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The Learning Scientists Podcast

Learning Scientists

A podcast for teachers, students, and parents about evidence based practice and learning.

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  • 99 episodes
  • Updated July 16

Episodes99

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  • May 16, 2018 · 5 min

    Episode 19 - Bite-Size Research on Benefits of Retrieval with Medical Residents

    Episode 19 - Bite-Size Research on Benefits of Retrieval with Medical Residents Learning Scientists This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust. Show Notes: This is a bite-size research episode, where we briefly describe research findings on a specific topic. This week, Megan talks research findings showing that medical residents benefit from retrieval practice after didactic conferences. In the last episode, Alyssa Smith, a third-year medical student, talked about the effective study strategies that she has been using throughout medical school. This episode continues with the medical education theme, discussing a paper by Doug Larsen, Andrew Butler, and Henry "Roddy" Roediger (1). This paper is interesting because it looks at the importance of retrieval practice for medical residents. Much of the research we discuss was done with college students or younger children. In this case, the research was conducted with individuals who are much further along in their professional career. The Experiment: Medical residents across all three years of the Pediatric Residency Program and all four years of the Emergency Medicine Program participated in a didactic conference. The conference was an hour-long interactive teaching session that was pretty typical of the types of sessions medical residents would attend to learn about broad topics. This particular conference covered the treatment of status epilepticus, and the diagnosis and treatment of myasthenia gravis. The residents may run into patients with either of these in emergency medicine. The experiment was within-subjects, meaning all of the residents participated in both of the repeated retrieval and repeated study learning conditions. In the repeated retrieval condition, residents took practice tests with feedback after the conference. They repeated this two more times at 2-week intervals. In the repeated study condition, residents reviewed a study guide after the conference. They repeated this two more times at 2-week intervals. They were randomly assigned to one of two groups: Group 1: practiced repeated retrieval with status epilepticus, reviewed the study guide for myasthenia gravis Group 2: repeatedly reviewed the study guide for status epilepticus, practiced retrieval with myasthenia gravis The residents all took one big test over both topics 6 months after initial learning at the didactic conference. The Results: Residents who practiced retrieval remembered a lot more than those who reviewed the study guide! So, repeated retrieval spaced out over time led to greater levels of retention compared to repeated studying spaced out over time. Repeated retrieval is beneficial for residents, individuals who are much further along in their professions than some of the typical populations we study. The authors point out that residents are probably not repeatedly studying the information from these didactic conferences spaced out over time. So, the repeated study condition may actually be better than what the typical resident does. Yet, repeated retrieval leads to even better retention compared to repeated studying over time! Tune in next month to learn about the importance of sleep and learning, and self care! Subscribe to our Podcast! Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss References: (1) Larsen, D. P., Butler, A. C., & Roediger, H. L. (2009). Repeated testing improves long-term retention relative to repeated study: a randomized controlled trial. Medical Education, 43, 1174-1181.

