Teaching Students to Adopt Learning Strategies
By: Geoff Richman
Some years ago, I read an article in Educational Leadership magazine by Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist from the University of Virginia, titled “Strategies That Make Learning Last,” In it, he illuminated distributed practice and practice testing as foundational strategies to make one’s learning durable. That same year, Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger, III, and Mark A. McDaniel highlighted these same habits in their book, Make It Stick (2014).
Inspired by both texts and both strategies over the subsequent months, I presented at the Georgia Independent Schools Conference, sharing these two and other study strategies before opening the floor for ideas, thoughts, and questions.
A math teacher said, “At our school, we do not allow the use of the word ‘study.’ It is too vague. We have found that having our students be more specific with their language has improved their results.” As a very veteran learning specialist, I admit here that I am not really in the results business; I am more about process: the means leading to those academic ends. Still, I appreciated the impetus for the vocabulary shift, for making middle and high school students more intentional about their learning actions.
Upon returning to the classroom, I immediately adopted their ban on the word “study,” a boycott that remains firmly in place a decade later.
Fast forward to today when a student sits next to me to create a weekend plan of action.
“You wrote ‘Study for math test,’”’ I point out. “What does that mean?”
“I’ll review my homework.”
“What does that look like?”
“I can look over the problems and see if there are any I didn’t get.”
“What will you do with those you did not understand?”
How long they’ve worked with me will usually determine the alacrity with which students recognize my seemingly bottomless well of clarifying questions. I will not stop until they use more precise language: language pertaining to those specific strategies that are both more efficient and more effective in improving their understanding and showing what they know.
“I am going to begin using flashcards to review vocabulary tonight. Tomorrow night, I will try to write some responses to the free-response questions. I will run through the vocab again during our next class.”
“I will practice test myself on all the problems in the review packet. Then I will compare my answers to the answer key.’’
That’s it!
So what are distributed practice and practice testing and how do they work?
Distributed Practice
It might be easier to understand what distributed practice is by considering what it is not. It is not cramming. Instead, revision sessions are spread across days—possibly weeks—in order to increase retention of the material. In fact, it is the forgetting in between sessions that catalyzes the remembering when one returns to it. (This phenomenon is also the underlying benefit of low- or no-stakes assessments but that is another piece for another time.) On average, study sessions should be separated by 10 to 20 percent of the time that you’d like to remember something. So if, for example, the quiz is in a week’s time, separate practice sessions by a day or two. For students who need to remember learning for longer periods, such as end-of-year cumulative exams, separating revision sessions by up to a month will be of value. (We are looking at you, Advanced Placement courses.) In this example, separating revision sessions by up to a month will be of value. While this learning strategy is, in essence, a scheduling/calendaring skill, it should not be especially surprising that teaching this strategy can happen only once we are confident our students have functional time-management skills. Creating a distributed practice plan is only helpful if they adhere to it and doing so involves discipline and willpower, particularly since new learning is happening concurrently.
Practice Testing
If distributing practice is the “when,” then practice testing is the “how.” Put another way, if one of our students were to ask, “What practice am I distributing?” we would reply, “Practice testing.” A part of retrieval practice also called self-quizzing, practice testing asks students to retrieve learning from long-term memory so that it can be accessed in working memory. Indeed, it is the casting about in our memory that encourages the learning to last, to, as the title of the book mentioned above suggests, make it “stickier.” Not only is practice testing an efficient way to ensure that memory is robust and long-lasting, but it’s also a reliable way of evaluating whether you need to continue studying. When we re-read or look over work we have already completed, we are prone, as are all humans, to overestimate our understanding, a situation that will most certainly end poorly for us come test time. Better to have an understanding of what we know and, perhaps more importantly, what we don’t know. Giving yourself a practice test is the way to find out.
Just as students will benefit from practice at managing time (see above), there will be positive returns from teachers showing them what self-quizzing can look like in their classrooms. Some disciplines seem to set themselves up more elegantly with practice testing opportunities, such as problem sets for mathematics and vocabulary flashcards in world language courses. End-of-chapter questions in textbooks serve a similar purpose. Admittedly, practice testing for assessments that involve writing, whether short- or long-answer, is less facile because flashcards and practice sets, for example, rarely factor in these disciplines. But just as a basketball player will not improve their shot without a ball, one who will be tested on their writing will want to “practice like they play.” Teachers can help by sharing questions with enough time for students to answer them in short paragraphs and receive feedback.
Students in my room know not to include the word “study” in their daily or weekly planner, because they will do anything to avoid this guy peppering them with questions to uncover the strategy or strategies they will use to prepare for assessments. They also know that when they incorporate these they see improvement in their results; the process directly—and positively—impacts the product.
References
Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick. Harvard University Press.
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
Geoff Richman is an international learning specialist currently in London. He has been a K-12 director, department chair, and special education coordinator in Atlanta, Amsterdam, and Portland, Oregon. He recently earned certification as an educational therapist. His writing has appeared in edutopia, International School and The International Educator.