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Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques

253 points by pella 4y ago

pella 4y ago
TLDR: Result of a large meta-analysis of study techniques: High - Distributed practice - Practice testing Moderate - Elaborative interrogation - Interleaved practice - Self-explanation Low - Highlighting - Imagery use for text learning - Rereading - Summarization - The keyword mnemonic // via: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1630938305213628417 https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1630938305213628417 ( see tips How AI/ChatGPT can help )
- Jensson 4y ago
  Problem is that people greatly prefer the low result study techniques since they requires less mental effort. It has been known for a while that they are bad, but since doing those allows people to study more hours for same amount of effort they do it anyway.
  - chowells 4y ago
    Yeah, all of "learning styles" fits into that bucket. It may be what you like, but it isn't what has been shown to be the most effective.
  - Brybry 4y ago
    "Practice testing" can just be using flashcards to test yourself. That was really common when I was in school and is fairly low effort.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      Making flash cards is in the low gain category, and that is very popular. Disciplined testing using those cards wasn't nearly as common from what I saw, people just made them and then forgot about them. Or just read through them without putting in effort trying to answer each one without looking at the answer. Doing those properly requires effort.
      - bawolff 4y ago
        Lol, i can't imagine going through the effort of making flashcards and then just not using them. Are people really like that?
        Jensson 4y ago
        Yeah, you can see it in comments in this thread, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34985638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34985638
        reidjs 4y ago
        Guilty
        parksoha 4y ago
        If you do not have time to study... I had to do long commutes while working part-time to get my CS degree. Sometimes I was left with only 1 day of study for an exam and this was the best method for me.
        suddenclarity 4y ago
        People do it all the time because it's fun and you get the initial kick. Like planning a budget, habits, hobby, exercise routine or spend a week collecting courses. Then the daily grind starts and you give up after a few days.
        GolDDranks 4y ago
        Yes, it happens more than you'd imagine. I, personally, just am reading a novel series Japanese, 8 books in. While reading, I have highlighted all the words/parts I didn't know in order to export them and make flashcards out of them. I haven't still started going through them, but the thought of doing so feels laborious, so procrastinating is bound to happen.
        hunter-gatherer 4y ago
        Finnish is a second language to me and what I've found better than flash cards is to just write down words I don't know as I'm reading. Initially this can seem terribkt slow because each book with have its own vocabularly set. As I continue if I read a word I don't know zi scan the list briefly. If it isn't there or I fail to see it I write it down again. Has worked well for me.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      As someone who creates flashcards often, the creation is definitely not low effort. Reviewing is.
      - admiral33 4y ago
        I've made plenty of flashcards during undergrad and creation can definitely be both high effort and low effort. Low effort copy and paste from textbook, high effort when using a plugin for anki can mean obfuscating multiple parts of an algorithm/tree. I'm proud of my best flashcards - but is there any evidence that creation + studying is more effective than studying alone over the same timeframe? Anki suggests that on their site but I haven't seen much evidence for it. Study -> create -> study -> create is effective for us programmers using google but is study -> create -> study -> study ... more effective than study -> study... ?
        BeetleB 4y ago
        I'm not sure I understand what "study -> study" is. Is it studying without creating flash cards, or utilizing them? As in just studying the book, doing problems, etc? If so, in my experience, then yes, integrating flash cards is much more effective. Especially for working professionals who often have to step away from what they are studying for many months at a time (except doing the cards for 15 minutes a day).