  • May 2, 2018 · 20 min

    Episode 18 - Effective Studying in Medical School with Alyssa Smith

    Episode 18 - Effective Studying in Medical School with Alyssa Smith Learning Scientists This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust. Show Notes: Alyssa Smith with the Rosalind Franklin Statue on the Rosalind Franklin campus In this episode, Megan interviews her little sister, Alyssa Smith, who is finishing up her 3rd year in Medical School at Chicago Medical School. Alyssa uses many of the six strategies for effective learning that we talk about on the podcast. As the sister of a Cognitive Psychologist who specializes in learning, she has of course heard of these strategies before. But in addition, during orientation to Medical School she and her class were introduced to many of these strategies and the research behind them. The students were taught explicitly how to use the strategies, and student tutors reinforce the strategies with their younger peers. Alyssa and her class were told during this orientation that many of the strategies they have used to get them this far, for example cramming, might not cut it in medical school. In medical school, students are required to learn an immense amount of information and retain that information over time. To do this, they will need to use the most effective learning strategies. Alyssa explains that when she was an undergraduate, she did do a lot of cramming and she was able to do well in her classes. However, we know cramming does not tend to lead to long-term learning, and Alyssa says she has lost a lot of what she learned as an undergrad, even from class in which she did very well. This isn't uncommon; many of her peers say the same thing. She knows that as a physician she will need to remember what she is learning in medical school, and is now dedicated to ensuring that she is learning for the long-term. So how does Alyssa use effective strategies now? She explained with some very specific examples. How she has used spacing and interleaving Alyssa Smith at her White Coat Ceremony At the beginning of each week, Alyssa created a study schedule and made sure to schedule time for at least 2 or 3 different courses each day. One thing that really helped her to stick to her schedule was to plan a little bit of flexible time each week. Alyssa planned Monday through Friday, but left the weekends for studying whatever she was struggling with the most. This helped her stick to her schedule. If she was struggling with something, in the past she might have been tempted to ignore her other courses and focus on the difficult topics. But, with her flexible schedule, she would say to herself "I have to do well on every course. I can't neglect the others, so I'm going to stick to my schedule." Then on the weekends she would go back to the things she felt she needed to revist, and often found she actually knew it better than she thought she did! How she has used retrieval To help with classes like Anatomy and Pharmacology, Alyssa used flashcard programs, like Anki. One great thing about Anki is that it incorporates spacing. You can input your confidence on different terms, and based on your confidence it will show up sooner (like 10 minutes) or later (like 2 days). But importantly, they always come back to make sure you're engaging in repeated retrieval. They can also utilize interleaving if you make different decks. How she has used dual coding, combined with other strategies Alyssa's diagrams for dual coding retrieval practice! Alyssa found dual coding to be effective and fun. (She says she knows it's nerdy, but it's true!!!) Alyssa talks about online programs that utilize dual coding, like SketchyMedical. They show videos that tell a little story and as you go along include symbols that are associated with specific concepts. These programs are not free, but Alyssa said she personally found them useful. She also created her own dual coding retrieval practice by drawing diagrams of things she needed to learn on her closet door mirror, so that she could practice retrieving the information using the diagrams as cues whenever she was getting ready! (Introducing spacing, too.) Has learning styles come up as a med student? Unfortunately, this is something she has heard from both students and professors. But, during her initial orientation the class was told that the learning styles theory is not true. Instead, the class was told to integrate lots of different methods! What would you recommend to incoming medical students? Alyssa recommends learning how to use evidence-based study strategies right away. Start out by creating a schedule where you're studying your classes each day if you can, and at least 2-3 days per week. Then, stick to the schedule so you're not cramming! What would you say to premed students who are hoping to get into medical school? Start incorporating these strategies now, there's a learning curve and it was difficult at first but it was frustrating. Get into the habit now, and Stay tuned for a bite-size research episode about learning medical concepts later this month! Subscribe to our Podcast! Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

  • Apr 18, 2018 · 15 min

    Episode 17 - For Parents Interested in Student Learning Part 2

    Episode 17 - For Parents Interested in Student Learning Part 2 Learning Scientists This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust. Show Notes: Today's episode is the second of two episodes that we recorded specifically for parents. Our goal was to take what we know about the science of learning and focus on how it can be used by you - parents - to help your children with their learning and performance on tests, exams, and other types of assessments. We hope that these 2 episodes will be applicable to parents of a range of students, regardless of age and specific subject(s) being studied. You may be a parent of a child whose school is implementing effective strategies from cognitive psychology, or you may be interested in helping your child utilize these strategies at home even if they are not part of the school's regular practice. We talk about the strategies from both of these perspectives. In the previous episode, we talked about how parents can help their children with spaced practice and retrieval practice, and we touched on interleaving. In this episode, we talk about elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding. Elaboration involves adding details to our memories. One way to do that is to simply have conversations with your children about topics that may relate to concepts that they have learned in class. You can also encourage elaborative interrogation by posing how and why questions. If your child isn't ready to answer them yet, that's OK - you can look up the answer together, or even ask their teachers. Concrete examples are important for your children to experience when trying to learn an abstract idea. Because concrete information is easier to understand and remember, finding and generating concrete examples for the abstract ideas they are studying will help your children learn more. It's important to ensure that your child understands the connection between the concrete example and the abstract idea, so that they don't just remember the example alone. Dual coding involves combining words and visuals to provide multiple ways for information to be understood and later remembered. You can help your children connects words and visuals by drawing with them, or having them describe a picture to you. However, it's important to note that this technique is not just for children who like art; be careful with labeling your child as a "visual learner", as this does not appear to be a useful categorization. Subscribe to our Podcast! Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

