Building Study Skills
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #91
Hello! I’ve recently been in the USA, speaking at researchED Delaware (when this update publishes, I will still be travelling back).
I thought it would be fun to share the key points from my talk.
Students don’t intuitively know how to study
Self-regulated study is by definition not guided by a teacher, meaning that it calls strongly on metacognitive judgements – deciding how to study, when to study, and so forth.
However, when students are left to figure these things out for themselves, they are often misled by their intuitions.
Students don’t intuitively know how to study. They may be told, ‘Do what works best for you’. But this can be a dangerous message, because their intuitions will lead them astray. Specifically, they often opt for worse strategies.
Overall, it’s rather like telling people to eat healthily based on their judgements of how food tastes. Something that’s more enjoyable isn’t always better for us.
Flawed judgements of learning
Students make flawed judgements of learning in part because learning and memory are hard to judge.
This links to the idea of temporary performance, discussed in a recent update (see update #89). If students make rapid progress via strategies such as re-reading, they mistakenly think they have mastered the material – that they have learned. In fact, they have only boosted performance.
Desirable difficulties
Desirable difficulties are a key part of tackling this problem. Building these into independent study helps to ensure that material is well learned, with less forgetting. I focused particularly on four strategies in the talk:
Spacing out practice
Retrieval practice
Variation of context and type of study activity
Elaborative questioning
I also discussed some broader skills, including motivation and goal setting, that successful students need (see chapters 8 and 9 of my recent book for much more on bad study habits vs. effective skills).
Building in the skills
Finally, I addressed how these skills can be developed in schools.
Some schools like to give a talk about study skills to their students prior to the start of major exams. But we can’t just tell people how to study. Doing so is passive, and lacks scaffolding, practice and feedback – all things that are essential for developing new skills! It may also overload students with too much information at one time.
A much preferable approach is to start early, building up an awareness of memory and self regulation from primary/elementary school onwards.
Teachers can also guide the first stages of studying for a specific test, bringing some of this process into the classroom. If we supervise students making their study plans and help them to get started, they’re much less likely to go astray in their choices.
I also discussed tackling myths and misconceptions on a school-wide basis.
I could go on… but I think that covers the essentials of what was in the talk. In short, we can’t rely on students to make good choices about how to study, and the solution is to support and build the skills of effective studying across the school years.
Here are the slides from my talk:
Firth (2024). Transforming study skills through cognitive science. researchED Delaware.
I’d love to hear about how study skills are supported in your context.
Jonathan
Please note that my slides and similar materials are used under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. This means you can use or adapt them with attribution for non-commercial purposes. If you wish to use my materials for other purposes, feel free to get in touch.
Your observation that students don’t intuitively know how to study is really powerful and explains the major hole in most educational settings. Much information is taught, maybe even taught well. But making students rather than professional educators responsible for large chunks of the learning process leads to inconsistent results and lots of loss of knowledge. Thanks for this excellent update!