This week I'm away at Gladstone's library in Flintshire to do some reading and preparation for the start of school in a few week's time. I had come with the intention of reading They Say I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein and making notes and plans on how to use it with my extended essay students this year. Fortunately or unfortunately, time will tell, I was led astray by Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger and Mark A. McDaniel.
This post is part of a recall exercise I have set myself to see how much I remember from what I have already read and tested myself on. You will see how this fits in, I hope, as I write.
Gerald Graff and his colleague Mark Daniel are psychologist who have been working on memory and how to help learners improve their study techniques so that they can more readily move what they learn from short term to long term memory. In Make It Stick they lay out what they have learned, the science behind it and how learners of all ages can improve their retention of information. Roediger and McDaniel are the scientists and they have cleverly teamed up with Peter Brown, who is the story teller and writer. Thus the book becomes immensely readable to the non-scientist, of whom I am one. Though I only teach one class at the moment, it is called Study Skills, and so I was immediately drawn to the subject.
The authors start by discussing the misconceptions most people have about learning and I must admit to having fallen in to this when I was in the classroom full time.
1. That learning which is difficult is being approached in the wrong way.
2. That if we read something over and over again, we will remember it.
3. That if we underline or highlight important points, this will help us remember the information.
What they go on to prove is:
1. Learning needs to be effortful to be effective. The more we struggle with something, the more it will stay with us. Thus, they also encourage the learner to try to solve a problem before they are taught how to do it.
2. Reading material over and over again, known as massed practice, in other words, becoming familiar with it will not help you learn it. It may stay with you for a short time but a week or so later, you won't remember much of it. It's a great technique for cramming before a test but most of us want to remember that information for longer than the writing of a test.
3. The most effective method for learning and retaining information is to test yourself regularly (but also after a period of time has elapsed). Testing in this manner is known as retrieval practice.
4. Leaving time between study periods helps to improve the retention of the information.
5. Retention is facilitated by relating that information to what you have already learned.
6. Interleaving practice or study sessions with other information or problems will improve retention. To explain interleaving, they give the following example. Rather than giving students a large number of problems to solve on the same concept for homework, give them some on the lesson just taught and some relating to previous work done. By doing so, students are forced to recall previously learned information and thus strengthen the memory of it.
It basically comes down to this: To improve retention of information or skills, the learner should test themselves regularly (retrieving the information), leave time between study/testing sessions and interleave the studying.
Now, I have forgotten to talk about their emphasis on testing. This is not testing to see how much one has learned but testing to help with the learning. The authors give a number of examples of how teachers have changed their testing regime to increase the number of tests, in order to assist students with their learning. By testing students frequently, it forces them to study more regularly and requires them to retrieve the information and thus reinforce it.
Of course there is much more to the book and I have probably not summarized as well as I might have. However, the point of what I have just written is to test myself on what I have learned by writing a summary. I will now go over my notes and see how well I have done.