  • Apr 4, 2018 · 21 min

    Episode 16 - For Parents Interested in Student Learning Part 1

    Episode 16 - For Parents Interested in Student Learning Part 1 Learning Scientists This episode was funded by The Wellcome Trust. Show Notes: Today's episode is specifically for parents. Our goal was to take what we know about the science of learning and focus on how it can be used by you - parents - to help your children with their learning and performance on tests, exams, and other types of assessments. We hope that this episode will be applicable to parents of a range of students, regardless of age and specific subject(s) being studied. You may be a parent of a child whose school is implementing effective strategies from cognitive psychology, or you may be interested in helping your child utilize these strategies at home even if they are not part of the school's regular practice. We talk about the strategies from both of these perspectives. In this episode, we talk about the two most important study strategies: spaced practice and retrieval practice. These two strategies have the most evidence for their effectiveness, and are the most broadly applicable across a huge variety of different skills and subjects. Spaced practice is the opposite of cramming. We tend to find that students often end up cramming for their tests. However, if your child spaces out their study episodes over time instead, they will be learning more for the long-term, rather than just forgetting most of the information soon after the test. You can help your child integrate informal spaced practice by asking them about something they mentioned a few weeks ago. This will help your child refresh the information in their memory rather than move on and forget it. That's where retrieval practice comes in. The idea behind this strategy is to bring information to mind from memory. Your child can do this in many ways - writing or sketching what they know from memory, teaching someone else the material, or even just telling you a story about what they are learning. This act of bringing the information to mind from memory - producing the information without their classroom materials in front of them - will actually increase their memory for the material. If your children are a little more independent, you might try to help them plan out their own study schedules. And once they get to high school, you can point them to our podcast - our last two episodes (Episode 14 and Episode 15) were recorded specifcally for students. Subscribe to our Podcast! Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

  • Mar 21, 2018 · 20 min

    Episode 15 - How Students Can Use Interleaving, Elaboration, Dual Coding, and Concrete Examples

    Episode 15 - How Students Can Use Interleaving, Elaboration, Dual Coding, and Concrete Examples Learning Scientists 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. Download Episode Transcript (.txt) 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. Subscribe to our Podcast! Go to our show on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. RSS feed: http://www.learningscientists.org/learning-scientists-podcast/?format=rss

