Learning and Studying Realities
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #112
Hello! Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been talking about a couple of exam-related issues. Today’s update is relevant to exams, but also applies to many other learners and learning situations, including education in young children and, indeed, older adults.
Variation
We know that a common pattern when learners prepare for a test is to ‘cram’ their learning. Cognitive scientists often advise against this because spacing out practice is much more effective.
However, another problem with cramming is that it is often very repetitive in format. I’m thinking of when learners re-read the same texts, do similar kinds of question or task repeatedly, or go over lists of definitions or vocabulary in the hope of making it stick. The practice is not varied.
Varying your practice is a desirable difficulty (see update #99), and makes it easier to transfer what has been practised/studied to new contexts.
In real situations, of course, this can be difficult. Often the materials that learners have don’t lend themselves to varied practice – they may only have a set of notes or tasks to work from, for example.
However, there still a few ways that learners can vary how they study:
Vary the surroundings. This could in involve working in different rooms or locations.
Engage with material in varied ways. For example, with a text, reading could be interspersed with self-explaining, explaining to a peer, summarising, and testing one’s memory for the details.
Varying the challenge. For some physical tasks like shooting a basketball, the outcome can’t really be varied, but the distance and angle can, and so could the presence/absence of obstacles, or what the player is doing immediately beforehand.
Vary the social context. Students often practice alone; one way to vary their practice would be to perform for others, or have a friend or parent test them.
In short, variation is not only about the material itself. While some aspects of variation might be hard or impossible to vary, others are more under our control, and we can look to these as ways of mixing up practice and thereby making it more effective.
Movement
The second issue I want to mention relates to movement, and is not unconnected to the ideas above: moving around as you study or practice (or not doing so) can provide a further way of varying practice!
In addition, there is some evidence that exercise is good for cognition in general. For example, Hillman, Erickson and Kramer (2008), in a review of research, argue that there is strong evidence to suggest that physical activity is correlated with better cognitive function both in childhood and among older adults.
An intriguing point from their paper is that cutting school PE in favor of more time for literacy and numeracy could be a mistake:
“no empirical evidence exists to suggest that the elimination of non-academic programmes (such as PE) is related to higher academic achievement. In fact, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Aerobic fitness has a small but positive relation to academic achievement” (p. 59).
The researchers also note a “a dearth of research on exercise–cognition effects in young adults” (p. 59). Frustratingly, this means we can only speculate about what exactly the implications might be for students in high school and above. However, we can note several areas where physical activity is known to have psychological benefits:
Any hope that physical activity paves the way to effective learning is probably a bit unrealistic, as exercise won’t make up a shortfall in knowledge or effective study strategies. Still, despite the many unknowns in this area of research, exercise is likely to be neutral at worst, and has other benefits such as those listed above. It could even (as the evidence among children suggests) outweigh its ‘costs’ in terms of time taken by boosting concentration or other cognitive functions.
On a practical level, if I were advising a student who was preparing for an assessment, I would suggest that taking a walk or having a short exercise break would be time well spent. And if that student subsequently self-tested on returning to their desk, this would provide a useful combination of delayed practice and retrieval (‘successive relearning’).
More on the links between movement and cognition in a future update!
Hope you have a great week,
Jonathan
Last time: Exam Season: Can CogSci Help? (Part 2)
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