The Science Of Learning: Learning Strategies

"These resources were created based on research from cognitive psychology from the past few decades. To learn more about how we created the materials, see this blog. The materials are intended to teach about principles of learning and to provide teachers and students with flexible guiding principles to guide learning and studying ... "

Download resources to support this strategy, including, posters, bookmarks, powerpoint slides and more.

Download resources to support this strategy, including, bookmarks, powerpoint slides, posters and more.

Download resources to support this strategy, including, posters, bookmarks, powerpoint slides and more.

Download resources to support this strategy, including, posters, bookmarks, powerpoint slides and more.

Download resources to support this strategy, including, posters, bookmarks, powerpoint slides and more.

Download resources to support this strategy, including, posters, bookmarks, powerpoint slides and more.

"Over the last century hundreds of studies have demonstrated that testing is an effective intervention to enhance long-term retention of studied knowledge and facilitate mastery of new information, compared with restudying and many other learning strategies (e.g., concept mapping), a phenomenon termed the testing effect. How robust is this effect in applied settings beyond the laboratory? The current review integrated 48,478 students’ data, extracted from 222 independent studies, to investigate the magnitude, boundary conditions, and psychological underpinnings of test-enhanced learning in the classroom. The results show that overall testing (quizzing) raises student academic achievement to a medium extent (g = 0.499). The magnitude of the effect is modulated by a variety of factors, including learning strategy in the control condition, test format consistency, material matching, provision of corrective feedback, number of test repetitions, test administration location and timepoint, treatment duration, and experimental design. The documented findings support 3 theories to account for the classroom testing effect: additional exposure, transfer-appropriate processing, and motivation. In addition to their implications for theory development, these results have practical significance for enhancing teaching practice and guiding education policy and highlight important directions for future research."

"Many investigations have shown that retrieval practice enhances the recall of different types of information, including both medical and physiological, but the effects of the strategy on higher‐order thinking, such as evaluation, are less clear. The primary aim of this study was to compare how effectively retrieval practice and repeated studying (i.e. reading) strategies facilitated the evaluation of two research articles that advocated dissimilar conclusions. A secondary aim was to determine if that comparison was affected by using those same strategies to first learn important contextual information about the articles ... "

"Recent work has shown that retrieval hints can make test trials more enjoyable without sacrificing learning. We investigated the extent to which this effect was moderated by hint strength. Both experiments utilized a within-participants design. In Experiment 1 (n = 41), participants studied skeletal charts highlighting a bone region. After study, participants received one test trial with either consonants-only (e.g., _cc_p_t_l), vowels-only (e.g., o__i_i_a_), or no hint (e.g., _________). Retrieval latencies were fastest for the consonants-only items, suggesting they provided the strongest hints. Although the consonants-only trial produced the worst final test performance,participants rated that trial
as the most effective, the most fun, and the trial they would use from now on. Experiment 2 (n = 32) replicated and extended these results using a criterion learning paradigm. These experiments show that participants prefer extremely strong hints during test trials, even when such hints impair performance ... "

"The Bjork’s work on desirable difficulties -explaining that retrieval is more challenging and so has a larger impact on retention."

"Retrieval practice is a learning technique that is known to produce enhanced long term memory retention when compared to several other techniques. This difference in learning outcome is commonly called “the testing effect”. Yet there is little research on how individual differences in personality traits and working memory capacity moderate the size of the retrieval-practice benefits. The current study is a conceptual replication of a previous study, further investigating whether the testing effect is sensitive to individual differences in the personality traits Grit and Need for Cognition, and working memory capacity. Using a within-subjects design (N ¼ 151), participants practiced 60 Swahili–Swedish word pairs (e.g., adhama–honor) through retrieval practice and re-studying. Learning was assessed at three time points: five minutes, one week, and four weeks after practice. The results revealed a significant testing effect at all three time points. Further, the results showed no association between the testing effect and the personality traits, or between the testing effect and working memory, at any time point. To conclude, retrieval practice seems to be a learning technique that is not moderated by individual differences in these specific personality traits or with working memory capacity, thus possibly beneficial for all students ... "

"Testing in school is usually done for purposes of assessment, to assign students grades (from tests in classrooms) or rank them in terms of abilities (in standardized tests). Yet tests can serve other purposes in educational settings that greatly improve performance; this chapter reviews 10 other benefits of testing. Retrieval practice occurring during tests can greatly enhance retention of the retrieved information (relative to no testing or even to restudying). Furthermore, besides its durability, such repeated retrieval produces knowledge that can be retrieved flexibly and transferred to other situations. On open-ended assessments (such as essay tests), retrieval practice required by tests can help students organize information and form a coherent knowledge base. Retrieval of some information on a test can also lead to easier retrieval of related information, at least on delayed tests. Besides these direct effects of testing, there are also indirect effects that are quite positive. If students are quizzed frequently, they tend to study more and with more regularity. Quizzes also permit students to discover gaps in their knowledge and focus study efforts on difficult material; furthermore, when students study after taking a test, they learn more from the study episode than if they had not taken the test. Quizzing also enables better metacognitive monitoring for both students and teachers because it provides feedback as to how well learning is progressing. Greater learning would occur in educational settings if students used self-testing as a study strategy and were quizzed more frequently in class."

"Retrieval practice has been shown to be a highly effective tool for enhancing memory, a fact that has led to major changes to educational practice and technology. However, when initial learning is poor, initial retrieval practice is unlikely to be successful and long-term benefits of retrieval practice are compromised or nonexistent. Here, we investigate the benefit of a scaffolded retrieval technique called diminishing-cues retrieval practice (Finley, Benjamin, Hays, Bjork, & Kornell, Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 289–298, 2011). Under learning conditions that favored a strong testing effect, diminishing cues and standard retrieval practice both enhanced memory performance relative to restudy. Critically, under learning conditions where standard retrieval practice was not helpful, diminishing cues enhanced memory performance substantially. These experiments demonstrate that diminishing-cues retrieval practice can widen the range of conditions under which testing can benefit memory, and so can serve as a model for the broader application of testing-based techniques for enhancing learning."

"Practice tests and spaced study are both highly potent for enhancing learning and memory. Combining these two methods under the conditions in which they are most effective (i.e., practice tests that invoke successful retrieval from long-term memory and spacing study across days) yields a promising learning technique referred to as successive relearning. Given the obvious implications of successive relearning for promoting student learning and the voluminous literatures on testing and spacing more generally, surprisingly few studies have evaluated successive relearning, and none have done so in an authentic educational context. The two experiments reported here establish the potency of a successive relearning intervention for enhancing student learning by demonstrating meaningful improvements in course exam performance and on long-term retention tests."

"The Bjork’s New theory of disuse and the seminal concepts of retrieval and storage strength, showing that greater gains in storage strength are achieved when retrieval strength is lower."