100 Posts – Reflections and Targets!
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #100
Hello, and welcome to a milestone post from these Memory and Metacognition updates – this is the 100th weekly post! 🎂
I’ve been thinking for a while about what it should cover. Appropriately enough, I’ve settled on applying two very metacognitive concepts – reflecting on what I’ve done so far, and setting targets for what to do next.
First, though, just to say a huge thank-you for being part of these updates. Whether you read every week or just dip in occasionally, it’s a real honour to have the opportunity to share these ideas with fellow educators.
Reflections and targets
I’ve spent some time looking back over the previous posts (okay, yeah… I made a spreadsheet categorising every post!). Unsurprisingly, the most common topics focus on memory, metacognition, desirable difficulties, and study skills. There are a few other things that have cropped up:
Creativity
Generative learning
Literacy
Errors
Motivation
Schemas
Attention
One thing I want to do, going forward, is go back and expand on ideas such as the ones above. After all, many of you weren’t even subscribed yet when I wrote about things like generative learning (posts 30–33)! I’d also like to make that older material more accessible, and I’m thinking about how best to do that.
Another thing I plan to do is to share more posts where I delve into a specific research study that I’ve read. I do frequently recommend research papers, but I will write more posts that summarise recent studies on memory and metacognition. I’ll start with one today.
Other than that, my goal is just to keep going and try to write posts that are useful to you and other educators. All being well, perhaps I will reach post number 200 (let’s not think about how many years that will take!).
So, those are my targets.
A study: McDaniel et al (2021)
The study I want to focus on this week is by Mark McDaniel, Gilles Einstein and Emily Een. It’s interesting because – as you probably know from these updates and elsewhere – there are some very effective and evidence-based study strategies, but we don’t know much about why students do or don’t adopt these strategies.
“there is at present a major gap in our understanding of how to teach students these strategies such that they will self-regulate their learning and spontaneously engage powerful learning strategies … in appropriate situations” (p. 366).
Here are some key points from the paper:
It’s not enough just to tell students about effective strategies; knowledge is necessary, but alone it has a short-lived benefit.
Instead, students also need to try strategies out so they believe they work, make a commitment to using them, and develop a specific action plan for doing so.
The authors used the above points as a guiding framework, carrying out a small intervention study with 10 college students.
The strategies focused on were: retrieval practice, building understanding (including self-explanation), organization, mnemonics, generation, spacing, and interleaving.
Participants read cogsci books and papers to develop knowledge, and tried out the strategies to develop belief in their effectiveness.
Commitment was developed via homework where students were asked to apply the strategy to at least one of their other courses.
For each strategy, students had to complete a short project answering specific questions about when and how they planned to use it, describing this in detail, and then later reflect on progress (planning and reflection – metacognition again!).
Although the study was small scale, there was positive feedback, and encouraging signs at a 7-month follow up that students were still using at least some of the strategies.
The authors discussed how such interventions could be structured in future.
Overall, the paper is a really good read, and helps us to see that it’s not enough to just learn about study skills – it’s important to support them in a more sustained and motivating way. And if you are interested in the implications for younger learners, you might like this short article that I wrote about developing study awareness across younger years.
McDaniel, M. A., Einstein, G. O., & Een, E. (2021). Training college students to use learning strategies: A framework and pilot course. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 20(3), 364–382.
That’s all for now. Thanks again for reading, and here’s to the next 100 blog posts!
Jonathan
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