        admiral33 4y ago
        Yeah my comment wasn't clear. Creating the flashcards is a slow process but supposedly imparts 'deeper' knowledge for the creator. That is the claim I'm curious about. Anki has shared decks that anyone can download and study [1]. Say someone has an exam coming up that they need to prepare for. They have two choices: study flashcards given to them, or make and study their own flashcards. For the sake of this example the deck that would be given to them and the one they'd make are identical and contain sufficient information to achieve a perfect score. 3 hypothetical scenarios: - A short length study period where a large proportion of time is used to create the cards allowing less time to 'test' their knowledge compared to if they had started reviewing right away. - A medium length study period where the creation period is now a smaller proportion of the total time. Because they created the deck their self testing performance increases at a greater rate compared to testing with a deck given to them. - A longer length study period where the creation period is now a negligible proportion of the total study time. The benefits of being the one who created the flashcards fade. Whether they created the flashcards or not matters less as knowledge of the deck is complete either way and studying the deck is done only for maintenence. Either way this is just a question about the most effective way to 'download' knowledge. I'd always choose to make my own cards because I'd be able to make a more targeted deck and know how to use plugins to make the cards more interactive. 1: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/
  - tokinonagare 4y ago
    Not surprising highlighting has low impact. I never understood how people could thing that just putting color over something would help in anyway. Also that was one of the feature my former lab used to promote in its learning software and happily wrote cringe research papers about. I understand why: it's both easy to implement and track, which makes it a good feature for low-effort papers.
    - gowld 4y ago
      "Low" doesn't mean bad. Sure, practice is better than highlighting/rereading, but I expect that practice fails if the student makes a mistake that can be cured by re-reading. Also, practice takes a lot longer (costs a lot more), so it better have higher impact. Highlighting is an indexing technique, and maybe a marginal improvement to reading. It's a piece of a solution.
    - the_fury 4y ago
      I've practiced highlighting on and off over the years, but it's never been for memorization. I've mainly used it to separate out critical passages to speed up and simplify future reading.
      - anbotero 4y ago
        Absolutely this. I use it on my Kindle all the time for this same purpose, and come back to some of them when I know the Chapter they are in and I need to refresh a concept or phrase.
    - chrisweekly 4y ago
      One round of highlighting is almost worthless on its own. BUT. "Progressive summarization" (term coined by Tiago Forte) starts with broad highlighting, followed by 1-2 more rounds of increasingly refined highlighting, and finally rewriting material in own words based on the last round of highlights. Leads to deeper understanding and recall etc.
    - ortusdux 4y ago
      I once purchased a used textbook wherein over 75% of the text was highlighted.
- Silverback_VII 4y ago
  no spaced repetition? ChatGPT seems to be very good at generating cards btw
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    Spaced repetition is distributed practice
    - layman51 4y ago
      I read that “distributed practice” seems to be scheduling the learning activities to be spread out over time. I’m not sure if distributed practice has this, but “spaced repetition” seems to have some additional part to it where you don’t review the flash cards that you answer correctly as often as the ones you get wrong.
      - CuriouslyC 4y ago
        It's distributed practice where the time between practice sessions is chosen to maximize learning / work.
  - thundergolfer 4y ago
    > ChatGPT seems to be very good at generating cards btw So you can get very good at memorizing occassionally incorrect information? If I'm going to put in the effort to drill information into my brain with spaced-repetition, I have a high bar for the accuracy of that information. I hand write all my cards, and think it's commonly accepted that the manual process of producing the cards is an important first step in the memorization process.
    - david_allison 4y ago
      You can prompt ChatGPT to convert existing information into Q/A or cloze style, which saves time for some workloads. I wouldn't trust it to generate cards from scratch.
- yt-sdb 4y ago
  In case it's also not clear to others: "high", "moderate", and "low" refer to utility in learning.
  - criddell 4y ago
    It's very surprising to me that elaborative explanation, summarizing, and self-explanation score lower than practice tests. I've found that trying to teach something to somebody else is the fastest way for me to determine if I really understand something.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      So that method might be fast, but it isn't accurate, your explanations could easily be wrong without you knowing they are wrong. So even though you feel like you know it if you can explain it, many times people are wrong and give wrong explanations but still feel like they are experts, don't be one of those people.
      - criddell 4y ago
        It looks like the type of practice test matters a lot: > a multiple-choice practice test increased intrusions of false alternatives on a final cued-recall test when no feedback was provided, whereas no such increase was observed when feedback was given Sounds like practice tests are most useful when they are graded and the student gets that feedback. I suppose that makes sense. Flash cards and practice problems also fall under practice testing and it sounds like they were less effective.
    - hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
      It doesn't surprise me. Practice tests can show you you are unambiguously wrong about the details of things in a way writing my own summaries can't unless you go over them with a fine toothed comb anyway.
- criddell 4y ago
  Test taking is a skill that you can develop. I wonder what portion of the improvements from practice testing come from getting better at test taking?
