CH 8
Make it Stick!
Learning Tips for Students
Remember that the most successful students are those who take charge of their own learning and follow a simple but disciplined strategy.
Practice Retrieving New Learning from Memory
“Retrieval practice” means self-quizzing.
Set aside a little time every week throughout the semester to quiz yourself on the material in a course, both the current week’s work and material covered in prior weeks.
What are the key ideas?
What terms or ideas are new to me?
How would I define them?
How do the ideas relate to what I already know?
Space Out Your Retrieval Practice
With Spaced out practicing: As you reconstruct learning from long-term memory, as awkward as it feels, you are strengthening your mastery as well as the memory.
Interleave the Study of Different Problem Types
When you structure your study regimen, once you reach the point where you understand a new problem type and its solution but your grasp of it is still rudimentary, scatter this problem type throughout your practice sequence so that you are alternately quizzing yourself on various problem types and retrieving the appropriate solutions for each.
If you find yourself falling into single-minded, repetitive practice of a particular topic or skill, change it up: mix in the practice of other subjects, other skills, constantly challenging your ability to recognize the problem type and select the right solution.
Other Effective Study Strategies
The more that you can elaborate on how new learning relates to what you already know, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create to remember it later.
Fill in the Blank
For instance: On a small level, the act of filling in a missing word in a text (that is, generating the word yourself rather than having it supplied by the writer) results in better learning and memory of the text than simply reading a complete text.
CALIBRATION
is the act of aligning your judgments of what you know and don’t know with objective feedback so as to avoid being carried off by the illusions of mastery that catch many learners by surprise at test time.
Generation
Generation is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution.
REFLECTION
REFLECTION is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds layers to learning and strengthens skills.
What is it? Reflection is the act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned in a recent class or experience and asking yourself questions. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experiences does it remind you of? What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results?
MNEMONIC DEVICES
help you to retrieve what you have learned and to hold arbitrary information in memory (Chapter 7)
Tim the Tool Man Taylor Fellows
Among the highlights were these:
• Always does the reading prior to a lecture
• Anticipates test questions and their answers as he reads
• Answers rhetorical questions in his head during lectures to test his retention of the reading
• Reviews study guides, finds terms he can’t recall or doesn’t know, and relearns those terms
• Copies bolded terms and their definitions into a reading notebook, making sure that he understands them
• Takes the practice test that is provided online by his professor; from this he discovers which concepts he doesn’t know and makes a point to learn them
• Reorganizes the course information into a study guide of his design
• Writes out concepts that are detailed or important, posts them above his bed, and tests himself on them from time to time
• Spaces out his review and practice over the duration of the course
Tips for Lifelong Learners
In a sense, of course, we’re all lifelong learners. From the moment we’re born we start learning about the world around us through experimentation, trial and error, and random encounters with challenges that require us to recall what we did the last time we found ourselves in a similar circumstance. In other words, the techniques of generation, spaced practice and the like that we present in this book are organic (even if counterintuitive), and it’s not surprising that many people have already discovered their power in the pursuit of interests and careers that require continuous learning.
Retrieval Practice
Fuller uses retrieval practice in various forms. First, he takes a blank sheet of paper and covers a page of the script. He draws it down, silently rendering the lines of the characters he’s playing opposite, because those lines cue his own, and the emotion in them is reflected one way or another by his own character. He keeps his own line covered and attempts to speak it aloud from memory. He checks his accuracy. If he gets the line wrong, he covers it up and speaks it again. When he has spoken it correctly, he reveals the next passage and goes on.
Fuller’s learning process is a seamless blend of desirable difficulties: retrieval practice, spacing, interleaving, generation (of his character’s soul, carriage, motivations, and idiosyncrasies), and elaboration. Through these techniques, he learns the role and the many levels of meaning that make a performance come alive to himself and to his audience.
Generation
In short, you may actually be writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version exists. Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”
Be Transparent
“Stop. Do not look at your notes. Just take a minute to think about it yourself.” I tell them our brains are like a forest, and your memory is in there somewhere. You’re here, and the memory is over there. The more times you make a path to that memory, the better the path is, so that the next time you need the memory, it’s going to be easier to find it.
We teach them to think like the professionals they want to become. And when they fall, we show them how to get up again.
Matthews will tell a student, “If you’ve read every word of this chapter, you’re not being very efficient.” The point is not to “slide your eyes over the words.” You start with questions, and you read for answers.
It’s a skill used for keeping your bearings in unfamiliar territory. You climb a tree or a height of land and sight a distant landmark in the direction you’re headed. Compass in hand, you note how many degrees your landmark lies off of due north. Then you descend into the bush and keep working your way in that direction. Periodically, you pause to shoot an azimuth and make sure you’re on course. Quizzing is a way of shooting an azimuth in the classroom: are you gaining the mastery you need to get where you’re trying to go?
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 software 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.
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 are Farmers Bam Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba Bam
For example, when participants first arrive, they’re assigned to a red, blue, or green group. The red group is instructed to go meet people in the room. The blue group is instructed to go learn three things about somebody in the room. The green group is instructed to ask another member of the class about his or her family, prior occupation, favorite forms of recreation, and what he or she enjoys most. When the class reconvenes, they share what they have learned about others, and it is quickly evident that the green group, which had a structure for talking to others, learned much more than did their peers.
When talking about sales later in the week the question comes up, what’s an effective way to learn about a prospective customer? Somebody will recall the initial get-acquainted exercise that proved so fruitful: asking about one’s family, occupation, recreation, and enjoyment. That icebreaker now morphs into a handy tool for getting to know a prospective client and it gets an acronym: FORE.
Once you turn up a lead, how do you discover needs he or she has that the company’s products can meet? They return to the handy acronym FORE. Now, the habit of asking about one’s family, occupation, recreation, and enjoyment becomes something even more potent than a tool for getting acquainted. It provides an opening into four of the most important realms of a prospect’s life where insurance and financial products can help that person protect his or her assets and achieve his or her financial goals. At each pivot from one subject back to another, understanding deepens, and new skills take form.
Kaizen Event
Wynveen took their plan to each of the twelve work stations on the line with a simple question: What changes are needed to make this plan work? Production workers and their crew leaders put their heads together and redesigned the components to fit the new plan. The line was disassembled and rebuilt in two halves, over two weekends, restarted, and fine-tuned over subsequent months, a process that generated yet an additional two hundred improvements suggested by production workers: a learning process of testing, feedback, and correction.
The result? After five months, the plant had met Wynveen’s stretch goals and cut costs in half. During the conversion and shakedown, the production teams never missed a shipment and never had a quality issue. The principle of engagement—actively seeking the ideas of employees from all levels of the plant—is central to the company’s culture of continuous improvement. “Engagement is a management style of trust and a willingness to talk,” Wynveen says.
We have talked throughout this book about learning, not about education. The responsibility for learning rests with every individual, whereas the responsibility for education (and training, too) rests with the institutions of society. Education embraces a world of difficult questions. Are we teaching the right things? Do we reach children young enough? How should we measure outcomes? Are our young people mortgaging their futures to pay for a college degree?
These are urgent issues, and we need to wrestle through them. But while we’re doing that, the techniques for highly effective learning that are outlined in this book can be put to use right now everywhere learners, teachers, and trainers are at work. They come at no cost, they require no structural reform, and the benefits they promise are both real and long-lasting.