In this chapter, we’ve considered several different types of learning from behavioral, cognitive, evolutionary, and neural perspectives. Yet it may seem strange to you that we haven’t discussed the kind of learning to which you are currently devoting much of your life: learning in educational settings such as the classroom. Way back in the first chapter of this book (Psychology: Evolution of a Science), we reviewed some techniques that we think are useful for studying the material in this course and others (see The Real World, Improving Study Skills, p. 6). But we didn’t say much about the actual research that supports these suggestions. Let’s consider what recent research says about learning techniques, and then we will turn to the equally important topic of exerting control over learning processes.

Students use a wide variety of study techniques in attempts to increase learning, including highlighting and underlining, rereading, summarizing, and visual imagery mnemonics (Annis & Annis, 1982; Wade, Trathen, & Schraw, 1990). How effective are such techniques? A comprehensive analysis of research concerning 10 learning techniques (Dunlosky et al., 2013) evaluated the overall usefulness of each technique and classified it as high, moderate, or low utility. TABLE 7.2 provides a brief description of each of the 10 techniques and the overall utility assessment for each one.

Despite their popularity, highlighting, rereading, summarizing, and visual imagery mnemonics all received a low utility assessment. That doesn’t mean that these techniques have no value whatsoever for improving learning, but it does indicate that each one has significant limitations and that time could be better spent using other approaches—a reason why none of these techniques appeared in the Improving Study Skills box. The Improving Study Skills box did highlight both of the techniques that received high utility assessments: distributed practice (“Rehearse”) and practice testing (“Test”). Let’s take a deeper look at some of the research that supports the beneficial effects of these two effective techniques, which have been intensively investigated during the past few years.

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Distributed Practice

Cramming for exams (neglecting to study for an extended period of time and then studying intensively just before an exam; Vacha & McBride, 1993) is common in educational life. Surveys of undergraduates indicate that anywhere from about 25% to as many as 50% of students report relying on cramming (McIntyre & Munson, 2008). Though cramming is better than not studying at all, when students cram for an exam, they repeatedly study the to-be-learned information with little or no time between repetitions, a procedure known as massed practice. Such students are thus denying themselves the benefits of distributed practice, which involves spreading out study activities so that more time intervenes between repetitions of the to-be-learned information. (Students who rely on cramming are also inviting some of the health and performance problems associated with procrastination that we outlined in The Real World box on p. 4).

What’s most impressive is just how widespread the benefits of distributed practice are: They have been observed for numerous different kinds of materials, including foreign vocabulary, definitions, and face–name pairs, and they have been demonstrated not only in undergraduates, but also in children, older adults, and individuals with memory problems due to brain damage (Dunlosky et al., 2013). A review of 254 separate studies involving more than 14,000 participants concluded that, on average, participants retained 47% of studied information after distributed practice compared with 37% after massed practice (Cepeda et al., 2006).

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Despite all the evidence indicating that distributed practice is an effective learning strategy, we still don’t fully understand why that is so. One promising idea is that when engaging in massed practice, retrieving recently studied information is relatively easy, whereas during distributed practice, it is more difficult to retrieve information that was studied less recently. More difficult retrievals benefit subsequent learning more than easy retrievals, in line with idea of “desirable difficulties” (Bjork & Bjork, 2011) introduced in the Improving Study Skills box. Whatever the explanation for the effects of distributed practice, there is no denying its benefits for students.

Practice Testing

Practice testing, like distributed practice, has proven useful across a wide range of materials, including the learning of stories, facts, vocabulary, and lectures (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Karpicke, 2012; see also the LearningCurve system associated with this text, which uses practice testing). As you learned in the Memory chapter, practice testing is effective, in part, because actively retrieving an item from memory on a test improves subsequent retention of that item more than simply studying it again (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Yet when asked about their preferred study strategies, students indicated by a wide margin that they prefer rereading materials to testing themselves (Karpicke, 2012). The benefits of testing tend to be greatest when the test is difficult and requires considerable retrieval effort (Pyc & Rawson, 2009), a finding that is also consistent with the desirable difficulties hypothesis (Bjork & Bjork, 2011). Not only does testing increase verbatim learning of the exact material that is tested, but it also enhances the transfer of learning from one situation to another (Carpenter, 2012). For example, if you are given practice tests with short-answer questions, such testing improves later performance on both short-answer and multiple-choice questions (Kang, McDermott, & Roediger, 2007). Testing also improves the ability to draw conclusions from the studied material, which is an important part of learning and often critical to performing well in the classroom (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011).