  - Jensson 4y ago
    They tried test taking with tests of a very different format than the final examination, still worked.
- misterbwong 4y ago
  TLDR Addendum for people like me who aren't immediately familiar with these terms High - Distributed practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time - Practice testing: Self-testing or taking practice tests over to-be-learned material Moderate - Elaborative interrogation: Generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true - Interleaved practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session - Self-explanation: Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving Low - Highlighting: Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading - Imagery use for text learning: Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening - Rereading: Restudying text material again after an initial reading - Summarization: Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts - The keyword mnemonic: Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  I'd recommend against relying on this TL.DR. The article is incredibly nuanced, and answers many more questions than only "is this method any good?" I'd also say it's not correct to place rereading at low effectiveness. The result on the article is more complicated than that. Also, the article is mostly about memorization learning, and entirely about things with correct/incorrect answers. How well this generalizes for learning the things you need outside of schools isn't there at all.
- l5870uoo9y 4y ago
  Is practice testing equivalent to a multiple choice quiz on the subject?
- SpaceManNabs 4y ago
  This list has been pretty well known for about 10 years at least. I remember having this list for at least that long. From what I understand as well, self-explanation can be higher depending on how elaborate the encoding is. edit: just noticed that the date was 2013 and not 2023 so 10 years is correct. I read this same article long ago.
- whatever1 4y ago
  How can you practice history? Or biology? Or organic chemistry. Or law? You just have to memorize the damn thing. There are no shortcuts.
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    You write about it. I dual majored in history in college in the 90s. The best professors made you write a paper every class that would fit on the front of a college ruled looseleaf paper that would be more comfortable to write on 3-4 pages. The process of writing and editing taught you to think. Journalism writing before the shit-fest of online news was similar. 6 editors would wield the sword over whatever you wrote.
  - austinjp 4y ago
    This is just a guess: maybe thought experiments? In law, that might be randomly picking/generating cases and arguing the points to rehearse knowledge. In history, similarly it could mean role-playing historical scenarios and considering the individuals involved and the politics of the day. I'm imagining these as group activities, not something one would do alone. I also freely admit my naivety regarding these subjects. Finally, I don't think these or similar approaches are "short cuts". Quite the opposite.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    No one really said anything about shortcuts. Building maps of knowledge that have logical progressions and connections is so much more fulfilling than rote memorization. I can either memorize that the Iron Age came after the Bronze Age or I can weave a story with as many details as I can find and understand the inner workings of how the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age happened. You can also identify patterns within domains, which is a pretty common way to begin tackling problems or questions that you don’t really know but can start making an educated guess about.
  - squokko 4y ago
    I think there's a very useless and useful way of memorizing, say, history or biology, and the useless way is probably better for passing exams, and the useful way is better for, everything else. The useless way is: let me memorize all of the dates of the US Presidents. If the question is "When did Ulysses Grant become President?" you remember it's 1869. The useful way is, let me learn about each Presidential administration and what baggage it inherited from the previous administration and passed onto the next one. Then, if the question is "When did Ulysses Grant become President?" you think, well Lincoln was assassinated shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865, Johnson served out his term but definitely didn't get another, so Grant would have started in 1869.
- hbarka 4y ago
  I’m curious if academic learning focus by country can be generalized along these categories. For example Singapore versus Australia.
poszlem 4y ago
In my opinion, one of the most significant failures of modern education is the lack of emphasis on spaced repetition. It's really a shame that while we have lessons on a wide range of topics, including the latest social justice causes, there is one technique that can be truly life-changing, yet it's often not taught until people reach adulthood and have to discover it on their own.
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  what do you call the two midterms, the final, the reading, the lecture, and the worksheets? all cover the same material at different times. if anything, it's higher level education (4, 5, and 600 level college courses) where i saw a lack of spaced repetition, or any sort of learning beyond the professor presenting the material. I guess it's expected that at that point you have your learning technique figured out.
  - drjasonharrison 4y ago
    Sometimes they don't cover the same material. In post-secondary education, the amount of material, typically due to the speed or density of delivery, may reveal that your learning technique isn't working. For example you may spend too much time on one topic rather than on a topic more heavily weighted in an exam.
