageable for the professor,” McDermott says. “As a student, you’re either there and you take it, or you’re not. For the professor, no hassling over makeup tests.”10
The quizzes in totality count for 20 percent of a student’s grade in the course. In addition, McDermott gives two
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midterm exams and a fi nal. The last two exams are cumulative. Having cumulative exams reinforces learning by requiring students to engage in spaced review.
Columbia, Illinois, Public School District As recounted in Chapter 2, we have worked with teachers in a middle school in Columbia, Illinois, to test the effects of integrating low-
stakes quizzing into the curriculum. Regular quizzing and other forms of retrieval practice have been adopted by teachers in the school who were a part of the research study and by others who were not but who observed the benefi cial results. The initial research project has since been extended into history and science classes in the district’s high school, where frequent retrieval practice is being used both to bolster learning and to help teachers focus instruction on areas where student understanding and per for mance need to be improved.
The Illinois State Board of Education has adopted new math and En glish language arts standards for K– 12 education in line with the Common Core State Standards Initiative led by the National Governors Association and endorsed by the nation’s secretary of education. Common Core establishes standards for college and career readiness that students should be able to meet on graduation from high school. The Columbia School District, like others, is redesigning its curriculum and its tests to be more rigorous and to engage students in more writing and analysis work, with the aim of promoting the higher- level skills of conceptual understanding, reasoning, and problem solving that will enable students to meet the standards established by the state. As one example of this overhaul, the sciences curriculum is being vertically aligned so that students are reexposed to a subject at various stages of their school
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careers. The result is more spaced and interleaved instruction.
In physical sciences, for instance, middle school students may learn to identify the six basic machines (inclined plane, wedge, screw, lever, wheel and axle, and pulley) and how they work, and then may return to these concepts in subsequent grades, delving into the underlying physics and how these basic tools can be combined and applied to solve different problems.
Tips for Trainers
Here are some ways trainers are using the same principles as those who teach in schools, in a variety of less structured and nonclassroom settings.
In- Service Training
Licensed professionals in many fi elds must earn continuing education credits to keep their skills current and maintain their licenses. As the pediatric neurologist Doug Larsen describes in Chapter 3, this kind of training for doctors is typically compressed into a weekend symposium, out of respect for participants’ busy schedules, set at a hotel or resort, and structured around meals and PowerPoint lectures. In other words, the strategies of retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving are nowhere to be seen. Participants are lucky to retain much of what they learn.
If you see yourself in this scenario, there are a few things you might consider doing. One, get a copy of the pre sen ta tion materials and use them to quiz yourself on the key ideas, much as Nathaniel Fuller quizzes himself on the arc of a play, his lines, the many layers of character. Two, schedule follow- up emails to appear in your inbox every month or so with questions that require you to retrieve the critical learning you gained from the seminar. Three, contact your professional association
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and ask them to consider revamping their approach to training along the lines outlined in this book.
The testing effect forms the basis of a new commercial training platform called Qstream that helps trainers send learners periodic quizzes via their mobile devices to strengthen learning through spaced retrieval practice. Similarly, an emerging platform called Osmosis uses mobile and Web based soft-ware to provide learners access to thousands of crowdsourced practice questions and explanations. Osmosis combines the testing effect, spacing, and social networking to facilitate what its developers call “student- driven social learning.” Qstream (qstream.com) and Osmosis (osmose- it.com) suggest interesting possibilities for redesigning in-service training for
professionals. Many other companies are developing similar programs.
Kathy Maixner, Business Coach
The Maixner Group is a consulting shop based in Portland, Oregon, that helps companies identify growth strategies and improve their sales tactics. Kathy Maixner fries big fi sh and little. One of the big fi sh added $21 million to its annual revenue as a result of hooking up with Maixner. One of the small ones, Inner Gate Acu
punc ture (profi led at the close of this chapter), learned how to establish a solid business management footing under a clinical practice whose growth was outpacing its control systems.
We’re interested in Maixner because the coaching techniques she has developed over her career line up so well with the learning principles described in this book. In short, Maixner sees her role as helping the client dig past the symptoms of a problem to discover its root causes, and then to generate possible solutions and play out the implications of different strategies before committing to them.
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Maixner told us: “If you hand people the solution, they don’t need to explore how you got to that solution. If they generate the solution, then they’re the ones who are traveling down that road. Should they go left or right? We discuss the options.”11
Maixner’s years of experience working with clients in many different fi elds helps her see around corners, where the hazards lie. She often uses role- playing to simulate problems, getting her clients to generate solutions, try them out, get feedback, and practice what works. In other words, she introduces the diffi culties that make the learning stronger and more accurately refl ect what the client will encounter out in the marketplace.
Farmers Insurance
Corporate sales training can be complicated. Typically, it’s about corporate culture, beliefs and behavior, and learning to promote and protect the brand. It’s also technical, learning the features and advantages of the products. And it’s partly strategic, learning about the target market and how to generate prospects and make sales. At Farmers Insurance, whose principal sales force is a cadre of about fourteen thousand exclusive in-de pen dent agents, training must also equip the company’s reps to become successful as entrepreneurs, building and managing their own agency.
Farmers sells property and casualty policies and investment products like annuities and mutual funds to the tune of about $20 billion a year. Describing the full scope of their training could fi ll volumes, but we’ll focus on the way Farmers brings new agents on board, training them in the four areas of sales, marketing systems, business planning, and advocacy of the brand. The company’s new-agent training is an excellent example of interleaving the learning and practice of different
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