If rereading is largely in effec tive, why do students favor it?
One reason may be that they’re getting bad study advice. But there’s another, subtler way they’re pushed toward this method of review, the phenomenon mentioned earlier: rising familiarity with a text and fl uency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery. As any professor will attest, students work hard to capture the precise wording of phrases they hear in class lectures, laboring under the misapprehension that the essence of the subject lies in the syntax in which it’s described. Mastering
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the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them. However, repeated reading provides the illusion of mastery of the underlying ideas. Don’t let yourself be fooled. The fact that you can repeat the phrases in a text or your lecture notes is no indication that you understand the signifi cance of the precepts they describe, their application, or how they relate to what you already know about the subject.
Too common is the experience of a college professor answering a knock on her offi ce door only to fi nd a fi rst- year student in distress, asking to discuss his low grade on the fi rst test in introductory psychology. How is it possible? He attended all the lectures and took diligent notes on them. He read the text and highlighted the critical passages.
How did he study for the test? she asks.
Well, he’d gone back and highlighted his notes, and then reviewed the highlighted notes and his highlighted text material several times until he felt he was thoroughly familiar with all of it. How could it be that he had pulled a D on the exam?
Had he used the set of key concepts in the back of each chapter to test himself? Could he look at a concept like “conditioned stimulus,” defi ne it, and use it in a paragraph? While he was reading, had he thought of converting the main points of the text into a series of questions and then later tried to answer them while he was studying? Had he at least rephrased the main ideas in his own words as he read? Had he tried to relate them to what he already knew? Had he looked for examples outside the text? The answer was no in every case.
He sees himself as the model student, diligent to a fault, but the truth is he doesn’t know how to study effectively.
The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical
Learning Is Misunderstood ê 17
for decision making. The problem was famously (and pro-phetically) summed up by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld in a 2002 press briefi ng about US intelligence on Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction: “There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns— there are things we do not know we don’t know. ”
The emphasis here is ours. We make it to drive home the point that students who don’t quiz themselves (and most do not) tend to overestimate how well they have mastered class material. Why? When they hear a lecture or read a text that is a paragon of clarity, the ease with which they follow the argument gives them the feeling that they already know it and don’t need to study it. In other words, they tend not to know what they don’t know; when put to the test, they fi nd they cannot recall the critical ideas or apply them in a new context.
Likewise, when they’ve reread their lecture notes and texts to the point of fl uency, their fl uency gives them the false sense that they’re in possession of the underlying content, principles, and implications that constitute real learning, confi dent that they can recall them at a moment’s notice. The upshot is that even the most diligent students are often hobbled by two liabilities: a failure to know the areas where their learning is weak— that is, where they need to do more work to bring up their knowledge— and a preference for study methods that create a false sense of mastery.11
Knowledge: Not Suffi cient, but Necessary Albert Einstein declared “creativity is more important than knowledge,” and the sentiment appears to be widely shared by
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college students, if their choice in t-shirt proclamations is any indication. And why wouldn’t they seize on the sentiment? It embodies an obvious and profound truth, for without creativity where would our scientifi c, social, or economic break-throughs come from? Besides which, accumulating knowledge can feel like a grind, while creativity sounds like a lot more fun.
But of course the dichotomy is false. You wouldn’t want to see that t-shirt on your neurosurgeon or on the captain who’s fl ying your plane across the Pacifi c. But the sentiment has gained some currency as a reaction to standardized testing, fearing that this kind of testing leads to an emphasis on memorization at the expense of high- level skills. Notwithstanding the pitfalls of standardized testing, what we really ought to ask is how to do better at building knowledge and creativity, for without knowledge you don’t have the foundation for the higher- level skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving. As the psychologist Robert Sternberg and two colleagues put it,
“one cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply.”12
Mastery in any fi eld, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill. These are the fruits of variety in the practice of new skills, and of striving, refl ection, and mental rehearsal. Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction site with the supplies to put up a house. Building the house requires not only knowledge of countless different fi ttings and materials but conceptual understanding, too, of aspects like the load- bearing properties of a header or roof truss system, or the principles of energy transfer and conservation that will keep the house warm but the roof deck cold so the own er doesn’t call six months later with ice dam problems. Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.
