This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust.

Show Notes:

Today's episode is specifically for students. It is the follow-up to our previous episode (Episode 14) for students. Our goal for this pair of episodes was to take what we know about the science of learning and focus on how it can be used by you - students - to improve how much you're learning and your performance on tests, exams, and other types of assessments. We hope that this episode will be applicable to a range of students, regardless of age and specific subject(s) being studied.

The two most important study strategies are spaced practice and retrieval practice. They have the most evidence for their effectiveness, and are the most broadly applicable across a huge variety of different skills and subjects. We focused Episode 14 on these two strategies, and we begin the current episode by reviewing them.

In this follow-up episode, we discuss 4 additional techniques that also have merit. Interleaving, elaboration, dual coding, and concrete examples. You can find videos about all six of these study strategies here.

Transcript:

Special thanks to the Digital Access Team at the University of Cincinnati for providing the transcripts for this episode.

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  Megan Sumeraki: Welcome to the Learning Scientist Podcast, a podcast for teachers, students, and parents about evidence-based practice and learning.

  Yana Weinstein: The Learning Scientist Podcast is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

  Megan Sumeraki: Hi, I'm Dr. Megan Sumeracki, a professor at Rhode island college.

  Yana Weinstein: And I'm Dr. Yana Weinstein, a professor at UMass Lowell.

  Megan Sumeraki: And together, we co-founded the Learning Scientists. We apply cognitive psychology to education for teachers, students, and parents.

  Yana Weinstein: In the last podcast episode, which was aimed at students, we talked about two particular learning strategies, spaced practice and retrieval practice. We'll be carrying on today with another episode for students. But first, Megan is going to give a bit of a recap about those two study strategies from the previous episode.

  Megan Sumeraki: Yeah. If you haven't listened to the previous podcast episode, you might want to go back and listen to that one before you listen to this one. But just to briefly recap, spaced practice is all about spacing your studying over time. So rather than studying for one long cramming session right before an exam, take that same amount of time and break it up so that you're studying maybe 30 minutes each day or even just every other day for your courses so that you're always studying for upcoming exams and you're not just cramming the night before. Spacing out your learning will help you remember more and it will save you time in the long-run.

  And the other strategy is retrieval practice. And this is all about bringing information to mind and producing what you know. So to practice retrieval, you can just take a blank sheet of paper and try to write out or even sketch everything that you know about a topic or everything that you can remember, or you can take practice tests or answer practice questions. You might even get together with a friend and try to ask one another questions and produce the information. Really, anything that involves bringing information to mind and either writing it down or saying it out loud is retrieval practice.

  Yana Weinstein: So spaced practice and retrieval practice are the two really important strategies that we want to make sure that you're using. But beyond that, there are four additional study strategies that have also received quite a lot of evidence from cognitive psychology, and we're going to talk about those additional four strategies today.

  So the four strategies just, first of all, to list them for you are interleaving, elaboration, dual coding, and concrete examples. We'll take each one of those in turn, and we'll start with interleaving. The idea behind interleaving is that you'll be mixing up the types of things that you're studying in one study session. So this is within one particular subject, not mixing up all of the different subjects you might be studying. But let's say you're studying something for a math test or math quiz and you have some problems to solve. Now, one way of doing it would be to solve the same type of problem over and over again, not the same exact one, obviously, but different versions of the same type of problem to kind of get into the swing of things. That's not interleaving. That might be known as blocking. So you're blocking together similar problems. Now, interleaving would be mixing in different types of problems. So you can imagine that doing this would actually be harder, right? So you're jumping around from different types of problems and you have to think on your feet about what strategy you would apply to each problem. But the research actually shows that by doing the studying in this interleaved fashion, you're then going to be better at solving the different problems later on.

  Megan Sumeraki: So that's an example from math, but really you could interleave other ideas from other subjects as well. The goal is really to interleave anything where you need to be able to tell the difference between two ideas. So in math, when you're on a math test, you're going to need to solve a bunch of different types of math problems. But you need to do more than just know how to solve the problem. You actually need to be able to identify what type of problem it is on the test and then apply the correct strategy or the correct solution. And so any time that you need to be able to compare and contrast or tell the difference between two things, interleaving can really help.

  Yana Weinstein: And the other thing that interleaving helps you with is becoming flexible with the information. So, for example, we were talking to some children in the UK and one of them told us that he actually uses what we know of as interleaving, but he called it jumbling it up to learn directions in German. So he said that instead of always learning them the same order, like go straight, go left, go right and kind of memorizing it that way, he made sure to mix them up or interleave them so that he was always doing it in a different order, making him more flexible with remembering those different directions later.

  Megan Sumeraki: And then another strategy that you can use to try and get at sort of the similarities and differences between ideas and also get at the underlying structure of ideas is elaboration. And elaboration can mean a lot of different things. There's a lot of different ways to utilize elaboration, but the strategy that has a fair amount of evidence to support its effectiveness is called elaborative interrogation. So elaboration really just means to sort of add stuff or continue to connect things that you already know to the stuff that you're learning, and interrogation means to question. And when you use elaborative interrogation, you're basically asking yourself a bunch of questions about how and why things work and then trying to find the answers to those questions.

  So, for example, let's say you're studying or learning about the World Wars. And you might go in and ask yourself a bunch of questions like, how did World War I start? How did World War II start? Why did the wars happen? Who was on each side? What were the different types of weaponry that were used, and so on? And you would just ask yourself a whole bunch of questions and then try to find the answers to those questions. This is going to help you learn the main ideas, but also to really get at the underlying structure, the deep understanding that you're trying to achieve.

  And another thing you can do with elaborative interrogation is just take two ideas and compare and contrast them. So you're already kind of did that with World War I and World War II. You could also take other historical events and sort of add them in and say, what were the key differences between, say, the political climate during World War II and the political climate during other time periods? Or what are the similarities between the two World Wars, basically comparing and contrasting. And in this way, you're actually combining in a way interleaving and elaboration because you're mixing up ideas that you're going to have to be able to tell the difference between later and asking these how and why questions to get at the underlying idea.

  Yana Weinstein: So another way that you can practice elaboration is to try to apply what you're learning, what you're trying to elaborate upon to your own real life experiences or memories. So, for example, you might be going through your day and then noticing things that relate to a concept that you're studying and trying to make connections between what you're learning in class and the real world. Sometimes it can seem like what you're learning is so disconnected from real life, but if you really think about it carefully, it all relates in some way or another to what you're living.

  Megan Sumeraki: The third strategy we're going to talk about today is dual coding. And the idea behind dual coding is combining words with visuals, or really just coming up with more than one way of representing material.

  Yana Weinstein: There are a couple of reasons why combining words with visuals might be helpful to your learning, so it might be useful for you to think about these. One of them is that having two different sources of information can help you to remember at test. So, for example, let's say that you looked at or drew a diagram that you found quite helpful, but also learned information in text form. When it comes to the test, you might have forgotten the explanation, but you might still be able to reproduce the diagram or the picture from memory, and then that can trigger some of the other text-based memories and help you to answer the question on the exam.

  The other reason why dual coding or combining words with visuals can be helpful, we'll talk about this a little bit later as well, is that making things into a picture makes them more concrete. So you might be studying something very abstract and difficult to grasp, but if you draw a picture or take a look at a picture that illustrates it, that will seem more concrete and more easy to understand.

  Megan Sumeraki: So the way that you can use this is to find the pictures in your course materials, pictures that are maybe in your textbook or things that your teacher or instructor has used, and then collect the words or the text-based information that you have and compare and contrast the two. So what is the text telling you? What is the picture telling you? What might be missing from one? What might be missing from the other? And then you can actually combine this with retrieval practice and sort of scaffold your retrieval practice.

  So if you're having trouble just taking a blank sheet of paper and writing out the whole process or drawing the entire diagram from memory, start by looking at the text information but covering up the pictures, and try to draw your own picture to go along with it. So you're kind of starting to practice retrieval. You still have some cues there, but you're changing the information into a representation that's a little bit different.

  You can try it the other way to. Take the pictures that are in your textbook or in your course materials, cover up all of the words, and try to describe those pictures using your own words. And then you can work your way up to where you're practicing retrieval on your own and you're writing out what you know and drawing some sort of visual representation.

