Robert Bjork on using cognitive psychology to enhance learning.

PODCAST NOTES

Guest:

Dr. Robert Bjork

Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA
Learning and memory; the science of learning in the practice of teaching.
The Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab

Common misperceptions

Belief that we work something like a man made recording device.

In almost every critical way, we differ from any such device.” – Robert Bjork

How can it be that we have all these years of learning things and formal education and then end up really not understanding the process? You might just think by sheer trial and error during all of our educational experiences we would come to understand ourselves better than we apparently do.” – Robert Bjork

We found all these different situations where the very same thing that produces forgetting then enhances learning if the material is re-studied again. Forgetting is a friend of learning.” – Robert Bjork

The spacing effect

Delay in re-studying information

The environmental context

If you study it again, then you’re better off to study it in a different place.
This is counter to the advice to study in a single place.

Retrieval practice

When you recall something, it does far more to reveal that you did indeed have it in your memory.

“Using our memories shapes our memory.”- Robert Bjork

As we use our memories, the things we recall become more recallable. Things in competition with the memories become less recallable.”- Robert Bjork

We should input less and output more.”- Robert Bjork

Test yourself; retrieval practice

Low-stakes or no-stakes testing is key to optimizing learning.”- Robert Bjork

“When I say they become inaccessible, they are absolutely not gone.”- Robert Bjork

Interleaving

“In all those real-world situation where there’s several related tasks or components to be learned, the tendency is to provide instruction in a block test. It seems to make sense to work on one thing at a time.”- Robert Bjork

“We are finding that interleaving leads to much better long-term retention. It slows the gain in performance during the training process but, then leads to much better long-term performance.”- Robert Bjork

“Forgetting is not entirely a negative process. There are a number of senses in which forgetting can be a good thing.”- Robert Bjork

“The very same people who just performed better, substantially, with interleaving, almost uniformly said that blocking helped them learn better.”- Robert Bjork

Desirable difficulties

They’re difficulties in the sense that they pose challenges (increased frequency of errors) but they’re desirable in that they foster the very goals of instruction (long-term retention and transfer of knowledge into new situations).

Interleaving vs blocking
Varying the conditions of learning and the examples you provide rather than keeping them constant
Spacing vs massing (cramming)

“The word desirable is key. There’s a lot of ways to make things difficult that are bad.”- Robert Bjork

The generation effect

Any time you can take advantage of what your students already know and give them certain cues so that they produce an answer, rather than you giving them an answer, you greatly enhance their long-term retention.”- Robert Bjork

Incorporating generation is a desirable difficulty but people have to succeed at the generation. If they fail, it is no longer a desirable difficulty.”- Robert Bjork

Errors are a key component of effective learning.”- Robert Bjork

Successful forgetting

Memory relies on being in the same situation
Present it in a different context, produces longer-term learning
Encode the information differently; encoding variability
Retrieval is powerful, but depends on success to make it so

Many things are involved in remembering people’s names.” – Robert Bjork

Self regulated learning

The key is for us all to learn how to learn more effectively.”- Robert Bjork

As a consequence of our complex and rapidly changing world and also changes in technology and educational environments, more and more learning is happening outside any formal classroom setting. It’s in our own hands.”

Across a lifetime

Recommendations

Bonni recommends:

GoCognitive’s Robert Bjork videos on YouTube

Bob recommends:

Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning

Several books on research on learning

Make it stick: the science of successful learning

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How we learn: The surprising truth about when, where, and why it happens

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What if everything you knew about education was wrong?

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Closing notes

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Joanna Guldi, "The Dangerous Art of Text Mining: A Methodology for Digital History" (Cambridge UP, 2022)