Strengthening the Student Toolbox

Article: Strengthening the Student Toolbox

Author: John Dunlosky

"…students believe these relatively ineffective strategies are actually the most effective, and at least on the surface they do seem sound, perhaps because, even after pulling

an all-nighter, students manage to squeak by on exams…"

An Overview

This article is written by a practicing classroom teacher, evaluating the evidence for and against 10 learning strategies that students use (or at least should be using). The author rates each of these on how effective they are, gives examples of the research, and some tips on how to incorporate them as teachers.

The premise for this article is summarised in the following quote:

"…the emphasis is on what students need to learn, whereas little emphasis - if any - is placed on training students how they should go about learning the content and what skills will promote efficient studying to support robust learning…"

Throughout it makes comparisons between the strategies that many students use (such as reading notes, highlighting and summarising) with the more effective strategies that most are not aware of (such as practice testing, distributed practice, interleaved practice and elaboration). It looks, in turn, at each of the 10 strategies, giving an overview of the research and some examples. The author also states the strategies chosen "can be used successfully by a motivated student who has access to a pen or pencil, some index cards, and perhaps a calendar".

The key findings are shown in the below table, along with the 10 strategies.

The article is very clear in what it is saying: the methods students traditionally use to study (reading, highlighting, summarising) are not particularly effective, and the other strategies would provide students with better knowledge and understanding. I will briefly overview each of the 10 strategies discussed.

Practice Testing - the idea of testing yourself as a revision strategy is one I am sure most teachers promote, however the research shows this is probably the most effective way to study. Indeed some students do use practice tests, however "…most students who use practice tests report that they do so to figure out what they know and do not know", and this is not actually the biggest benefit of testing yourself. By retrieving information from long-term memory, students actually strengthen the memory for future retrieval. Moreover, teachers can make use of this strategy in class by using low (or preferably no) stakes quizzes where students have to recall information.

Distributed Practice - this strategy focuses more on how to plan studying. The example if given of a student learning spellings from a worksheet of 10 words. They have two options: write each word out three times then move to the next one; or write each word once, then repeat the list two more times. In each case the student writes each word 3 times, but "students will retain knowledge and skills for a longer period of time when they distribute their practice than when they mass it". That is the latter option is better for long term learning. However, many students prefer the former (massed) practice as it feels like they have learnt more as it is easier. The analogy is drawn with rehearsing for a play or dance recital: the performers would never cram the night before, but rather distribute the practice over many weeks. The author suggests "students should set aside blocks of time throughout the week to study the content for each class". It is better to spread out your studying over smaller portions of time, than do it all in one go.

Interleaved Practice - this one is presented with the caveat that most current research shows promise for maths and concept learning, but there is promising research for other subjects too. Interleaving builds in distributed practice through "mixing up the order of materials across different topics". The example for this strategy is given as finding the volumes of four different solids. One group study a solid, do massed practice on that solid, then move on to the next solids. The other group study all four solids then do interleaved practice on all four types, where no consecutive questions are of the same type. It is important that "regardless of whether practice was massed or interleaved, all students practiced solving four problems of each type". The results of this experiment are shown in the image below. This clearly shows that "massed practice leads to quick learning and quick forgetting, whereas interleaved practice slows learning but leads to much greater retention".

Elaborative Interrogation and Self-Explanation - these two strategies are presented together as they are similar. Elaborative Interrogation involves students trying to explain why something is true when reading it. Self-Explanation has students link the new learning to something they already know. Both strategies "encourage students to actively process the content they are focusing on and integrate it with their prior knowledge".

Rereading - a study at US Universities found that "84 percent of students studied by rereading their notes or textbooks". Despite its popularity, this strategy is very ineffective for long term learning. The suggestion for it being popular is that it is easy, and, like massed practice, seems to work for short term retention.

Highlighting - surely highlighting must be better than just rereading a text? Apparently not. Most research shows that it is no different, and one study even found that it was detrimental to studying compared to reading notes. The suggestion is that it makes students spend "less time thinking about connections across concepts".

Summarisation - this is a favourite of both students and teachers, and the good news is that it has been shown to be beneficial to student performance. However, this is only the case after students have been given extensive (about 4 hours) training on how to summarise effectively.

Mnemonics and Imagery - both of these strategies challenges students to develop their own connectives, usually in the form of an image, for studying. Mnemonics have been shown to be useful for language acquisition, and imagery in general can have benefits, though they are mostly short term.

My Takeaways

This article has further made me think carefully about talking with students about how they learn, on top of what they learn. We already give students a practice test before each bimester test in Maths, which incidentally is also interleaved by its nature. But perhaps we could be doing more? I have started to make use of no-stakes quizzes once a week with my S3 class, focusing on topics taught 2 more weeks previously (distributed practice along with retrieval practice). However, these have been on a specific topic.

The idea of interleaving in class also goes against some of the other research I have been doing on Cognitive Load Theory. That research has already led me to focus on breaking a topic down into constituent parts, but the idea of interleaving says students should practice mixed topics. This seems to suggest creating some cognitive overload, but more research into how these two ideas can be merged will be my next step.

I have already been thinking of doing some work with my students on appropriate study skills, and have previously done assemblies on this with students too. This article has made it clearer to me which strategies we should be promoting, and I will be putting together some resources for students to use to help them make the most of these research backed strategies.