  Now, this starts to sound a little bit like learning styles. So you may have heard of this idea. Some students feel that they are more visual learners, while others feel that they are more verbal learners. Really, there's not scientific evidence to back up that theory, and it's been tested in a number of times. And time and time again, we find that it really doesn't matter what the student's preference is in terms of their own learning. So in other words, if you feel like you really like visuals, that's OK. Visuals are going to help you, but it doesn't mean that you have to have visuals in order to learn and you shouldn't look at the text based material. And the other is true as well. If you feel like you're a really verbal person, yes, of course, the words in the text-based representation is going to help you, but it's not that you should only focus on that text-based representation and ignore the pictures.

  In reality, even though we all have preferences, the research shows that we all learn better when we combine the words with the visuals. And specifically, different types of subjects sort of have their own style. And so you can sort of imagine trying to learn how to ride a bike without using any sort of kinesthetic learning. That's not going to work. You can't read a book or look at a diagram and learn how to ride a bike. You have to actually ride it, just like it would be very difficult to learn a lot of topics in, say, biology without some sort of diagram showing the anatomy of a cell or the anatomy of the human body. Visuals are really necessary in those cases. In history, we definitely need some verbal representation. We need text.

  And so the idea is while you might have preferences--and if you really like the pictures, that's great. Definitely seek out the pictures. But you also want to try to integrate the other format into your studying so that you're getting the benefit of dual coding, combining the two.

  Yana Weinstein: The last strategy we want to talk about is called concrete examples. So on the face of it, it's really pretty simple. It's about thinking of examples about the topics and abstract ideas that you're studying. So I mentioned this earlier when talking about dual coding, that one of the reasons why it's good to represent things as a picture might be that it makes the abstract concept more concrete. And so pictures are just one way of making information more concrete. You could come up with specific examples, including real life examples, to illustrate abstract concepts that you're studying.

  Megan Sumeraki: So the important thing when you're either coming up with these concrete examples on your own or collecting examples from your teachers or instructors or even peers or other people in the class is that you're making the link between the different examples. So when we're learning something, we're novices at that thing. We're trying to become experts or we're trying to learn more and more about it. But really, we're all starting from lower levels of information. That's why we're learning it to begin with. And so if you're more novice, it's going to be difficult for you to get that underlying abstract idea. And we tend to sort of focus on the surface features. And ultimately, what you want to be able to do is understand that underlying abstract idea and apply it in other situations. That's what a lot of your test questions are going to ask you to do, and really that's what you need to do in order to use the information you're learning in later life. So how do we do that? Well, you need to take the different concrete examples and make the link between them so that you understand what the surface features are and what that underlying idea is. So up to this point, we've been talking about it very abstractly.

  Let me give you a set of concrete examples to illustrate this. Let's say you're learning about the abstract idea of scarcity. And the definition of scarcity involves when things become more and more rare or scarce. It drives the price up. And there's a lot of different pieces that go along with this. So one concrete example that you could maybe come up with on

  your own or you might find in a textbook or your teacher might have used it is the concept of airlines and airline tickets. When the flight is a fair amount away, maybe a couple of months away, the tickets for the flight are probably going to be more reasonable. But as it continues to get closer and closer to the flight time and seats become more and more scarce, people keep buying up the seats and so the available seats are getting smaller and smaller, the ticket price is going to drive up and it's going to be very difficult to buy tickets for a flight that's happening tomorrow. So those tickets are becoming scarce. That's one concrete example, and that's great. But later on, if you're trying to remember scarcity, if you don't remember the entire example, if you just think, oh, it was something about airline tickets, that doesn't really help you get the underlying idea. You're just going to remember airline tickets and that certainly isn't going to help if you can't remember the rest of it.

  So what you want is another set of concrete examples. Even if your teacher or instructor has only given you one, you want to try to come up with or find others so that you can make the link. So maybe you find a concrete example about concert tickets. And the closer you get to a concert--if some sort of musical performance or even a play, theater of some sort, the closer you get, the more those tickets are going to cost as they become more rare. And then you might even try to come up with examples that are very different, something that doesn't involve tickets or doesn't involve some specific event.