  • Mar 7, 2018 · 16 min

    Episode 14 - How Students Can Use Spacing and Retrieval Practice

    MEGAN SUMERACKI: 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 SUMERACKI: 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 SUMERACKI: And together, we co-founded the Learning Scientists. We apply cognitive psychology to education for teachers, students, and parents but today's episode is specifically for students. We're going to be talking about how we can take the research on learning and memory and apply it to student studying to try to improve how much you're learning and how well you're performing on tests and exams, as well as other types of assessments. YANA WEINSTEIN: So, we're assuming that students at different stages in their education might be listening to this. You might be still in high school, you might be at the beginning of your college career or maybe towards the end. Or maybe you're in a different stage of your life, but still learning something. We hope that this episode will be applicable regardless of what age you are or what you're studying. We're going to be talking about a few different strategies that are based in research from cognitive psychology that has been conducted over the past few decades. So, the strategies we'll be talking about are ones that have been repeatedly demonstrated as effective. First of all, we'd like to talk to you about two very important strategies. They're called spaced practice and retrieval practice. Don't worry about that specific terminology. We'll define it and repeat the definitions as we go through the podcast episode. MEGAN SUMERACKI: And so there are six and you can use them all together. But if you were only going to start with two and probably you want to start with just a couple. It's going to be difficult for you to listen to one podcast and then completely overhaul the way you are studying or trying to guide your own independent learning. So if you're just going to take two, spaced practice and retrieval practice really are the gold standard study strategies. They're the ones that have the most evidence to support their effectiveness. These are the two strategies that are the most widely applicable to students at different stages within their education and also across different subjects, from history to math, to engineering, YANA WEINSTEIN: to sport, MEGAN SUMERACKI: to psychology, YANA WEINSTEIN: to a musical instrument learning, MEGAN SUMERACKI: to dancing, and so on. YANA WEINSTEIN: So let's talk about space practice first. The idea of spaced practice or spacing out your studying over time is basically the opposite of something you might be familiar with, cramming. Think back to the last exam or test that you took. Did you spend a while doing some studying a little bit over time? So maybe half an hour a day for a few weeks? Or did you perhaps spend one day right before the exam, a long, long day of studying and then maybe even studying late into the night? Generally, we find that students tend to prefer that second method, or maybe they don't prefer it, but certainly the one that they default to simply because, well, various reasons. But one of them is that we're all quite deadline-driven. So when that test comes up and it's tomorrow, that's when we sort of get in gear to study. MEGAN SUMERACKI: It's a lot easier throughout the weeks when the test isn't coming up to say, oh, I don't need to do my half hour today. Oh, I'll do it tomorrow. Well, I'll double up over the weekend. And if you keep doing that over and over again, eventually you end up right before the test not having studied very much and needing to try to cram. YANA WEINSTEIN: And space practice is the opposite of that. It involves setting aside small chunks of time to practice over a period of at least a few weeks leading up to the exam. Now, the thing about spaced practice is that even if you spend the same amount of time studying that information spaced out as compared to cramming it on that last day, you are likely to remember more of it on the exam. So in reality, you won't be studying more, you'll be studying the same amount of time, but spread out over longer. MEGAN SUMERACKI: And when you spread out your study episodes over longer periods of time, you learn more in the same amount of time than you would if you crammed. The other benefit of spacing is that the stuff that you're learning actually becomes more durable. You're learning for the long term, not just for the test right now. And a lot of times, we are really mostly worried about the test right now. So if it's the night before an exam, you just want to cram it in, get through the test, and you don't really care if you remember it later. Or maybe that's your future self's problem. But in reality, eventually you're going to need that material again, even if it's just for the next test in that same class or another class that's related in the following year or even just a semester later. I'm sure your teachers or professors are always telling you that you need this stuff as you continue either through schooling or into your careers. And sometimes it's difficult to believe that we will actually need this stuff. But ultimately, even if it's just to get through this one class, this one semester, the information you're learning you need to retain at least through the semester to get through the class. And ideally, you'll be learning things that you can use throughout your life. YANA WEINSTEIN: Absolutely. The issue with space practice is that it's unfortunately not something you can decide to do at the last minute, by its very nature. This is something that you need to plan out before, well before the exam comes up. What is a good way to do this? Well, we tend to ask our students to take a look at their schedules and see where they can fit in a little bit of studying. Now, you might wonder, how much