Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #15 – Dunlosky et al's list of strategies
Hello! I hope things are going well for you. Welcome to another issue of my memory and metacognition updates.
In addition, a warm welcome to everyone who signed up to this list since the start of term/semester! It has been amazing to see over two hundred new educators join since August.
Metacognition includes a great many processes, but one of the most important ones as a learner's ability to make good choices about how to study. To do so, they must have some appreciation of how learning works.
They don't gain this knowledge by accident (in fact, as Amarbeer Singh Gill explains in this recent blog post, if left to their own devices, learners' intuition seems to lead them astray).
It therefore falls to educators to inform themselves about effective study strategies, and to communicate these to students.
So, what should we tell students about how to study, when should we do it, and how?
I will focus on the first of those three questions today. One source that has often been viewed as a checklist of effective study strategies is a paper by Dunlosky and colleagues in 2013, "Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology."
In it, they review the evidence for 10 key study techniques, ranking them from most to least effective.
You can read the full 55-page article here, but the following summary paper by John Dunlosky and Katherine Rawson is quicker to read and more accessible, and I recommend it:
Among the key take-home messages are that the spacing effect and practice tests are the most strongly supported techniques reviewed, viewed as having 'high utility'. I'll return to those in a second.
Next come three techniques rated as 'moderate' in their effects: elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, and interleaving. I would suggest that for interleaving, there is now evidence of high utility (as Dunlosky and Rawson anticipate in their paper, when they say: "this technique may quickly be on its way to earning a high rating...", p. 73).
Finally, they list five techniques with 'low utility':
Summarising
Highlighting
Keyword mnemonics
Imagery for text
Re-reading
It would probably take a separate issue of this newsletter to explain exactly why these five are low utility (and I am happy to oblige – watch this space!) but the main implication for now is that these should not be the focus of our recommendations to students. Unfortunately, students do often prefer these strategies!
Unsurprisingly, Dunlosky and Rawson place a particular focus on spacing and practice tests. Spacing, which I discuss in more detail here, means delaying practice. And as the authors explain, this technique can easily be combined with practice tests.
The result is what the researchers call successive relearning. To make use of this, students should delay practice until they are close to forgetting, and then consolidate prior study using a practice test.
Now, we know that retrieval practice can be done in more ways than just practice tests. But overall, this does seem to me a very practical recommendation for independent study that can be applied to a great many learning contexts.
That's it for now! Any questions, feel free to reply to this email, and I'll try to pick them up in a future issue.
Jonathan
Last week: Interleaving
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk