TRANSCRIPT: Learning Strategies Every Student Should Know

Speaker: Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire

Learning Strategies Every Student Should Know

Hello. I’m Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Professor of Chemistry at Louisiana State University, where I was also past Director of the University Learning Center, the Center for Academic Success. And I’m excited today to share with you some strategies that will allow you to learn very efficiently at the college level as opposed to doing the kinds of things that you did to learn and excel at the high school level.

You’ve probably already noticed that there is a big difference. Most students tell us that in high school, if they consistently attended class, if they paid very close attention to the teacher, and they memorized information very well, they did extremely well on exams. But in college instructors expect you to operate at higher levels. They’re not just asking memorization questions. They want you to apply information.

They want you to analyze information. And so we’re going to stalk about strategies that will allow you to transition into college learning mode versus high school learning mode.

One of the big differences is the amount of time that you spend in class. One of my colleagues has determined that typically in high school you spent about 145 hours in class learning the same amount of information that you learn in college but spending only about 40 hours in class. And so that means that the instructors in college expect that you’re going to do a lot of your learning outside of class, but most of our students tell us that typically they haven’t learned any study techniques because they did all of their learning in class. So we’re going to talk about strategies that will allow you to make the most efficient use of the time that you spend learning information outside of class.

Studying Vs. Learning

So, when we think about the difference in the kind of studying that’s required in high school versus college and how we can transition into college mode as opposed to high school mode, one of the most important questions to think about is what’s the difference between studying and learning. And we find that knowing the answer, and understanding the answer, to this question is really helpful to make that transition. Now I just want you to think just for a moment about how you might describe the difference between studying and learning, take a minute to think about that, and then just jot down your ideas about how you would characterize the difference.

Study Mode Vs. Learn Mode

I’ve actually asked that question to over 10,000 students at various institutions around the nation, at various levels from high school through even graduate and professional schools, medical schools, law schools, and I get a lot of different answers to that question, but, believe it or not, the most common answer that I get, students tell me that studying is just memorizing information for a test, whereas learning is understanding the information so that you can use it and apply it later on. Sometimes students tell me that studying is boring, learning is fun. Or they’ll say studying is short term, learning is for long term. But before you really understand the difference between those, it’s going to be very difficult to transition into college level learning.

Now I’d like you to think about, up to this point, would you say that you’ve spent more of your time in study mode or in learn mode, if we use the definition that studying is more memorizing information for a test and two weeks later you might not know that information at all, whereas if you’re learning, once you have that information you pretty much have it for almost for life we could say. So have you spent more time in study mode or in learn mode? And if you’re like most of my students, you’ve spent more time in study mode, so the big transition is now to move ourselves from being in study mode to learn mode, and it makes a huge difference in how you perform in your college classes. And I’ll give you an example of two students, and you’ll see how they were performing when they were in study mode versus how they were performing in learn mode.

Transitioning To Learn Mode

The first one is Travis, who was a student in a psychology course, and when he was focused just on studying and memorization, on the first exam in the course he made a 47, the second exam he made a 52, so he was failing the course big time. And I spoke with him, actually, just the night before the third exam. And he was able to increase his performance to 82 on the next test and then 86 on the test after that, and he ended up getting a B in the course.

And another student, Robert, who was in General Chemistry, had made a 42 on the first exam, so again he had failed the exam. And then after learning about transitioning the way he was studying, he ended up making hundreds on every single test after that and got an A in the course.

Now you might wonder, what did they do to improve their performance so dramatically? They were able to use a concept that we teach that’s called metacognition. And we’re going to talk about exactly what metacognition is and how you can apply that to your studies so that you can start to ace all of your college courses.

What is Metacognition?

Metacognition is a term that was coined by a cognitive psychologist, John Flavell, who described the process by which our brains can actually analyze what it’s doing. So metacognition is similar to – it’s almost as if you have a big brain outside your brain looking at what your brain is doing. And it’s analyzing, is this brain really learning this information or is she just simply memorizing information for a test. It’s your ability to recognize that you are a problem solver. You have the ability to solve problems yourself as opposed to relying on other people to always give you information. So, for example, let’s say you have a math test coming up, and you realize that you don’t know if it’s going to cover four chapters or five chapters, and so you might kind of go into a panic thinking, oh, what am I going to do, I have to – I don’t know exactly how to solve this problem. Well, if you’re using your metacognitive brain, it will kick in and recognize that that’s a problem and start to generate strategies for solving that problem. And so it might tell you, well, we can handle this. You can talk with the instructor, you can talk with other students, you can consult the syllabus, you might look at old exams from past years, but there are a number of different strategies, and there are some others that your metacognitive brain will generate that will allow you to be very calm and approach getting a solution to each one of the questions that arises, and so you’re not in dependent mode thinking that someone else is going to be able to do everything that you need done, you know that you can do it yourself.