  - bluSCALE4 4y ago
    I'm not sure but by spread out I would assume multi-year. What you described is still problematic. I believe this is why mixed grade classrooms worked out so well because this was inherently unavoidable.
  - CuriouslyC 4y ago
    Having an intensive course on a subject over 3-6 months doesn't really let you do much in terms of spaced repetition. If a course is a year long and material is briefly visited, then often revisited, that could work, but even with a year long course, if you see the material on a quiz, a test and (a little bit) in the final that's not even close to optimal.
sambapa 4y ago
TLDR: use Anki. Yes, really, that's it.
- account-5 4y ago
  I hope not. Anki did not work for me at all. I genuinely got worse at remembering things trying that spaced repetition stuff. Definitely not the way I learn things.
  - sambapa 4y ago
    Unfortunately it is backed 100% by this paper. Maybe you used Anki in a wrong way (it isn't so obvious and simple)
    - account-5 4y ago
      Maybe. I created cards, and regularly reviewed them in the app, whilst creating more as I was learning new things. Is there a different way of using it? All it did was stress me out because I wasn't recalling anything and all my cards were repeated basically all the time. Is there a guide you can recommend that shows me how to use it properly?
      - jldugger 4y ago
        I can't recall which guide I read but https://zhighley.com/anki-settings/ https://zhighley.com/anki-settings/ seems to cover the relevant bits. But it honestly depends on the purpose, and the person. There are tunables about how often you see cards in the learning phase, how many new cards are released daily, and how impactful forgetting is on future reviews. Language learning cards focused on vocabulary, may need a longer "learning" stage than math or science topics. So a lot of this comes down to looking at your recall percent, and tuning / reducing new cards added cards to the review set until you are hitting 80-90 percent recall for a week straight. I don't even recall the defaults but especially if you are downloading other people's decks its easy to drown in new cards. My other suggestion is to use Cloze deletion cards where feasible. It's much easier to learn the US Bill of rights as a set of clauses than trying to recall the seventh amendment on demand in its entirety, and Cloze makes it simple to produce these.
tedyoung 4y ago
I did a talk that dives into some of these topics, aimed at developers: https://youtu.be/SdvmMPcXK0Q https://youtu.be/SdvmMPcXK0Q
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>What's the best way to learn a thing? >By doing that thing, repeatedly. Wow, really activates my almonds. That massive complex academic performance for a conclusion you could have received if you just asked your grandmother. To me, this is a branch of scientism.
- ticviking 4y ago
  There is an open question of what smaller things can you teach someone to do so they can do the next more difficult thing. Music education is full of standard exercises like this that build skills and fluency in them until students can combine them in ways that seem magical to outsiders.
- syzarian 4y ago
  There are lots of examples of counter intuitive results and lots of examples of “obviously true” statements turning out to be false after a rigorous study. Here is an example of a study that reinforces the “obvious”. That doesn’t make the study without merit or that it was a waste of time.
- malshe 4y ago
  "Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer" - Duncan Watts
  - VoodooJuJu 4y ago
    "I could have told you that." - Grandma
kazinator 4y ago
I'm confused by the overly concise title and humbly suggest: "Improving Student's Learning with Learning Techniques That Improve Learning by virtue of being Effective". It needs to be clear that not all techniques are the same. Only some are effective. Moreover, it's not clear that what it means for a learning technique to be effective is that it improves learning. And so—aha!—that is why the study is only about the effective ones.
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  [dead]
RheingoldRiver 4y ago
It's so interesting to me that interleaved practice is an effective learning technique, that's probably the single method of study I used consistently throughout my entire schooling. Slightly bored of one subject? Okay switch to the next. Bored of this one? Switch to the next. CONSTANT context switching. I thought I was "cheating the system" by making my homework more interesting, who knew I was learning more effectively by employing a (moderately) effective study habit!
revskill 4y ago
Teaching students is almost the same as mentoring junior developers on how to successfully onboard them. The goal is to let them actively control the project they're working on.
ravedave5 4y ago
From years of editing wikipedia the first sentence sets off alarms for using weasel words "many students", "some people". I hope the rest of the paper is more rigorous.