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When Matt Brown had to decide whether or not to kill his right engine he was problem solving, and he needed to know from memory the procedures for fl ying with a dead engine and the tolerances of his plane in order to predict whether he would fall out of the air or be unable to straighten up for landing. The would- be neurosurgeon in her fi rst year of med school has to memorize the whole ner vous system, the whole skeletal system, the whole muscular system, the humeral system. If she can’t, she’s not going to be a neurosurgeon. Her success will depend on diligence, of course, but also on fi nding study strategies that will enable her to learn the sheer volume of material required in the limited hours available.
Testing: Dipstick versus Learning Tool There are few surer ways to raise the hackles of many students and educators than talking about testing. The growing focus over recent years on standardized assessment, in partic u lar, has turned testing into a lightning rod for frustration over how to achieve the country’s education goals. Online forums and news articles are besieged by readers who charge that emphasis on testing favors memorization at the expense of a larger grasp of context or creative ability; that testing creates extra stress for students and gives a false mea sure of ability; and so on. But if we stop thinking of testing as a dipstick to mea sure learning— if we think of it as practicing retrieval of learning from memory rather than “testing,” we open ourselves to another possibility: the use of testing as a tool for learning.
One of the most striking research fi ndings is the power of active retrieval— testing—to strengthen memory, and that the more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefi t. Think fl ight simulator versus PowerPoint lecture. Think quiz versus
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rereading. The act of retrieving learning from memory has two profound benefi ts. One, it tells you what you know and don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future. In effect, retrieval— testing—interrupts forgetting. Consider an eighth grade science class. For the class in question, at a middle school in Columbia, Illinois, researchers arranged for part of the material covered during the course to be the subject of low- stakes quizzing (with feedback) at three points in the semester. Another part of the material was never quizzed but was studied three times in review. In a test a month later, which material was better recalled? The students averaged A- on the material that was quizzed and C+ on the material that was not quizzed but reviewed.13
In Matt Brown’s case, even after ten years pi loting the
same business jet, his employer reinforces his mastery every six months in a battery of tests and fl ight simulations that require him to retrieve the information and maneuvers that are essential to stay in control of his plane. As Matt points out, you hardly ever have an emergency, so if you don’t practice what to do, there’s no way to keep it fresh.
Both of these cases— the research in the classroom and the experience of Matt Brown in updating his knowledge— point to the critical role of retrieval practice in keeping our knowledge accessible to us when we need it. The power of active retrieval is the topic of Chapter 2.14
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The Takeaway
For the most part, we are going about learning in the wrong ways, and we are giving poor advice to those who are coming up behind us. A great deal of what we think we know about how to learn is taken on faith and based on intuition but does not hold up under empirical research. Per sis tent illusions of knowing lead us to labor at unproductive strategies; as recounted in Chapter 3, this is true even of people who have participated in empirical studies and seen the evidence for themselves, fi rsthand. Illusions are potent persuaders. One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know. Second Lieutenant Kiley Hunkler, a 2013
graduate of West Point and winner of a Rhodes Scholarship, whom we write about in Chapter 8, uses the phrase “shooting an azimuth” to describe how she takes practice tests to help refocus her studying. In overland navigation, shooting an azimuth means climbing to a height, sighting an object on the horizon in the direction you’re traveling, and adjusting your compass heading to make sure you’re still gaining on your objective as you beat through the forest below.
The good news is that we now know of simple and practical strategies that anybody can use, at any point in life, to learn better and remember longer: various forms of retrieval practice, such as low- stakes quizzing and self- testing, spacing out practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules that differentiate types of problems, and so on. In the chapters that follow we describe these in depth. And because learning is an iterative pro cess that requires that you revisit what you have
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learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with new knowledge, we circle through these topics several times along the way. At the end, in Chapter 8, we pull it all together with specifi c tips and examples for putting these tools to work.
2
To Learn, Retrieve
Mike Ebersold got called into a hospital emergency room one afternoon late in 2011 to examine a Wisconsin deer hunter who’d been found lying unconscious in a cornfi eld. The man had blood at the back of his head, and the men who’d found and brought him in supposed he’d maybe stumbled and cracked his skull on something.