studying should I do? Does it need to be an hour or two hours, half an hour? Here's what we say to our students. We say, look, if right now you're doing zero minutes of studying every day for this test that's coming up in a few weeks, even if you added five minutes per day, that's still infinitely more than zero. And in all honesty, if you add five minutes to your schedule, you'll likely to perhaps continue a bit longer once you actually get into it. So we recommend setting aside some amount of time that seems reasonable to you. Don't overcommit and say you're going to do two hours of studying a night for a month because that's probably not going to happen. So some realistic amount of time, perhaps half an hour every couple of days or so. And during that time, this is not about doing the homework that you've already been assigned. That's separate. During that time, you're going to be actually studying for the upcoming exam or quiz, not the one that's coming up in a day or so, but the one that's coming up a bit later. This is not something that naturally occurs. So it really is something that you're going to need to get disciplined about and try to actually commit to. MEGAN SUMERACKI: And the key is to really take out your planners or calendars-- If you have an online calendar, that's fine too, and actually block off the time and say, this is the 30 minutes I'm going to spend studying for history, or this is the 45 minutes that I'm going to spend studying for math. Because when you block off that time, it makes it easier for you to then work it into your schedule. You're less likely to end up accidentally double booking yourself. YANA WEINSTEIN: Yeah. And so you could do this, try it out for about a week and then look at your calendar and see what you actually did. So take a log of when you actually did study as planned or whether something came up and stopped you from doing it. Or perhaps if you tried to study, but you had planned a study session for midnight and then realized that that's not the best time for you to be studying. MEGAN SUMERACKI: And if your schedule isn't working for you, make adjustments. it's really useless and honestly kind of depressing and is going to discourage you if you keep blocking off times, and then having to skip all of those times. So it's sort of like going to the gym. If you decide that you're going to go to the gym every morning for an hour before going to school, probably unless you're an athlete, that might not happen. Or if it's something that doesn't happen one week, it can be very discouraging and you feel like, ah, well, I'm just not a person who can go to the gym. Well, that's not necessarily true. You just have to find the time that's best for you. So if you are scheduling your study sessions for very, very early in the morning or very late at night, or at this time in the afternoon when you tend to get really tired and that's not working for you, try something new the next week. The goal is to keep playing with it until you get to a point where you have a schedule that works for you so that you can successfully study for your courses spaced out over time. And in the long-run, it's going to save you time. YANA WEINSTEIN: So a good way of doing this would be if you have a class, let's say, on a Monday, ideally what you would do is sleep on Monday night because sleep is very important, and then study that information again, say, on Tuesday. It doesn't have to be exactly Tuesday, but the idea is that you're leaving a gap of sleeping in between, which is helping you to consolidate the memories. MEGAN SUMERACKI: OK, so you've blocked off your time. You've figured out when you're going to study. But what in the world are you actually going to do while you're studying? We haven't gotten to that. We've just been going on and on about scheduling. Well, we said there are two strategies that are really effective, one being spaced practice, the other one is retrieval practice. And the idea behind retrieval practice is to try to bring information to mind, try to produce the information that you've already learned. And you can either write it down or you can say it out loud, or you can teach a friend maybe who's in the class or maybe your dog or your cat or your turtle, really whoever. Just make sure that you're producing this information, bringing it to mind, and then producing it in some way. The important thing is that you put your books and your notes and all of your other course materials away and try to produce these things from memory. You don't want to just keep looking at your notes or looking at your book. You want to produce it on your own. YANA WEINSTEIN: And of course, one obvious way of doing this might be to take a practice quiz. So if your professor or teacher has given you access to some kind of quizzing materials or some kind of study guide that you can use to quiz yourself, then definitely do that. If you don't have access to anything like that, you can also just literally take a blank piece of paper and try to write down everything you can remember about a particular topic from memory. And then afterwards what you would do to check to make sure that you got things correct or didn't miss things, you would take a look at your textbook and see whether there are some gaps or some inaccuracies. So it's interesting to ask students whether they actually do this. And what we find is that a few students will say that they do practice tests, and maybe you're one of them. But if we then ask students why they do the practice test, they tend to tell us, well, I want to know what I know and what I don't know, and then I can study. I like to think about testing as the opposite of that. I think of taking a test as studying. And then once you've studied by taking the quiz, because that's actually bringing information to mind from memory, then you can check in the