golemiprague 4y ago
[dead]
billbrown 4y ago
One of the authors—Daniel T. Willingham—has a new book along these lines: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Outsmart-Your-Brain/Daniel-T-Willingham/9781982167172 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Outsmart-Your-Brain/D... His book "Why Students Don't Like School" is one of the best books on cognition I've ever read if you can transfer its knowledge from the pedagogical form in which it's presented.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
wolverine876 4y ago
(2013)

253 points by pella 4y ago

TLDR: Result of a large meta-analysis of study techniques: High - Distributed practice - Practice testing Moderate - Elaborative interrogation - Interleaved practice - Self-explanation Low - Highlighting - Imagery use for text learning - Rereading - Summarization - The keyword mnemonic // via: https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1630938305213628417 https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1630938305213628417 ( see tips How AI/ChatGPT can help )

Jensson 4y ago
Problem is that people greatly prefer the low result study techniques since they requires less mental effort. It has been known for a while that they are bad, but since doing those allows people to study more hours for same amount of effort they do it anyway.
- chowells 4y ago
  Yeah, all of "learning styles" fits into that bucket. It may be what you like, but it isn't what has been shown to be the most effective.
- Brybry 4y ago
  "Practice testing" can just be using flashcards to test yourself. That was really common when I was in school and is fairly low effort.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    Making flash cards is in the low gain category, and that is very popular. Disciplined testing using those cards wasn't nearly as common from what I saw, people just made them and then forgot about them. Or just read through them without putting in effort trying to answer each one without looking at the answer. Doing those properly requires effort.
    - bawolff 4y ago
      Lol, i can't imagine going through the effort of making flashcards and then just not using them. Are people really like that?
      - Jensson 4y ago
        Yeah, you can see it in comments in this thread, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34985638 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34985638
      - reidjs 4y ago
        Guilty
      - parksoha 4y ago
        If you do not have time to study... I had to do long commutes while working part-time to get my CS degree. Sometimes I was left with only 1 day of study for an exam and this was the best method for me.
      - suddenclarity 4y ago
        People do it all the time because it's fun and you get the initial kick. Like planning a budget, habits, hobby, exercise routine or spend a week collecting courses. Then the daily grind starts and you give up after a few days.
      - GolDDranks 4y ago
        Yes, it happens more than you'd imagine. I, personally, just am reading a novel series Japanese, 8 books in. While reading, I have highlighted all the words/parts I didn't know in order to export them and make flashcards out of them. I haven't still started going through them, but the thought of doing so feels laborious, so procrastinating is bound to happen.
        hunter-gatherer 4y ago
        Finnish is a second language to me and what I've found better than flash cards is to just write down words I don't know as I'm reading. Initially this can seem terribkt slow because each book with have its own vocabularly set. As I continue if I read a word I don't know zi scan the list briefly. If it isn't there or I fail to see it I write it down again. Has worked well for me.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    As someone who creates flashcards often, the creation is definitely not low effort. Reviewing is.
    - admiral33 4y ago
      I've made plenty of flashcards during undergrad and creation can definitely be both high effort and low effort. Low effort copy and paste from textbook, high effort when using a plugin for anki can mean obfuscating multiple parts of an algorithm/tree. I'm proud of my best flashcards - but is there any evidence that creation + studying is more effective than studying alone over the same timeframe? Anki suggests that on their site but I haven't seen much evidence for it. Study -> create -> study -> create is effective for us programmers using google but is study -> create -> study -> study ... more effective than study -> study... ?
      - BeetleB 4y ago
        I'm not sure I understand what "study -> study" is. Is it studying without creating flash cards, or utilizing them? As in just studying the book, doing problems, etc? If so, in my experience, then yes, integrating flash cards is much more effective. Especially for working professionals who often have to step away from what they are studying for many months at a time (except doing the cards for 15 minutes a day).
