Latest / New Teacher Talk / Ep 179: Effective Study Strategies for Teachers & Students: Reading and Highlighting are the Best Study Methods

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Ep 179: Effective Study Strategies for Teachers & Students: Reading and Highlighting are the Best Study Methods · New Teacher Talk

Welcome to the latest episode of New Teacher Talk where we
discuss issues that are important to aspiring and early
career educators.
We are here to support you in your rural, suburban,
or urban school.
My name is Ken King,
and I am an education professor at Aurora University in
Aurora, Illinois.
Many people believe that highlighting and rereading are the
most effective ways to study.
This is actually not true.
These methods sometimes feel productive but don't lead to
strong long-term learning.
Instead, active strategies like self-testing,
retrieval practice,
and summarizing are much more effective when used to build
memory and understanding.
When I was an undergraduate student,
I often bought used textbooks with highlights already in
them.
I thought I'd found a shortcut.
The previous student had already marked the important
parts.
I headed my own highlights, reread the pages,
and reviewed the material again before exams.
I expected great results, but I was disappointed.
Even though I worked hard,
the results didn't match my efforts.
I began to wonder if a corner on me was using these
methods, why weren't they working for me?
Why I learned later changed the way I study and the way I
teach.
I could go through part one,
which is what's wrong with highlighting and rereading.
Let's address this issue.
While they may seem helpful,
decades of research and cognitive science show that they
don't support lasting learning.
Here are three reasons that explain why highlighting and
rereading are not very effective.
First of all,
they get to learn only the illusion of understanding.
With students reread or highlight text,
they often feel like they understand it just because it
seems familiar.
Recognizing something isn't the same thing as knowing it or
being able to explain it later.
To truly learn something,
students need to test their understanding in some way and
get some feedback.
This supports connecting new ideas with existing ideas,
which is one of the foundations of learning.
Secondly,
these are passive approaches to learning and not active.
Our brains learn best when they work hard by organizing,
connecting, and retrieving ideas.
Highlighting and rereading don't involve those processes.
They require little thinking,
which leads to weak memory and poor retention.
Active engagement,
where students make sense of and build on what they're
learning,
leads to much stronger memory and much stronger understanding.
The final reason is that highlighting and rereading does
not include retrieval practice.
One of the best ways to strengthen memory is to pull
information from the brain.
This is called retrieval practice.
Rereading highlights makes things look familiar,
but it doesn't help learners to practice recalling or
explaining the ideas.
Retrieval practice strengthens memory by making the brain
work to find and to use the information.
In the second part of today's presentation,
I'd like to discuss some actions that make learning stick.
So we have better information about why highlighting and
rereading is not the best approach for supporting long-term
learning.
We're going to look at four evidence-based study practices
that work better.
This will help you as a student,
and it'll certainly help you as a new teacher to help your
students be more effective in using strategies to help
learning stick.
Let's start with retrieval practice,
also known as self-testing.
Retrieval practice means trying to recall information from
memory without looking at your notes.
It's one of the most powerful strategies for long-term
learning.
Think about it like this.
When you're trying to recall information,
that very act strengthens memory and reveals what you do or
don't know.
Even unsuccessful attempts help,
especially when followed by feedback.
This is known as the testing effect.
Testing doesn't just measure learning, it improves it.
Here are two examples from the classroom.
You may be familiar with exit tickets.
After a lesson on ecosystems,
students write down answers to three or four short
questions from memory.
For example,
an ecology lesson might include these prompts as part of an
exit ticket,
such as name three types of consumers in a food chain,
or what happens when a top predator is removed.
The questions in this example are used to trigger the
recall of important information that was recently part of
the day's learning activities.
This is the key point.
You can also make an approach like making use of
flashcards.
It's an old strategy,
but it's one that can actually be very helpful.
Students can use flashcards to test themselves on key
terms.
After checking the answer,
they focus the review on the ones they got wrong.
This focuses on building on information that was missed,
rather than repetition of information that has already been
mastered, as in highlighting and rereading does.
