Learning and Performance Tips - Harper APUSH



Learning and Performance TipsForget What You Know About Good Study HabitsBy BENEDICT CAREYEvery September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).And check out the classroom. Does Junior's learning style match the new teacher's approach? Or the school's philosophy? Maybe the child isn't ''a good fit'' for the school.Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn't offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.''We have known these principles for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error,'' said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. ''Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.''Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are ''visual learners'' and others are auditory; some are ''left-brain'' students, others ''right-brain.'' In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. ''The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,'' the researchers concluded.Ditto for teaching styles, researchers say. Some excellent instructors caper in front of the blackboard like summer-theater Falstaffs; others are reserved to the point of shyness. ''We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,'' said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book ''Why Don't Students Like School?''But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong. For instance, many study skills courses insist that students find a specific place, a study room or a quiet corner of the library, to take their work. The research finds just the opposite. In one classic 1978 experiment, psychologists found that college students who studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms -- one windowless and cluttered, the other modern, with a view on a courtyard -- did far better on a test than students who studied the words twice, in the same room. Later studies have confirmed the finding, for a variety of topics.The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time, the authors say, regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious. It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.''What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,'' said Dr. Bjork, the senior author of the two-room experiment.Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting -- alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language -- seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. Musicians have known this for years, and their practice sessions often include a mix of scales, musical pieces and rhythmic work. Many athletes, too, routinely mix their workouts with strength, speed and skill drills.The advantages of this approach to studying can be striking, in some topic areas. In a study recently posted online by the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, Doug Rohrer and Kelli Taylor of the University of South Florida taught a group of fourth graders four equations, each to calculate a different dimension of a prism. Half of the children learned by studying repeated examples of one equation, say, calculating the number of prism faces when given the number of sides at the base, then moving on to the next type of calculation, studying repeated examples of that. The other half studied mixed problem sets, which included examples all four types of calculations grouped together. Both groups solved sample problems along the way, as they studied.A day later, the researchers gave all of the students a test on the material, presenting new problems of the same type. The children who had studied mixed sets did twice as well as the others, outscoring them 77 percent to 38 percent. The researchers have found the same in experiments involving adults and younger children.''When students see a list of problems, all of the same kind, they know the strategy to use before they even read the problem,'' said Dr. Rohrer. ''That's like riding a bike with training wheels.'' With mixed practice, he added, ''each problem is different from the last one, which means kids must learn how to choose the appropriate procedure -- just like they had to do on the test.''These findings extend well beyond math, even to aesthetic intuitive learning. In an experiment published last month in the journal Psychology and Aging, researchers found that college students and adults of retirement age were better able to distinguish the painting styles of 12 unfamiliar artists after viewing mixed collections (assortments, including works from all 12) than after viewing a dozen works from one artist, all together, then moving on to the next painter.The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. ''What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it's picking up what's similar and what's different about them,'' often subconsciously.Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn -- it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.''With many students, it's not like they can't remember the material'' when they move to a more advanced class, said Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis. ''It's like they've never seen it before.''When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer. An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.No one knows for sure why. It may be that the brain, when it revisits material at a later time, has to relearn some of what it has absorbed before adding new stuff -- and that that process is itself self-reinforcing.''The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,'' said Dr. Kornell. ''When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.''That's one reason cognitive scientists see testing itself -- or practice tests and quizzes -- as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.Dr. Roediger uses the analogy of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, which holds that the act of measuring a property of a particle alters that property: ''Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,'' he says -- and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.In one of his own experiments, Dr. Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke, also of Washington University, had college students study science passages from a reading comprehension test, in short study periods. When students studied the same material twice, in back-to-back sessions, they did very well on a test given immediately afterward, then began to forget the material.But if they studied the passage just once and did a practice test in the second session, they did very well on one test two days later, and another given a week later.''Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,'' Dr. Roediger said. ''Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.''Of course, one reason the thought of testing tightens people's stomachs is that tests are so often hard. Paradoxically, it is just this difficulty that makes them such effective study tools, research suggests. The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call ''desirable difficulty,'' is evident in daily life. The name of the actor who played Linc in ''The Mod Squad''? Francie's brother in ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn''? The name of the co-discoverer, with Newton, of calculus?The more mental sweat it takes to dig it out, the more securely it will be subsequently anchored.None of which is to suggest that these techniques -- alternating study environments, mixing content, spacing study sessions, self-testing or all the above -- will turn a grade-A slacker into a grade-A student. Motivation matters. So do impressing friends, making the hockey team and finding the nerve to text the cute student in social studies.''In lab experiments, you're able to control for all factors except the one you're studying,'' said Dr. Willingham. ''Not true in the classroom, in real life. All of these things are interacting at the same time.''But at the very least, the cognitive techniques give parents and students, young and old, something many did not have before: a study plan based on evidence, not schoolyard folk wisdom, or empty theorizing.-----------------------------------------------------------Studying for the Test by Taking ItBy?BENEDICT CAREYNOV. 22, 2014PROTESTS are flaring up in pockets of the country against the proliferation of standardized tests. For many parents and teachers, school has become little more than a series of workout sessions for the assessment du jour.And that is exactly backward, research shows. Tests should work for the student, not the other way around.In an?experiment?published late last year, two University of Texas psychologists threw out the final exam for the 900 students in their intro psych course and replaced it with a series of short quizzes that students took on their laptops at the beginning of each class.“They didn’t like it, at least at first,” said one of the professors, James W. Pennebaker. The other professor, Samuel D. Gosling, added, “For the first few weeks, every time their friends went out drinking, they couldn’t go — they had yet another quiz the next day.”But they did significantly better than a comparison intro psych class, both in their grades and on a larger quiz that included 17 of the same questions that appeared both in the quizzes and on the other class’s midterm. The quizzes were especially beneficial for the type of students — many from low-performing high schools — who don’t realize how far behind they are until it’s too late.One leading researcher in this field, Henry L. Roediger III of Washington University in St. Louis, argues that tests of varying scale and intensity can deepen learning. “We now know that testing, including self-testing, is an especially powerful form of study,” said Dr. Roediger, co-author of the book “Make It Stick.”How so? Because retrieving facts, formulas or concepts is a threefold mental act: finding the sought-after information in the vast catacombs of the brain; bringing it consciously to mind; and finally, storing it. That newly stored memory will be embedded in a host of additional associations and connections and be much easier to recall later than if you’d merely read it again.Testing has so many dimensions that it can often be easily disguised. In astudy?published last month, the cognitive scientist Doug Rohrer of the University of South Florida made a clever change in the math homework of middle school students in Tampa, Fla. Working with teachers, he essentially gave each student two types of assignments. To test some skills they got so-called blocked practice — concentrated drills on a single thing, like solving for X. On other skills they got mixed practice, that is, blending certain skills — say graphing — with other types of problems from the course.The rationale was straightforward. Practicing skills in isolation leads to noticeable improvement, but students do not have to shift gears. They know how to proceed because the assignment says “graphs” or “solving for X” at the top of the page.Yet at the end of the term, on a surprise test, the students solved 72 percent of the problems that they’d studied in mixed sets, compared with 38 percent of those in blocked, homework-as-usual sets. The problems and teachers were the same, and the classes were taught as usual. The only change was in the homework.In the jargon of the field, this strategy of mixed problem-sets is called interleaving. It is distinct from the end-of-unit reviews that teachers commonly give, because it’s self-guided and continual. It mimics a test in a crucial way, in that it forces students to distinguish between types of problems and decide which strategy is appropriate.The beauty of broadening testing beyond basic assessment is that the approach can be applied at home, easily, for students of all ages. Most young children