Better Studying from Notes
Better Studying from Notes
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #18
Hello, and welcome to another of my Memory and Metacognition updates!
I spoke last week about how highlighting and re-reading of notes/books are very limited techniques. But we also know that students will do these things anyway.
It's therefore worth thinking about how we could support learners, working with rather than against their (flawed) choices. This update is focused on strategies to make the reading of notes more effective.
Questioning
I discussed one such strategy a couple of weeks ago, in the form of explanatory questioning. It can be directly applied to the reading of textbooks and notes to make the process more active, and to deepen learners' understanding.
To use it, students should be encouraged to view a text in relatively short chunks – a few paragraphs at at time, for example. They should then try to self-explain terminology and processes, asking questions such as:
Why is this true?
How does this link to what I have learned before?
To support this, such explanatory questioning could be practised in class so that it becomes a habit, and built into homework tasks, too.
Spacing
The spacing effect can also be applied to re-reading. For example, Rawson (2012) found that re-reading a text improved performance on a later test, but only if there was a long rather than a short delay before re-reading.
That is to say, re-reading becomes effective if we wait long enough! The question then becomes: how long should the delay be?
A general principle with the spacing effect is that we should wait until information is on the point of being forgotten. The exact duration depends on the material and on the learners, but if a class test comes only a week or two after the initial study phase, then it may well be too soon.
Such a test could be scheduled later in term with no 'cost' in terms of class time. It will just make students' revision more impactful.
Retrieval Practice
Even a delayed re-reading fails to prompt retrieval practice, however, and may be rather passive. Returning to notes is not what Dunlosky and colleagues refer to as 'successive re-learning' if it involves only spaced practice.
And it's worth bearing in mind that re-reading is usually the control condition in experiments on retrieval practice – consistently showing itself to be less effective!
Therefore, we might want to encourage students, when re-reading a text, to test themselves on the details afterwards (this is slightly different from self-explanation, which happens as they are reading).
Again, teachers can prompt this by setting a quiz in class or as homework, though it is also valuable to encourage learners to use this strategy autonomously.
Better Highlighting
I often point out that highlighting is an ineffective strategy on which students shouldn't rely. However, it needn't be a total loss. Research by Yue et al (2014) found it to be effective under certain conditions. They argued that:
Highlighting is more effective when study is not spaced out.
Light highlighting appears to be better, perhaps because it is more selective.
Highlighted text can be better recalled without any cost to the non-highlighted text.
Overall, the study shows a surprising relationship between highlighting and spacing. Spacing is still the better strategy, but if students must cram their study, highlighting could be useful when they re-read a text. This could be because it helps to make that re-read a more active process.
The researchers also point out that selective, 'light' highlights are likely to be better because they require students to make careful decisions about what to highlight. This forces them to think deeply about the meaning of the text (a bit like self-explanation).
Format of the text
One final approach is to make the text itself more active, by including questions and prompts for learners to generate examples as they go through. You can take this approach when creating handouts or booklets for your own classes (or, indeed, when writing textbooks). I have tried to do so in the textbooks I have written.
Regarding my earlier points about students testing themselves, it's worth noting that most learners are not very good at coming up with effective quiz questions.
What they can do quite effectively is to carry out a 'brain dump' – writing down everything that they can remember for a text. The evidence seems to suggest that doing so is effective, that they should do so fairly soon after reading the text.
A homework text or textbook chapter could therefore include a prompt to do exactly that. And again, learners could be trained to do this for themselves when such a prompt is not present.
Study notes could also be prepared with short quiz questions, tasks that involve categorisation, etc. Helping to enhance students' notes in this way would be a good use of class time – it would pay dividends later.
Before I sign off, a shoutout to Amarbeer Singh Gill's excellent book, 'Dunlosky's Toolkit in Action', which I read recently. As he says on p. 18:
"Practice testing isn't 'good', just as highlighting isn't 'bad'. It could even be argued that practice testing done really poorly may be worse than highlighting done really well."
This is exactly the point I have tried to make over the past two issues, but it applies more broadly, too. It's not (just) what you do, but the way that you do it! Teachers need to understand the strategies that they are recommending, and help learners to use them effectively.
Not long now until Hallowe'en! 🎃
Jonathan
Last week: Re-reading and Highlighting
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk
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