Effective Learning Techniques

Effective Learning Techniques is the focus of a special issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest. The authors review evidence for the efficacy of 10 learning techniques that are commonly used in educational settings. Their basic question: would using these techniques boost student performance along four dimensions: learning condition (e.g. studying alone vs. in a group); student qualities (e.g., age or ability); materials (e.g., science, history, math); and type of assessment (essay vs. multiple-choice tests). Based on available research, each technique was categorized as having high, moderate, or low utility. Briefly, this is what they found:

• 1. Elaborative interrogation. Gist of the technique: get students to generate explanations for facts. Supposed to work by facilitating the integration of new information and prior learning. Rated as having moderate utility. Seems to work best when applied to relatively simple or short fact lists, and may not work as well for students lacking knowledge on the topic.
• 2. Self-explanation. Gist of the technique: get students to explain what they are doing as they are learning (e.g., solving a problem). Supposed to work like elaborative interrogation, by promoting integration of new/old information. Rated as having moderate utility. Generalizes across content and different tasks and for a variety of learning outcomes. Works better when students are taught how to do this. Drawback is that it may take too much time. Also, not clear how well the effects persist over time.
• 3. Summarization. Gist of the technique: students should identify key points of a text without trying to learn unimportant information. Obviously supposed to work by getting students to focus on high-level meaning, core lessons, etc. Rated as having low utility. Reason is that most students don't know how to do it well, and so it is effective for only the highly skilled. Learning to do it well requires "extensive" training and may not be feasible for most faculty. Also, unclear what types of tasks summarization will help with, and what textual factors may influence its efficacy (e.g., text length).
• 4. Highlighting and underlining. Supposed to work because it isolates critical terms, phrases, etc., so that they will "pop out" of the text and thereby become more memorable. Rated as having low utility. For most students, highlighting/underlining has no effect on performance above just reading. There is some evidence that it may help students who already know how to highlight effectively. Highlighting may reduce performance on higher-level tasks that require inference-making.
• 5. The keyword mnemonic. Gist of the technique: uses mental images to assist with remembering facts, lists of words, or associations between words. An example is creating an image to help remember the translation of a word from another language, as when an image of a dentist holding a tooth is used to remember that la dente (which sounds like dentist) means tooth. Most students don't know/use this technique. Rated as having low utility. Although this can work for many kinds of materials, at least for short-term memorization, the resulting learning does not endure. It is also not efficient.
• 6. Imagery used for text learning. Gist of the technique: students generate an image of a paragraph (that would incorporate key elements of the content) to help remember it. Idea is that it can help organize information or help with integration of information. Rated as low utility. May be beneficial for texts that lend themselves to visual imagery and for memorization, but is not generalizable.
• 7. Rereading. Gist of the technique: obviously to read texts at least two times. Supposed to work by increasing the amount of information encoded into memory and/or facilitating higher-level processing upon repeated readings. Rated as having low utility. Advantages are that students do not need training and that it can help with recall-based memory. However, effects on comprehension are unclear.
• 8. Practice testing. Gist of the technique: is that students practice giving responses that they may need to give on the actual test. Includes many forms of testing, including flashcards, practice problems from a book, or practice tests that mimic the actual test. Supposed to work by triggering students to search their memory to find the correct response, and this may help make connections to related information. Also may enhance mental organization of information. Rated as having high utility. Does not require much training, is relatively efficient, and seems to work in many different educational contexts.
• 9. Distributed practice. Gist of the technique: students engage in learning activities that are distributed across time (spaced), as opposed to trying to cram intensively in one long session. Supposed to work because later learning sessions help to remind the student of the earlier sessions and what was learned then. Another explanation is that, if there are very short intervals between learning sessions, students will not have to try as hard to remember, and they may have a false sense of what they actually know. Also allows for consolidation of earlier learning. Rated as having high utility. Works across many kinds of materials, produces more durable learning, and for complex and simple information.
• 10. Interleaved practice. Gist of the technique: rather than block studying in which a student studies all of the material for one test and then moves on to study all of the material for another test, studying is interwoven. Thus students alternate between studying for one and then another test. Supposed to work by enhancing organization in memory (students learn to distinguish between different kinds of problems and between different kinds of solutions. Also requires more tapping more often into long-term memory and repeated retrieval. Rated as having moderate utility. Seems to work in math and similar kinds of skills. However, the research on this technique is limited and mixed.

• Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E.J., Nathan, M.J., & Willingham, D.T. (2013). Improving students learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions for cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14, 4-58.

  _ Summary (of long article) by Dan Barritt