squirm through their homework, but many love to play teacher. By cutting short “study time” and asking them to be the teacher, parents can make the session more fun, more interactive and a richer learning experience. Teaching is self-testing of an especially potent kind.Ditto for making an outline of a chapter (with the book closed), or discussing the material with a friend or roommate. One reason scientists suspect that studying in pairs or groups can be helpful is that students are forced to talk to one another about the material — or better yet, argue about it. These are all forms of self-examination, and as such deepen learning more than passively rereading or reviewing the material.The brain is an exotic learning machine, to put it mildly. It does not take orders well. You can tell it to remember the major players in the settling of Manhattan, stress how crucially important that is, and on the test a week later very little comes back. And yet you might remember nearly every play in the San Francisco Giants’ Game 7 World Series victory. Why? Because the brain doesn’t listen to what you say; it watches what you?do. And thinking often about Madison Bumgarner pitching, talking about the game, arguing about it: These are mental actions, as well as subtle forms of testing knowledge.Testing in all its permutations, subtle and otherwise, convinces the brain that the knowledge is useful, and important. And by varying one’s testing strategies, the actual final exam — the dreaded assessment — isn’t nearly as scary.Want to Ace That Test? Get the Right Kind of SleepBy? HYPERLINK "" \o "More Posts by Benedict Carey" BENEDICT CAREY?Sleep. Parents crave it, but children and especially teenagers, need it. When educators and policymakers debate the relationship between sleep schedules and school performance and — given the constraints of buses, sports and everything else that seem so much more important — what they should do about it, they miss an intimate biological fact: Sleep is learning, of a very specific kind. Scientists now argue that a primary purpose of sleep is learning consolidation, separating the signal from the noise and flagging what is most valuable.School schedules change slowly, if at all, and the burden of helping teenagers get the sleep they need is squarely on parents. Can we help our children learn to exploit sleep as a learning tool (while getting enough of it)?Absolutely. There is research suggesting that different kinds of sleep can aid different kinds of learning, and by teaching “sleep study skills,” we can let our teenagers enjoy the sense that they’re gaming the system.Start with the basics.Sleep isn’t merely rest or downtime; the brain comes out to play when head meets pillow. A full night’s sleep includes a large dose of several distinct brain states, including REM sleep – when the brain flares with activity and dreams – and the netherworld of deep sleep, when it whispers to itself in a language that is barely audible. Each of these states developed to handle one kind of job, so getting sleep isn’t just something you “should do” or need. It’s far more: It’s your best friend when you want to get really good at something you’ve been working on.So you want to remember your Spanish vocabulary (or “How I Met Your Mother” trivia or Red Sox batting averages)?Easy. Hit the hay at your regular time; don’t stay up late checking Instagram. Studies have found that the first half of the night contains the richest dose of so-called deep sleep — the knocked-out-cold variety — and this is when the brain consolidates facts and figures and new words. This is retention territory, and without it (if we stay up too late), we’re foggier the next day on those basic facts. I explained this to my daughter, Flora, who was up until 2 a.m. or later on many school nights, starting in high school. She ignored it, or seemed to. Learning Arabic is what turned her around, I think. She wants to be good at it, and having to learn not only a new vocabulary but also a completely different writing system is, in the beginning, all retention.“I started going to bed earlier before the day of Arabic tests, partly for that reason,” Flora said (when reached by text). “But also, of course, I didn’t want to be tired.”And you want to rip on the guitar, or on the court, right?Just as the first half of a night’s sleep is rich with deep slumber, the second half is brimming with so-called Stage 2 sleep, the kind that consolidates motor memory, the stuff that aspiring musicians and athletes need. This is not an excuse to sleep through Period 1. Rather, it’s a reason not to roll out of bed too early and miss the body’s chance to refine all those skills learned while kicking a soccer ball off the garage or practicing dance moves.For an older, teenage student, these two learning stages of sleep offer something more: a means of being tactical about sleep, before an important test or performance. If it’s a French test, then turn off the lights at your normal time, and get up early to study. If it’s a music recital, do the opposite: stay up a little later preparing, and sleep in to your normal time in the morning. If you’re going to burn the candle, it’s good to know which end to burn it on.What about math tests? I hate those.Math tests strain both memory (retention) and understanding (comprehension). This is where REM sleep, the dreaming kind, comes in. Studies find that REM is exceptionally good for deciphering hidden patterns, comprehension, and seeing a solution to a hard problem. If the test is mostly a memory challenge (multiplication tables, formulas), then go to sleep at the usual time and get up early for prep. But if it’s hard problems, then it’s REM you want. Stay up a little later and get the full dose of dream-rich sleep, which helps the brain see hidden patterns.