Students spend an immense amount of their time studying—after all, have you ever taken a class in hopes of failing the final exam? Most students study class material before a test to try and avoid this fate. Despite making an effort to do this, almost anyone who has ever been in school can recall a time when they spent hours, days, or even weeks studying, only to arrive at a test and find that they are unable to answer any of the questions. While this can be very frustrating, it also shows that the amount of time you spend studying is not the only thing that determines how well you will do on a test. In order to determine which other factors might play a part, psychologist Andrew Butler conducted a study at Washington University in St. Louis that looked at different studying techniques and how they affect test performance. More specifically, Butler compared test-enhanced learning, which involves studying by being tested on the material at hand (like testing yourself with flashcards) to repeated restudying of information (picture yourself reading a textbook page over and over again).
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Have you ever completed a task but later you were unable to articulate what you did in order to succeed? For example, after I have completed a complicated math problem, I am typically unable to explain in words how I arrived at my answer. When this occurs, we are said to have implicit knowledge of the task rather than explicit knowledge of the task. In other words, the knowledge that is evident in our behavior but it is unavailable through speech. When I am unable to explain or articulate something, I often find myself gesturing or using my hands. In fact, I think of myself as a frequent gesturer. Many learners, myself included, demonstrate spontaneous gestures when trying to describe a task or knowledge that they cannot quite articulate. These gestures that we use while speaking are a way of revealing our implicit knowledge. Because gesturing behavior helps us reveal knowledge we cannot articulate, could gesturing enhance our learning? New research on gesturing has shown that gesturing can give us insight to the information that we cannot express through speech. But what happens when we are forced to gesture? Can forced gesturing reveal our implicit knowledge or perhaps, prepare us for learning?
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I wish I could have taken a picture of every student’s face that walked into Mr. B’s middle school history class on Friday morning. It was always a struggle to get up on Fridays because I knew that my first class of the day always meant it was time for a quiz. All of my peers despised Mr. B for his quizzes to make sure that we had been paying attention all week and that we were keeping up with the information. “Isn’t that what tests are for? Why do we have to take a quiz every week?”
Being tested frequently is something that students are most of the time not too fond of, but in the long run when you get the grade of your exam, you will thank the teachers that made you recall and tested you on the information learned every week! Recent research in cognitive psychology has provided strong evidence to support this notion.
Retrieval, the process by which information can be extracted from memory, is treated as an evaluative tool that reveals what people remember and what they have forgotten; retrieval shows what people know but it also changes what people know. From an educational perspective, it is important to understand that retrieval serves more than just the purpose of reinforcing memory of a tested fact! Cognitive psychologists have recently been seeking to provide educators with clear, effective advice on how to improve student learning.
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Do you ever listen to music while doing your homework? I know I do! In my opinion my iTunes library helps me stay on task and finish my work in a more timely manner. If you feel the same way I do, you should know that studies have shown that the effects of background music varying depending on the type of work you are doing; in some cases music can help you while in other situations you’re better off putting the headphones down.
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Growing up, I noticed that some children would leave the classroom with teachers I didn’t recognize, and until I grew a little older I didn’t understand where they were going. Eventually I learned that these children had learning disabilities, some of whom were diagnosed with dyslexia. What has never crossed my mind since then, is that there are still adults who are affected by reading disabilities. Experimenters Welcome, Chiarello, Halderman, and Leonard (2008) examined a group of college students who they called “Resilient Readers” who have a rare form of reading disability that can be thought of as similar to dyslexia. The stereotype that people with dyslexia just switch letters is only one small piece of the disorder, which is caused by the brain not properly recognizing or processing symbols (letters and words). There are other symptoms for those struggling with dyslexia, including difficulties in: figuring out meanings of sentences, recognizing written words, and rhyming. Though it can be difficult for a young student with dyslexia to learn how to read, if taught specialized techniques and approaches to learning they are able to overcome or at least learn to work with their disorder (PubMed Health). Many students with dyslexia attend higher education and excel among their classmates.
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Have you ever been in a lecture where you are stuck vigorously writing down notes for the entire class and asked yourself if the way you are taking notes is the best use of your time? Bui, Myerson, and Hale conducted a series of three experiments examining note-taking strategies, specifically hand-written vs. computer typed, and their relation to recall and memory. With approximately 83% of college instructors teaching in a lecture environment (Wirt et al. 2001), proper note taking is a beneficial skill to have when it comes to learning at higher levels of academia like undergraduate and graduate institutions.
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It’s no secret that in the pursuit of a higher education away from the confines of home students often explore a wilder side of themselves. The weekdays may be all about academics, but on the weekend campuses breakout with parties full of stressed students trying to let loose, if only for one night. This celebration of the weekend usually includes some alcoholic drinking. Four out of every five college students drink alcohol. Strict scheduling of academics and fun can lead students to overindulge, taking in too much of a good thing in a short period of time. In terms of drinking this pattern of behavior is called binge drinking. About half of all college students who drink also show patterns of binge drinking. 54% of binge drinking college students reported blacking out and forgetting what they had done some point in the past year, compared to only 25% for students who did not binge drink. Binge drinking as defined by the National Advisory Council of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) is attaining a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08 g% or more in about two hours. 0.08 g% is equivalent to about 5 or more drinks for most adults (4 or more for females). A BAC of 0.08 is considered intoxicated and is associated with impairment of speech, balance, reaction time, judgment, and memory. Though, because this impairment is often slight and just beginning to develop, it may be easy to believe you are less impaired than you are. Drinking 5 or more drinks in only 2 hours clearly shows its effects the night of their intake, but what about the next day? Worst, what if a student has academic responsibilities the next day? Even worst, what if the student has an exam the next day!
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For many students and faculty alike, testing is often considered a necessary evil in learning contexts. Tests – for students – are stressful, requiring hours of preparation, and may feel like a hurdle to be cleared. For many, testing is seen primarily as an assessment tool – it determines a grade, can have powerful and long-reaching implications on an individual’s future success and career options. Failing a test can have negative effects on academic performance and also on a student’s sense of worth. All in all, tests are typically seen as a rather negative event (unpublished data in our lab indicated an average rating of 3.04 on a 1-7 scale, where 1 was ‘extremely negative’ and 7 was ‘extremely positive’ for the word test).
For faculty, tests are often not held in much higher consideration. Tests can ‘take time away’ from more productive pursuits such as lectures or discussions. Preparing and grading a test is extremely time-consuming – thus pushing many faculty to opt for multiple choice questions that can be graded quickly and easily. Small wonder, then, that many college courses only include 2 or 3 exams over the course of a semester.
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