Problem Solver

In addition to knowing that you are a problem solver, your metacognitive brain allows you to monitor and control your mental processing. Because it’s one thing to know that you’re in memorization mode and you’re not really learning, but it’s another thing to not only monitor but control that. And so, if you’re using metacognition and your brain finds itself in memorization mode, then you kind of hear a little stop that says no, you need to be in learn mode. And you’re going to need to use those strategies that we’re going to talk about in just a minute.

But finally, if you’re using metacognition, you’ll be able to accurately judge your level of learning. So many students have told me that they knew everything that they were responsible for learning before they went in to take the test, but then as soon as they sat down, it was like the information just flew right out of their head and they flunked the test, even though they were very confident that they would do very well on the test when they sat down to take it. Well metacognition allows you to accurately judge your level of learning so you know if you understand information well enough to teach it to someone else or if you’ve just memorized it and are slightly familiar with the concepts but don’t know it very, very deeply.

Bloom’s Taxonomy

We said that if you’re using metacognition, you’ll be able to accurately judge your level of learning. What are the levels of learning that we’re talking about? In 1956, a psychologist named Benjamin Bloom worked with other psychologists to develop a hierarchy of learning levels, and it’s called Bloom’s Taxonomy, and you see it on the screen. A newer version was published in 2001, but it’s very similar to the original one, as you see now. Bloom’s Taxonomy is extremely important to our metacognitive brain as it analyzes your brain’s learning activities. Let’s take a closer look at Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Bloom’s Explained

There are actually six levels of learning that were identified by Bloom and colleagues, where the very lowest level is remembering that involves just memorizing information verbatim, for example, if we were going to apply Bloom’s Taxonomy to a history course, let’s say. If you’re at the remembering level, then all you would do is memorize names, dates, events that happened, and if anyone asked you, well, why did this event happen before this other event, you’d have no idea because all you would have done is just memorize the names, dates and places.

But if you’re at the understanding level, you’ll be able to put those events in context, and you could explain why one event had to happen before another event or even what the consequences of specific events were.

If you’re at the applying level, now you can use the information you’ve learned to apply it to different circumstances that you didn’t cover in class. For example, if you were explaining a certain historical event and the professor asked, what if this event had happened in Europe at the same time, what would the consequences have been. If you’re at the applying level, you would have no problem with that type of question. But if you had just operated at the remembering level, you would have no clue about how to answer that kind of application question.

If you’re at analyzing, you can now take any concept and break it down into simpler concepts. And an example there might be the concept of manifest destiny. This idea that certain things were meant to happen. For example, the expansion of the United States into the West. Now if you are at analyzing, you would be able to explain to someone exactly what manifest destiny is, how it’s related to the term manifest, and also destiny, and you would be able to take them through the individual steps that manifest destiny actually implies.

Now if you’re at the next level at evaluating, you would be able to look at manifest destiny as it operated in the United States versus manifest destiny as it operated in other countries, maybe in Asia or in Europe, and then evaluate the results of manifest destiny in those two locations and determine whether one was more effective than another, what the problems were in each of those situation.

And then finally, if you’re at the creating level, you would be able to come up with your own hypothetical country, come up with a scenario where manifest destiny would be operating in that country, and put forth the event, the activities, and the results of manifest destiny in that environment.

So you can see the difference, I hope, between the bottom level of Bloom’s where we’re just doing memorization, and the top level of Bloom’s, where we’re actually creating our own information, our theories, our countries or whatever.

Now to give you another quick example of the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and this is going to be a very simple example as it relates to Goldilocks and the Three Bears, where if you’re at the remembering level, it would just be list the items that Goldilocks used. If you’re at understanding, then you might have to answer the question why did she like baby bear’s chair the best as opposed to the other bears’ chairs. If you’re at applying, you might have to answer what kinds of things in this story could not really have happened. If you’re at analyzing, you might have to do something like compare this story to reality. What events in the story couldn’t really happen in real life?

If you’re at the evaluating, you might answer the question, was Goldilocks a good or a bad person. Was she bad because she actually broke into someone’s house, or was she good because she wasn’t really intending to do any harm. And if you’re at creating, then you could come up with your own story. It might be Goldilocks and the Three Fish. And so we, again, can see the difference in how we’re going to analyze and use information and learn and think if we’re at different levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Now the important thing is to look at our high school experience, our college experience, and analyze what levels of Bloom’s we needed to operate in each one of those environments.

High School Vs. College

Now that we know what the various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy are, I want you to take a minute to think back to your high school experience and think about the highest level at which you had to operate in order to make As and Bs in your high school classes. So take a minute to think about that, and then write down what that level was. Now I’d like for you to think about your college experience and think about what’s the lowest level that you have to operate in college in order to make the As and Bs in your college classes that you made in high school.

So let’s take a minute and write that level down.

Lower to Upper

Did you find there was a difference in the levels at which you operated in high school versus what’s needed in college? If you’re like most students you would have found that in high school, typically you needed to be at remembering or understanding to do very well in courses, but in college, you’ve got to be at application or analysis, or even higher to do well.