“Mom, I’m tired of studying – I’m going to have a nap.”By all means. Napping is sleep too, and it’s a miniature version of a full night’s slumber. An hourlong nap typically contains deep sleep, REM and some Stage 2. One caution: napping can interfere with some children’s sleep schedule, and it’s important to make sure day sleep doesn’t scramble the full serving at night. But the central point is that a sensation of exhaustion during a period of work is the brain’s way of saying, “O.K., I’ve studied (or practiced), now it’s time to digest this material and finish the job.”If a child can nap without losing a handle on his or her natural sleep rhythm, then let it happen.The upshot is that, for any young student who wants to do better — in school, in sports, in music or even in the social whirl (yes, that’s learning too) — knowing the science of sleep will help them respect slumber for what it is: learning consolidation. Of the best and most natural kind.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good ThingBy?BENEDICT CAREYImagine that on Day 1 of a difficult course, before you studied a single thing, you got hold of the final exam. The motherlode itself, full text, right there in your email inbox — attached mistakenly by the teacher, perhaps, or poached by a campus hacker. No answer key, no notes or guidelines. Just the questions.Would that help you study more effectively? Of course it would. You would read the questions carefully. You would know exactly what to focus on in your notes. Your ears would perk up anytime the teacher mentioned something relevant to a specific question. You would search the textbook for its discussion of each question. If you were thorough, you would have memorized the answer to every item before the course ended. On the day of that final, you would be the first to finish, sauntering out with an A+ in your pocket. And you would be cheating.But what if, instead, you took a test on Day 1 that was just as comprehensive as the final but?not?a replica? You would bomb the thing, for sure. You might not understand a single question. And yet as disorienting as that experience might feel, it would alter how you subsequently tuned into the course itself — and could sharply improve your overall performance.This is the idea behind pretesting, one of the most exciting developments in learning-science. Across a variety of experiments, psychologists have found that, in some circumstances, wrong answers on a pretest aren’t merely useless guesses. Rather, the attempts themselves change how we think about and store the information contained in the questions. On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we benefit from answering incorrectly by, in effect, priming our brain for what’s coming later.That is: The (bombed) pretest drives home the information in a way that studying as usual does not. We fail, but we fail forward.PhotoThe excitement around prefinals is rooted in the fact that the tests appear to improve subsequent performance in topics that are not already familiar, whether geography, sociology or psychology. At least they do so in experiments in controlled laboratory conditions. A just-completed study — the first of its kind, carried out by the U.C.L.A. psychologist Elizabeth Ligon Bjork — found that in a live classroom of Bjork’s own students, pretesting raised performance on final-exam questions by an average of 10 percent compared with a control group.The basic insight is as powerful as it is surprising: Testing might be the key to studying, rather than the other way around. As it turns out, a test is not only a measurement tool. It’s a way of enriching and altering memory.Many of us?dread tests because we’ve been wounded by a few over the years, and sometimes severely. Almost everyone has had at least one lost-in-space experience, opening an exam to find a long list of questions that seem to hail from another course altogether. Vision narrows, the mind seizes; all feeling drains from the extremities. We would crawl into a hole if we weren’t already in one.Yet another species of exam collapse is far more common. These are the cases in which we open the test and see familiar questions on material we’ve studied, perhaps even stuff we’ve highlighted with yellow marker: names, ideas, formulas we could recite easily only yesterday. And still we lay an egg, scoring average or worse.Why does this happen? Psychologists have studied learning long enough to have an answer, and typically it’s not a lack of effort (or of some elusive test-taking gene). The problem is that we have misjudged the depth of what we know. We are duped by a misperception of “fluency,” believing that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember?right now,?they will remain that way tomorrow or the next day. This fluency illusion is so strong that, once we feel we have some topic or assignment down, we assume that further study won’t strengthen our memory of the material. We move on, forgetting that we forget.Often our study “aids” simply create fluency illusions — including, yes, highlighting — as do chapter outlines provided by a teacher or a textbook. Such fluency misperceptions are automatic; they form subconsciously and render us extremely poor judges of what we need to restudy or practice again. “We know that if you study something twice, in spaced sessions, it’s harder to process the material the second time, and so people think it’s counterproductive,” Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College, said. “But the opposite is true: You learn more, even though it feels harder. Fluency is playing a trick on judgment.”The best way to overcome this illusion is testing, which also happens to be an effective study technique in its own right. This is not exactly a recent discovery; people have understood it since the dawn of formal education, probably longer. In 1620, the philosopher Francis Bacon wrote, “If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.”Scientific confirmation of this principle began