textbook to see if you got things right or wrong and give yourself feedback. That's kind of the opposite of how a lot of people think about studying and testing. We think about studying the textbook than checking that we know on a test. I like to think about taking the quiz as the studying, and then looking in the textbook as the check. MEGAN SUMERACKI: Because the research really does show that bringing the information to mind is helping you learn that information. It's making it easier for you to remember it later, and it's also making it easier for you to apply it in new situations later on. It's producing flexible and durable learning, which is what's going to help you on your upcoming tests and on tests in the future. YANA WEINSTEIN: One thing to note is that it's going to feel hard to do this. If you're used to reading and rereading your textbook, what happens is that every time you read a particular section for the next time, it starts feeling easier and easier to read it. But with practicing retrieval or bringing information to mind from memory, at first, when you start doing that, it might feel pretty difficult. You might have some gaps in your memory and not be able to recall much. And the important thing here is not to sort of lose confidence and say, oh, this doesn't work for me and go back to reading and rereading. That difficulty that you're experiencing of trying really hard to bring the information to mind and hopefully some of the time succeeding is actually going to create more learning in the long-run, even if it feels more difficult. MEGAN SUMERACKI: I like to tell my students to think about it this way. Which would you rather have? A situation where you're at home trying to write down information on a blank sheet of paper and struggling. Maybe you're only recalling half of it, maybe not even half, but then you can go back and look at the course material, figure out what you've missed and try again. Would you rather that, have that difficulty at home, or do you want to have that difficulty when you get in to take the test or exam, where you're sitting down and you're trying to answer questions and you're like, shoot, I don't know. I can't bring this information to mind. Struggling, struggling. But at this point, it's too late. There's no way for you to just go back to your course materials and look. That would be cheating, which has a whole other set of problems, right? Where would you rather it be difficult, while you're practicing and it doesn't really count, or at least it doesn't count in the same way, or during that test when it really matters? Another analogy that works really well is to think about sports or specifically to think about running, distance runners. When I was in high school, I did a lot of distance running. So I'll use that as an example. If you're getting ready for a long race, say you're going to run 5 kilometers or 10 kilometers for some sort of competition, you wouldn't practice only by walking really slowly. Now, you might do some walking, right? That's still good for you. It still gets you moving. Just like when we talk about retrieval practice, you're still doing some rereading and some looking over your material. But really you need to get to a point where you're able to run. Maybe it's not the full distance, maybe it's not everything all at once. You're doing it in spaced out intervals. But you still have to practice running in order to get good for the race. Retrieval practice and learning is the same way. You need to practice bringing the information to mind so that you're really good at bringing the information to mind and applying it later. So think of those practice tests as practice for ultimate exams and really practice demonstrating what you're learning. And then if you struggle, just like you would if you're practicing for a sport of some sort, you can slow down, you can look over the material again. But you need to work your way back up to practicing retrieval, trying to produce what you know. YANA WEINSTEIN: So just to recap, we've talked about two strategies. The first is space practice, where you're spacing out information or spacing out studying over time, and the second is retrieval practice, which is bringing information to mind from memory. And the way to combine these would be something that we'd call spaced retrieval practice. So imagine you're spacing out your studying throughout a few weeks or a month. And then each time you sit down to study, what you're actually doing is quizzing yourself or trying to recall the information in some other way, like describing it to a friend. Now, you're combining the benefits of spaced practice and retrieval practice. MEGAN SUMERACKI: And these two strategies work really well together. And if you're going to start with just a couple strategies, which we really recommend starting out slow rather than trying to overhaul everything all at once, you would want to start with these two because they are the most effective comparatively. We also know that just by listening to one podcast, you're not going to have learned everything that there is to know about spacing and retrieval. You may need to revisit this podcast again. Or if you want another format of resources, we have a lot of things on our website-- www.learnings cientists.org. And you can find posters that describe the strategies. You can also check out our blog. And the blog has a lot of information about how to use the strategies. And in the show notes, we'll link to a blog post where we talk about ways that students can use our website most effectively. In two weeks, we'll be coming out with another episode where we talk about the other four strategies that are very effective-- interleaving, elaboration, concrete examples, and dual coding. Thanks for listening. YANA WEINSTEIN: The Learning Scientist Podcast is funded by the Wellcome Trust.