Close to Home: Do students use best study strategies?

Research conducted by John Dunlosky at Kent State University describes how certain study techniques can accelerate learning while others do not.

The highest performing learning technique is quizzing. This includes practice tests done by students on their own outside of class. Using flash cards to test recall or simply answering the same questions at the end of the textbook ranked highest.

One study asked students to memorize word pairs - half of which where included on a recall test. One week later, students remembered 35 percent of the words they had quizzed themselves on at home but only 4 percent of those words that they had not included in their self-quizzing.

Why does self-quizzing work? Practice at testing triggers a search of long-term memory that activates related information, forming multiple memory pathways for easier access.

The bottom line is that all students can benefit from the practice of testing; the benefits may last for months to years. If nothing else, self-testing can give a student experience for the real tests to follow.

The second highly rated technique is called distributed practice. Students usually mass their studies or cram. With distributed practice, students practiced over time and were more effective in the tests that followed. Researchers had students learn the English equivalent of Spanish words and then reviewed the material in six sessions. One group did the review sessions back to back, another one day apart and a third did the reviews 30 days apart. Students in the 30-day group remembered the translations the best. Of 254 studies involving more than 14,000 subjects, students remembered more after spaced study, scoring 47 percent versus 37 percent for students who massed their study.

The third rated technique is elaborative interrogation. These two big words, elaborative and interrogation, suggest that students use “why” questions to facilitate learning. Why questions produce explanations for facts. Why is this true?

In one test, students who used elaborative interrogation answered about 72 percent of questions correctly, compared to about 37 percent for questions that had not used elaborative interrogation. Also, why questions get students to think out of the box, which is good for tapping into the higher centers of the brain.

Self-explanation was ranked fourth. Students can develop explanations for what they learn with such questions as: “What new information is provided here for greater learning?” and “How does it relate to what I already know?” Self-explanation is said to be beneficial for solving math problems, logical reasoning and for learning from narratives. In younger children, self-explanation can help with basic ideas such as learning numbers or recognizing patterns. In addition, self-explanation is said to improve memory, comprehension and problem solving.

What doesn’t work? At the top of the list is highlighting, which showed little or no improved performance. The problem is that highlighting zeros in on individual items rather than connecting across items, reducing a student’s ability to actually think. At the least, highlighting could be useful for self-tests. In short, if you are going to highlight, then over-mark sparingly, and try to connect the information to successful learning techniques as mentioned above.

Schools of education need to take the lead and teach future teachers effective learning techniques. Maybe a class in preparing for tests for all incoming freshmen?

David Sortino, a resident of Graton, is director of the Neurofeedback Institute. Email him at davidsortino@comcast.net.