Tackling Misconceptions About How to Study
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #44
Hi! This week I hosted a group of Czech academics whose university I visited last year, and took them to visit schools in Glasgow. It was a great opportunity for me to reflect on some good metacognition-inspired practice!
I’ll describe it all in a future update.
Today: I promised recently that I would share my slides from researchED Haninge. The link is below. I’ll also explain some of the main ideas from the presentation.
Firth (2023) – researchED Scandinavia (Haninge) slides.
The first part of the talk briefly covered several major evidence-based study strategies:
Organisation
Variation
Some of these need little introduction if you have been reading these updates for a while, but you can click on the links to access previous posts!
Organisation may be less familiar, but it is in fact a very well-established idea from Psychology. Linking and categorising things meaningfully makes them more memorable, and therefore less prone to being forgotten.
Finally, variation strikes me as an important and under-used desirable difficulty. Often, students try to minimise variation to keep things easier. They study in the same place, and under similar conditions, but this is not best for long-term learning.
The later part of the talk moves on to metacognition. I explain why we can’t leave study choices to the student, because they tend to have so many metacognitive illusions, misjudging their own learning.
Teachers can be part of the solution via simple strategies such as scaffolding study habits in the classroom and directly tackling misconceptions as they arise.
Doing so is all part of a wider process of helping students to understand their own minds and their own learning.
My talk at the Barcelona researchED next Saturday (3rd June 2023) will in some ways follow the same themes, but also broaden them. I will talk more about how we can develop self-regulated learning, and about some of the policies and professional learning strategies that can support this across different age groups of students.
Have a great week!
Jonathan
Last week: Getting Ever More Evidence-Informed
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk
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.