in 1916, when Arthur Gates, a psychologist at Columbia University, created an ingenious study to further Bacon’s insight. If someone is trying to learn a piece of text from memory, Gates wondered, what would be the ideal ratio of study to recitation (without looking)? To interrogate this question, he had more than 100 schoolchildren try to memorize text from Who’s Who entries. He broke them into groups and gave each child nine minutes to prepare, along with specific instructions on how to use that time. One group spent 1 minute 48 seconds memorizing and the remaining time rehearsing (reciting); another split its time roughly in half, equal parts memorizing and rehearsing; a third studied for a third and recited for two-thirds; and so on.After a sufficient break, Gates sat through sputtered details of the lives of great Americans and found his ratio. “In general,” he concluded, “best results are obtained by introducing recitation after devoting about 40 percent of the time to reading. Introducing recitation too early or too late leads to poorer results.” The quickest way to master that Shakespearean sonnet, in other words, is to spend the first third of your time memorizing it and the remaining two-thirds of the time trying to recite it from memory.In the 1930s, a doctoral student at the State University of Iowa, Herbert F. Spitzer, recognized the broader implications of this insight. Gates’s emphasis on recitation was, Spitzer realized, not merely a study tip for memorization; it was nothing less than a form of self-examination. It was testing as study, and Spitzer wanted to extend the finding, asking a question that would apply more broadly in education: If testing is so helpful, when is the best time to do it?He mounted an enormous experiment, enlisting more than 3,500 sixth graders at 91 elementary schools in nine Iowa cities. He had them study an age-appropriate article of roughly 600 words in length, similar to what they might analyze for homework. Spitzer divided the students into groups and had each take tests on the passages over the next two months, according to different schedules. For instance, Group 1 received one quiz immediately after studying, then another a day later and a third three weeks later. Group 6, by contrast, didn’t take one until three weeks after reading the passage. Again, the time the students had to study was identical. So were the quizzes. Yet the groups’ scores varied widely, and a clear pattern emerged.The groups that took pop quizzes soon after reading the passage — once or twice within the first week — did the best on a final exam given at the end of two months, marking about 50 percent of the questions correct. (Remember, they had studied their peanut or bamboo article only once.) By contrast, the groups who took their first pop quiz two weeks or more after studying scored much lower, below 30 percent on the final. Spitzer’s study showed that not only is testing a powerful study technique, but it’s also one that should be deployed sooner rather than later. “Achievement tests or examinations are learning devices and should not be considered only as tools for measuring achievement of pupils,” he concluded.The testing effect, as it’s known, is now well established, and it opens a window on the alchemy of memory itself. “Retrieving a fact is not like opening a computer file,” says Henry Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who, with Jeffrey Karpicke, now at Purdue University, has established the effect’s lasting power. “It alters what we remember?and?changes how we subsequently organize that knowledge in our brain.”If tests are?most effective when given sooner rather than later, then why not go the distance? Why not give the final on the first day, as well as on the last? This is the radical question that Bjork, the U.C.L.A. psychologist, has set out to investigate.She did not actually give a comprehensive prefinal on the first day of class, in order to avoid overwhelming her students. She also decided to start with fairly basic material, conducting the study on her Psychology 100B class at U.C.L.A., which covers research methods.PhotoShe and Nicholas Soderstrom, a postdoc, gave the entire class of more than 300 students a short pretest, all multiple-choice questions, immediately before the start of some lectures but not others. “We wanted to see whether students would better remember and understand material from lectures preceded by a pretest than from lectures not preceded by a pretest,” Soderstrom said.To answer that, Bjork and Soderstrom did something clever on a cumulative final exam, which was given at the end of the course. Namely, they included on it questions that were related to the pretest ones as well as questions that were not. “If pretesting helps, then students should do better on related questions during a later exam than on questions about material we covered in the lectures but was not pretested,” Bjork said. She and Soderstrom would compare students’ scores on pretest-related questions with their scores on nonpretested ones, to see if there was any difference.For example, here’s a question from one of the pretests:Which of the following is true of scientific explanations?a.?They are less likely to be verified by empirical observation than other types of explanations.b.?They are accepted because they come from a trusted source or authority figure.c.?They are accepted only provisionally.d.?In the face of evidence that is inconsistent with a scientific explanation, the evidence will be questioned.e.?All of the above are true about scientific explanations.And here’s a related question, from the cumulative test given after the lectures:Which of the following is true of explanations based on belief?a.?They are more likely to be verified by empirical observation than other types of explanations.b.?They are accepted because they come from a trusted source or authority figure.c.?They