What Works, What Doesn't - study tips
What study tips work for you and your students and which one's don't (or at least their effectiveness has not been demonstrated in research)?
I read a section in "Eureka! The Science of Genius" by Scientific American, 10-01-2015 in Chapter 2.2 called "What Works, What Doesn’t" by John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan and Daniel T. Willingham.
Here's a summary of their findings (Although if I only make a summary of them, then they won't be in my long-term memory; thus I'll have to create a self-test for them and review them over the next 30 days).
Research-based Study Tips
- Self-test - Use note cards, repetitive quizzing towards mastery, or the Cornell system of writing keywords and questions in the margin to be quizzed on later.
- Distributed Practice - Extend learning over 30 days while learning other skills and content.
Study Techniques with Limitations
- Elaborative Interrogation (Asking, "Why?") - Effective with prior knowledge.
- Self-explanation (Justifying answers) - Increases time spent by 30-100%, leads to paraphrasing instead of making mental connections with prior knowledge and needs more research to demonstrate effectiveness at increasing retention.
- Interleaved Practice - Effective for learning math. For example, when learning how to calculate volume of various objects, this technique allows for simultaneous compare and contrasting methods. Though this is not as effective in other subjects.
Ineffective Study Techniques
- Highlighting/underlining/marking material - Limits ability to infer because of focus on individual parts; though this can be a starting point for self-testing.
- Rereading - Effective for simple recall or fill-in-the-blank after 2nd reading but may not increase comprehension as much as self-test and distributed practice.
- Imagery for text, summarizing and mnemonics - Lack evidence for long-term retention compared to the time they take to implement.
Let's start a conversation about what surprised you in these findings. What study tips work for you and your students and which one's don't (or at least their effectiveness has not been demonstrated in research)?
Picture credit: UPI photographer Arthur Sasse in 1951
Karen, I see that mind mapping is encouraged in preparation for GCSE and A level exams (https://www.goconqr.com/en/a-levels/resources/mind-maps/). Good point on having the class come up with the images and mnemonics. On the other hand, Mind Maps or Thinking Maps were not mentioned in this study. Mind Maps have a slew of research behind them for organizing one's thoughts to improve writing, including note taking, brainstorming, organizing ideas, identifying cause and effect, and comprehension. One of these articles even noted the benefit of long-term memory (https://www.mindmeister.com/190266643/concept-mapping-mind-mapping-research) According to this study, "Imagery for text learning" is when “students are told to create images for every paragraph they read. Research has revealed a patchwork of inconsistent results that have not been shown to last over the long term.” How have you used the 8 Thinking Maps to help students? Do you and David incorporate them into your Sticky Studying app videos?
I found using imagery very effective and a lasting technique for both GCSE and A levels. If you pool the ideas of a whole class together or use apps that come up with the images or mnemonics, then time spent is not an issue. We all think in images, so it's the obvious way to embed knowledge. Do you consider Mind Maps within this category too? Lots of research has been done to prove their efficacy.