So the question is, how do you move yourself from the lower levels to the upper levels, and we have a great tool for that. It’s called the study cycle, and The Learning Center at the Center for Academic Success at LSU has adapted this from a procedure that was developed by Dr. Frank Crist, a learning specialist. And the study cycle has five steps that are essentially guaranteed to move you from those lower levels to the upper levels. We’ll take a closer look at that.

The Study Cycle

There are five steps to the study cycle, the first being previewing information that you have to learn before you go to class. And previewing takes very little time, about ten minutes if you do it correctly, just look at the bold-faced print, italicized words, any charts and graphs, so that you give your brain an overview of what it’s going to learn. And you come up with questions that you’d like the lecture to answer for you, so you’re giving yourself a purpose for going to class.

And then the second class is to go to class. Commit to yourself that you’re not going to miss a single class because if you’ve done the previewing you’ll be able to use that in-class time as a learning hour.

And then the third step is to review information that was covered in class as soon as possible after you get out of class. Because it has the same effect as seeing a movie more than once. I’m sure all of you have had the experience where you’ve seen a movie a second time and you see things the second time around that you didn’t even realize were there the first time around. The same thing happens with learning when you do the review.

And then the fourth step is to do that intense studying. We are going to, in addition to spending about ten minutes to preview and ten minutes to review, we’ve got to do some intense studying, so for about 45 minutes to an hour, and you want to do one of these for at least every hour that you spend in class where you spend an intense study hour and you can see here we have steps to the intense study session. You want to set a goal for the first minute or two, then you study with focus, you turn off the cell phone, you don’t pay any attention to Facebook, study with focus. And then take a break and reward yourself, and then review what you’ve just studied so again you will see things that you hadn’t seen before.

And then finally, assess your studying, and this is where that metacognitive brain comes in again. It says was the study technique that I used to learn this information, was it effective, did I do as well as I could have on this exam or do I need to adopt some other study behaviors. So if you use the study cycle, you’ll be able to move your learning from just memorization and understanding to being able to apply concepts and analyze information.

Activity: Count The Vowels

Remember those students earlier who made a significant improvement in their test scores? I want to do an activity with you now that will help you understand how they could make such a dramatic improvement in their performance. This activity is called Count the Vowels. I’m going to give you 45 seconds to count the vowels in the list of words or short phrases that are on the screen. So, you ready? Let’s start. Count the vowels now.

Activity: List The Words

Now what I’d like for you to do is write down the list of words that were on the screen. Ah, that’s a little bit more difficult, isn’t it? Most people don’t remember very many. So just take a minute to write down the number of the words of short phrases you remembered from that list.

Now what I’d like you to do is take a look at the list of words again, and if you go from top to bottom on the list, tell me what are the words arranged according to? Have you noticed yet? Yes. They’re arranged according to numbers. Dollar bill for one, dice for two, tricycle for three, four leaf clover, hand, etc.

Now I’m going to give you 45 seconds to memorize the list of words, and we’ll see how we do the next time around. So start memorizing the words now.

Strategies For Success

Ah, did you find that there was a difference in the number you remembered the first time and the second time? If you’re like most students, typically the first time they remembered about three, and three out of 15 is about 20%, so that’s an F minus. But the second time around, when they had strategy, the average is typically about 12, or 80%. So you can see that in about three minutes you could move your performance from an F or F minus, I call it, to a B just by learning strategies. And that’s what metacognition will do. Once you have the strategies, you can immediately be more successful.

So let’s look at the metacognitive strategies that we applied to improve our performance. First, we knew exactly what the task was. Second we developed a way to relate the information to something that was familiar to us. And third, we could judge our level of learning and improve it just by practicing and reciting the words without looking at the list.

Now there are a lot of other metacognitive learning strategies that your metacognitive brain will come up with if you just give it a chance. Strategies like read the textbook on a regular basis. Review the old exams. Try to write practice exam questions yourself. There are many, many more you’ll think about if you’ll just turn metacognition loose in your life.

Review

Now let’s briefly review the three main points from our session today. One is that you can metacognition, use your metacognitive brain, to think about the level at which you’re thinking and learning, and two, you can use strategies like the study cycle, Bloom’s Taxonomy, to consciously move yourself to think at higher levels and to perform well and ace your college courses. And the third point, which is extremely important, is in order to ace college courses you don’t have to have super intelligence or super ability, you just have to have effective strategy that your metacognitive brain will help you develop, and you just have to be consistent in applying those strategies to your college courses and to the other activities in your life.

Implement A Strategy

Now as we come to a close, I’d like you to really think about which strategies that we’ve talked about this morning you really want to start applying in your life right now. So I’d like you to take a minute to just write down a strategy that you will commit to starting as quickly as possible, even today if you can, and commit to yourself that you’re going to continue to use this strategy for at least two to three weeks so that you can really experience the impact of applying metacognitive strategies in your life. So turn that metacognitive brain loose, let it do its thing, and you will see your performance in your college courses start to soar.