are assumed to be true absolutely.d.?In the face of evidence that is inconsistent with an explanation based on belief, the belief will be questioned.e.?b and c above.The students tanked all three pretests, performing no better than if they had guessed at random. Bjork and Soderstrom had expected as much. But the class received prompt feedback, attending the relevant lecture shortly after they took each of the three pretests. Those lectures in effect supplied them with correct answers to questions that had just been posed on the pretest. In previous experiments, such immediacy seemed to be a critical component: Pretests led to the most improvement when students received the correct answers reasonably soon after their guessing.In order to gauge the effect of the testing, Bjork and Soderstrom gave a cumulative exam at the end of the 10-week course. It was the same format as the others: multiple-choice questions, each with five possible answers. The result? Bjork’s Psych 100B class scored about 10 percent higher on the related questions than on the unrelated ones. It’s far from a magic memory pill — but 10 percent, as we all know, can often translate to a letter grade. “On the basis of this significant difference,” Bjork said, “giving students a pretest on topics to be covered in a lecture improves their ability to answer related questions about those topics on a later final exam.” Even when students bomb, she said, pretests provide them an opportunity to see what vocabulary will be used in the coming lectures, what kinds of questions will be posed and which distinctions between concepts will be crucial.Bjork’s experiment?suggests that pretesting serves to prime the brain, predisposing it to absorb new information. Scientists have several theories as to how this happens. One is fairly obvious: Students get a glimpse from a pretest of the teacher’s hand, of what they’ll be up against. That’s in the interest of not just students but of teachers, too. You can teach facts and concepts all you want, but what’s most important in the end is how students think?about that material: How they incorporate all those definitions into a working narrative about a topic that gives them confidence in judging what’s important and what’s less so. These are not easy things to communicate, even for the best teachers. You can’t download such critical thinking quickly, hard as you might try. But you can easily give a test with questions that themselves force that kind of hierarchical thinking. “Taking a practice test and getting wrong answers seems to improve subsequent study, because the test adjusts our thinking in some way to the kind of material we need to know,” Bjork said.A second possibility has to do with the concept of fluency. Wrong guesses expose our fluency illusions, our false impression that we “know” the capital of Eritrea because we just saw it or once studied it. A test, if multiple-choice, forces us to select the correct answer from a number of possibilities that also look plausible. “Let’s say you’re pretty sure that Australia’s capital is Canberra,” Robert A. Bjork, Elizabeth Ligon Bjork’s husband and a leading learning scientist, said. “O.K., that seems easy enough. But when the exam question appears, you see all sorts of other possibilities — Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide — and suddenly you’re not so sure. If you’re studying just the correct answer, you don’t appreciate all the other possible answers that could come to mind or appear on the test.” Pretesting operates as a sort of fluency vaccine.Biologically, too, there may be something deeper at work. To review, memory builds on itself in ways we don’t usually notice. Retrieval — i.e. remembering — is a different mental act than straight studying; the brain is digging out a fact, together with a network of associations, which alters and enriches how that network is subsequently re-stored. But guessing is distinct from both study and retrieval. It too will reshape our mental networks by embedding unfamiliar concepts (the lend-lease program, the confirmation bias, the superego) into questions we at least partly comprehend (“Name one psychological phenomenon that skews our evaluation of evidence”). Even if the question is not entirely clear and its solution unknown, a guess will in itself begin to link the questions to possible answers. And those networks light up like Christmas lights when we hear the concepts again.And here is where pretesting shows its likely limitations: A prefinal for an intro class in Arabic or Chinese could be a wash, because the notations and characters are entirely alien. There’s no scaffolding of familiar language to work with — no existing network in which to situate the new symbols — before we make a guess. We are truly lost, with no recognizable landmark. The research thus far suggests that prefinals will be much more useful in humanities courses and social-science disciplines in which unfamiliar concepts are at least embedded in language we can parse.The word “testing” is still loaded, of course, in ways that have nothing to do with learning science. Educators and experts have debated the value of standardized testing for decades, and reforms like the No Child Left Behind law, which increased the use of such exams, have only inflamed the argument. Many teachers complain that a focus on testing limits their ability to fully explore subjects with their students. Others attack tests as woefully incomplete measures of learning, blind to all varieties of creative thinking.But the emerging study of pretesting flips that logic on its head. “Teaching to the test” becomes “learning to understand the pretest,” whichever one the teacher chooses to devise. The test, that is, becomes an introduction to what students should learn, rather than a final judgment on what they did not. ................
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