Recent research conducted in the laboratory of one of your textbook authors highlights yet another benefit of testing: Including brief tests during a lecture can improve learning by reducing the tendency to mind-wander (Szpunar, Khan, & Schacter, 2013). How often have you found your mind wandering—thinking about your evening plans, recalling a scene from a movie, or texting a friend—in the midst of a lecture that you know that you ought to be attending to carefully? It’s probably happened more than once. Research indicates that students’ minds wander frequently during classroom lectures (Bunce, Flens, & Neiles, 2011; Lindquist & McLean, 2011; Wilson & Korn, 2007). Critically, such mind wandering impairs learning of the lecture material (Risko et al., 2012). In the study by Szpunar et al. (2013), participants watched a videotaped lecture that was divided into four segments. All of the participants were told that they might or might not be tested after each segment; they were also encouraged to take notes during the lectures. However, some participants (“tested group”) received brief tests on each segment, while others (“nontested group”) did not receive a test until after the final segment. A third group of participants (“restudy group”) were shown, but not tested on, the material after each segment.

DATA VISUALIZATION

At random times during the lectures, participants in all groups were probed about whether they were paying attention to the lecture or mind wandering off to other topics. Participants in the nontested and restudy groups indicated that they were mind wandering in response to about 40% of the probes, but the incidence of mind wandering was cut in half, to about 20%, in the tested group. Participants in the tested group took significantly more notes during the lectures, and they retained significantly more information from the lecture on a final test than did participants in the other two groups, who performed similarly. Participants in the tested group were also less anxious about the final test than those in the other groups. These results indicate that part of the value of testing comes from encouraging people to sustain attention to a lecture in a way that discourages task-irrelevant activities such as mind wandering, and it encourages task-relevant activities such as note taking. Because these benefits of testing were observed in response to a videotaped lecture, they apply most directly to online learning, where taped lectures are the norm, but there is every reason to believe that the results would apply in live classroom settings as well.

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It’s the night before the final exam in your introductory psychology course. You’ve put in a lot of time reviewing your course notes and the material in this textbook, and you feel that you have learned most of it pretty well. You are coming down the home stretch with little time left, and you’ve got to decide whether to devote those precious remaining minutes to studying psychological disorders or social psychology. How do you make that decision? What are the potential consequences of your decision? An important part of learning involves assessing how well we know something and how much more time we need to devote to studying it.

Experimental evidence reveals that people’s judgments about what they have learned, which psychologists refer to as judgments of learning (JOLs), have a causal influence on learning: People typically devote more time to studying items that they judge they have not learned well (Metcalfe & Finn, 2008; Son & Metcalfe, 2000).

Unfortunately, JOLs are often inaccurate (Castel, McCabe, & Roediger, 2007). For example, after reading and rereading a chapter or article in preparation for a test, you may feel that the material is quite familiar, and that feeling may convince you that you’ve learned the material well enough that you don’t need to study it further. However, the feeling of familiarity can be misleading: It may be the result of a low-level process such as perceptual priming (see the Memory chapter) and not the kind of learning that will be required to perform well on an exam (Bjork & Bjork, 2011). One way to avoid being fooled by such misleading subjective impressions is to test yourself from time to time when studying for an exam under examlike conditions and to carefully compare your responses to the actual answers.

So, if you are preparing for the final exam in this course and need to decide whether to devote more time to studying psychological disorders or social psychology, try to exert control over learning by testing yourself on material from the two chapters; you can use the results of those tests to help you decide which chapter requires further work. Heed the conclusion from researchers (Bjork, Dunlosky, and Kornell, 2013) that becoming a more sophisticated and effective learner requires understanding: (a) key features of learning and memory; (b) effective learning techniques; (c) how to monitor and control one’s own learning; and (d) biases that can undermine judgments of learning.

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