  So a really different concrete example of scarcity is water during a drought. When there's a drought, water becomes scarce, so there's less water available. But that doesn't mean that the closer you get to some event, the more expensive water becomes. Perhaps the price of buying bottled water in the store might increase or the cost of your water bill might increase. But really, the big deal is it's this limited resource that we all need. So within a given household, you're going to treat water differently. During a drought, if the city or the town isn't allowing people to use more than a certain amount of water per day, you're probably not going to waste your water on a water balloon fight or running a sprinkler just to run through and play. You're going to save it for things that are really necessary, like drinking and cooking, bathing, those sorts of things. And so you're treating the water differently. The value of the water to you is higher during that drought.

  So once you've collected a handful of these concrete examples, like what we've talked about with the airline tickets, with the concert or the theater tickets, and then water, make the link. So the airline tickets, the concert tickets, the water is the thing that's becoming scarce, and it drives up the price or the value. So the airline tickets become more expensive, the theater tickets become more expensive, and then water just becomes a resource that you're not going to use as much. So its value increases, but it's not necessarily value in terms of money. Its value in terms of what you're going to use it on. And if you can take those three examples or however many examples and make the link sort of describe how they work together and how they all describe this abstract idea of scarcity, that really helps you understand the idea and will make it easier for you to recognize scarcity within other examples in the future.

  Yana Weinstein: So those were some concrete examples of the abstract concept of scarcity. What would happen if you made up an example or found an example that wasn't quite right? This is where it is really important that if you are making up your own examples rather than finding them in your textbook or from your teacher's materials, you should really check with your teacher or instructor to make sure that the example does apply.

  Megan Sumeraki: And if you're studying in groups, you can sort of check one another's examples and pull the examples together because sometimes it is difficult to come up with them. And so if you're working together to create them, you can sort of talk through them and try to figure out, is this really a good example? Isn't it a good example? And just engaging in that process is going to be helpful. And then you can ask your teachers or your instructors.

  Yana Weinstein: And actually, if you go on our website and look at the videos, we have another concrete example of scarcity where I dressed up as a Pokemon character. So that has the additional memorability of me looking ridiculous. But you'll see another way of illustrating the abstract idea of scarcity there.

  And this might be a good time for us to let you know that we do have the resources that you can access on our website, www.learningscientists.org. And there you will be able to find these videos that I just mentioned, one per strategy, and also one video that was made by someone else but summarizing the six strategies. You can also find obviously this podcast, but also blogs, some of which are written by students using the study strategies. You can also find downloadable materials in the form of both posters and PowerPoints. You'll probably want to download the posters because they summarize how to do each of the strategies that we've talked about in this episode and the previous one in just one poster per strategy that you can print out, put on your walls, and then follow along to see how to use each strategy.

  Megan Sumeraki: We certainly don't expect you to remember every single strategy after listening to one or two podcasts. That really doesn't make any sense. We're creating two different podcasts to try and space the presentation of the two really important ones, spacing and retrieval. Really, you're probably not going to overhaul everything you do when you study just in one go. It's going to happen in smaller pieces. So we really recommend that you start with spacing and retrieval practice. And as you become more comfortable with those or you find the need to compare and contrast different ideas or understand abstract ideas more, really start to add the other strategies into your independent learning. And that should really help you both remember the formation that you're trying to learn for tests, exams, or other assessments, but also to be able to remember this stuff as you continue on through schooling and move on to your careers and just general life.

  Yana Weinstein: And just a final word of warning. We've mentioned this throughout, but these strategies might not feel really easy right away. You'll need to practice them and watch your results over a long-term rather than just immediately hoping to achieve perfect performance, and then giving up. So really give these strategies a chance, just like with any habit.

  Megan Sumeraki: If you haven't done so already, please go on iTunes and rate, review, and subscribe to our podcast. It really helps others find the podcast so that they can learn about the signs of learning too. Thanks, and we'll see you next time.

  Yana Weinstein: Thanks for listening. The Learning Scientist Podcast is funded by the Wellcome Trust.

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