We know that research emphasizes the value of this
approach.
In a study cited by Karpicke and Rodeger,
the students who practiced retrieval remember 80 percent in
the material a week later,
compared to only 33 to 40 percent for those who just reread
the information,
that students were often unaware of the difference,
which shows how unused the strategy is.
Another approach is spaced practice.
Space practice means spreading out study sessions over time
instead of cramming.
This approach improves long-term memory and helps reduce
forgetting.
This works in spacing the practice over time,
gives the brain time to consolidate new information.
When students return a material after some time,
they have to work harder to recall it,
which strengthens memory.
For classroom practice,
here are two ways to approach this through a spiral review
or through creating study calendars.
In the example of a weekly spiral review,
a teacher takes the time to plan how their class will
review their work.
For example, on each Monday,
students begin math problems with problems of the last week
and with problems from a few weeks ago and problems from
earlier in the year.
This helps keep the past learning fresh.
Students could also, creating systems for themselves,
they can create their own student calendar that sets aside
specific time to review materials.
A student created schedule would set up a plan to revisit
topics every few days.
For example,
a plan might include these points with students revisiting
the same topic on three different days.
Mondays, review cells.
Thursday, review cells again.
And next Tuesday, more review of cells.
These three briefer sessions would be more effective than a
single extended study session right before an examination.
Their approach I'd like to offer is elaborative
interrogation and self-explanation.
These two points work together well.
These two strategies help learners connect new information
with what they already know.
Elaborative interrogation means asking why questions about
what you're learning and to explore the reasons behind it.
And self-explanation means explaining how or why something
works in your own words.
These strategies work because they make the brain work
harder to understand, organize information.
When learners explain concepts or ask why something is
true, they're building deeper connections.
That leads to better memory and better understanding,
especially when they already know a little bit about the
topic.
As a teacher,
you can help students practice these ideas during class and
help them prepare for independent review later on.
In the science class,
you could start by asking students to make use of why
questions.
During a lesson on photosynthesis,
ask questions that begin with the word why.
This changes the relationship between the question and a
learner.
Rather than asking them to define photosynthesis,
ask them to answer questions such as,
why do plants need sunlight or why is chlorophyll
important?
Requesting that students spend this time explaining their
thinking will yield great results for them.
In a part of a math lesson,
you could ask students to describe how they solve the
problem.
For example,
why did you choose to divide before subtracting,
or how did you know to multiply, are great questions.
Rather than addressing a specific answer to a specific
question,
you're requesting students to consider the process they use
to solve a problem, which will deepen understanding.
Both of these types of questions turn passive learning into
active reasoning.
I'd like to wrap up now with an approach called interleaved
practice.
Interleaved practice means mixing different types of
problems or topics in a study session,
rather than practicing just one kind over and over again.
This works better for learning because when students mix up
the kind of problems they solve,
their brains have to figure out which strategy fits each
one.
This helps them learn to tell problems apart and choose the
right approach.
It can and in fact will feel harder at first,
but it leads to stronger learning and better problem
solving.
This is different from what's called block practice,
where review requires students only to look at a single
type of problem.
In your own classroom, try something like this.
Instead of giving 10 multiplication problems in a row,
include a mix of addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division problems.
Students must decide which operations to use,
which helps them to understand all of the operations
better.
You can see the same practice at work with this example
too.
Before a science test,
set up review stations where students rotate through topics
like weather, rocks, plants and energy.
Switching topics helps them apply what they've learned in
different ways.
This also is a great way to support learning in disciplines
such as science that have common ideas such as patterns and
symmetry that are present in many different branches of
science.
These four strategies, retrieval practice, space practice,
collaborative interrogation with self-explanation and
interleaved practice have one thing in common.
They all help students actively engage with what they're
learning.
That effort leads to stronger memory and deeper
understanding.
Instead of relying on passive methods like highlighting and
rereading, these approaches help make learning stick.
Thank you for listening.
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channel.
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