        admiral33 4y ago
        Yeah my comment wasn't clear. Creating the flashcards is a slow process but supposedly imparts 'deeper' knowledge for the creator. That is the claim I'm curious about. Anki has shared decks that anyone can download and study [1]. Say someone has an exam coming up that they need to prepare for. They have two choices: study flashcards given to them, or make and study their own flashcards. For the sake of this example the deck that would be given to them and the one they'd make are identical and contain sufficient information to achieve a perfect score. 3 hypothetical scenarios: - A short length study period where a large proportion of time is used to create the cards allowing less time to 'test' their knowledge compared to if they had started reviewing right away. - A medium length study period where the creation period is now a smaller proportion of the total time. Because they created the deck their self testing performance increases at a greater rate compared to testing with a deck given to them. - A longer length study period where the creation period is now a negligible proportion of the total study time. The benefits of being the one who created the flashcards fade. Whether they created the flashcards or not matters less as knowledge of the deck is complete either way and studying the deck is done only for maintenence. Either way this is just a question about the most effective way to 'download' knowledge. I'd always choose to make my own cards because I'd be able to make a more targeted deck and know how to use plugins to make the cards more interactive. 1: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/
- tokinonagare 4y ago
  Not surprising highlighting has low impact. I never understood how people could thing that just putting color over something would help in anyway. Also that was one of the feature my former lab used to promote in its learning software and happily wrote cringe research papers about. I understand why: it's both easy to implement and track, which makes it a good feature for low-effort papers.
  - gowld 4y ago
    "Low" doesn't mean bad. Sure, practice is better than highlighting/rereading, but I expect that practice fails if the student makes a mistake that can be cured by re-reading. Also, practice takes a lot longer (costs a lot more), so it better have higher impact. Highlighting is an indexing technique, and maybe a marginal improvement to reading. It's a piece of a solution.
  - the_fury 4y ago
    I've practiced highlighting on and off over the years, but it's never been for memorization. I've mainly used it to separate out critical passages to speed up and simplify future reading.
    - anbotero 4y ago
      Absolutely this. I use it on my Kindle all the time for this same purpose, and come back to some of them when I know the Chapter they are in and I need to refresh a concept or phrase.
  - chrisweekly 4y ago
    One round of highlighting is almost worthless on its own. BUT. "Progressive summarization" (term coined by Tiago Forte) starts with broad highlighting, followed by 1-2 more rounds of increasingly refined highlighting, and finally rewriting material in own words based on the last round of highlights. Leads to deeper understanding and recall etc.
  - ortusdux 4y ago
    I once purchased a used textbook wherein over 75% of the text was highlighted.
Silverback_VII 4y ago
no spaced repetition? ChatGPT seems to be very good at generating cards btw
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  Spaced repetition is distributed practice
  - layman51 4y ago
    I read that “distributed practice” seems to be scheduling the learning activities to be spread out over time. I’m not sure if distributed practice has this, but “spaced repetition” seems to have some additional part to it where you don’t review the flash cards that you answer correctly as often as the ones you get wrong.
    - CuriouslyC 4y ago
      It's distributed practice where the time between practice sessions is chosen to maximize learning / work.
- thundergolfer 4y ago
  > ChatGPT seems to be very good at generating cards btw So you can get very good at memorizing occassionally incorrect information? If I'm going to put in the effort to drill information into my brain with spaced-repetition, I have a high bar for the accuracy of that information. I hand write all my cards, and think it's commonly accepted that the manual process of producing the cards is an important first step in the memorization process.
  - david_allison 4y ago
    You can prompt ChatGPT to convert existing information into Q/A or cloze style, which saves time for some workloads. I wouldn't trust it to generate cards from scratch.
yt-sdb 4y ago
In case it's also not clear to others: "high", "moderate", and "low" refer to utility in learning.
- criddell 4y ago
  It's very surprising to me that elaborative explanation, summarizing, and self-explanation score lower than practice tests. I've found that trying to teach something to somebody else is the fastest way for me to determine if I really understand something.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    So that method might be fast, but it isn't accurate, your explanations could easily be wrong without you knowing they are wrong. So even though you feel like you know it if you can explain it, many times people are wrong and give wrong explanations but still feel like they are experts, don't be one of those people.
    - criddell 4y ago
      It looks like the type of practice test matters a lot: > a multiple-choice practice test increased intrusions of false alternatives on a final cued-recall test when no feedback was provided, whereas no such increase was observed when feedback was given Sounds like practice tests are most useful when they are graded and the student gets that feedback. I suppose that makes sense. Flash cards and practice problems also fall under practice testing and it sounds like they were less effective.
  - hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
    It doesn't surprise me. Practice tests can show you you are unambiguously wrong about the details of things in a way writing my own summaries can't unless you go over them with a fine toothed comb anyway.
criddell 4y ago
Test taking is a skill that you can develop. I wonder what portion of the improvements from practice testing come from getting better at test taking?
- Jensson 4y ago
  They tried test taking with tests of a very different format than the final examination, still worked.
misterbwong 4y ago
TLDR Addendum for people like me who aren't immediately familiar with these terms High - Distributed practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time - Practice testing: Self-testing or taking practice tests over to-be-learned material Moderate - Elaborative interrogation: Generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true - Interleaved practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session - Self-explanation: Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving Low - Highlighting: Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading - Imagery use for text learning: Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening - Rereading: Restudying text material again after an initial reading - Summarization: Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts - The keyword mnemonic: Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
marcosdumay 4y ago
I'd recommend against relying on this TL.DR. The article is incredibly nuanced, and answers many more questions than only "is this method any good?" I'd also say it's not correct to place rereading at low effectiveness. The result on the article is more complicated than that. Also, the article is mostly about memorization learning, and entirely about things with correct/incorrect answers. How well this generalizes for learning the things you need outside of schools isn't there at all.
l5870uoo9y 4y ago
Is practice testing equivalent to a multiple choice quiz on the subject?
SpaceManNabs 4y ago
This list has been pretty well known for about 10 years at least. I remember having this list for at least that long. From what I understand as well, self-explanation can be higher depending on how elaborate the encoding is. edit: just noticed that the date was 2013 and not 2023 so 10 years is correct. I read this same article long ago.
whatever1 4y ago
How can you practice history? Or biology? Or organic chemistry. Or law? You just have to memorize the damn thing. There are no shortcuts.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  You write about it. I dual majored in history in college in the 90s. The best professors made you write a paper every class that would fit on the front of a college ruled looseleaf paper that would be more comfortable to write on 3-4 pages. The process of writing and editing taught you to think. Journalism writing before the shit-fest of online news was similar. 6 editors would wield the sword over whatever you wrote.
- austinjp 4y ago
  This is just a guess: maybe thought experiments? In law, that might be randomly picking/generating cases and arguing the points to rehearse knowledge. In history, similarly it could mean role-playing historical scenarios and considering the individuals involved and the politics of the day. I'm imagining these as group activities, not something one would do alone. I also freely admit my naivety regarding these subjects. Finally, I don't think these or similar approaches are "short cuts". Quite the opposite.
- mym1990 4y ago
  No one really said anything about shortcuts. Building maps of knowledge that have logical progressions and connections is so much more fulfilling than rote memorization. I can either memorize that the Iron Age came after the Bronze Age or I can weave a story with as many details as I can find and understand the inner workings of how the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age happened. You can also identify patterns within domains, which is a pretty common way to begin tackling problems or questions that you don’t really know but can start making an educated guess about.
- squokko 4y ago
  I think there's a very useless and useful way of memorizing, say, history or biology, and the useless way is probably better for passing exams, and the useful way is better for, everything else. The useless way is: let me memorize all of the dates of the US Presidents. If the question is "When did Ulysses Grant become President?" you remember it's 1869. The useful way is, let me learn about each Presidential administration and what baggage it inherited from the previous administration and passed onto the next one. Then, if the question is "When did Ulysses Grant become President?" you think, well Lincoln was assassinated shortly after the end of the Civil War in 1865, Johnson served out his term but definitely didn't get another, so Grant would have started in 1869.
hbarka 4y ago
I’m curious if academic learning focus by country can be generalized along these categories. For example Singapore versus Australia.

poszlem 4y ago

In my opinion, one of the most significant failures of modern education is the lack of emphasis on spaced repetition. It's really a shame that while we have lessons on a wide range of topics, including the latest social justice causes, there is one technique that can be truly life-changing, yet it's often not taught until people reach adulthood and have to discover it on their own.

waynesonfire 4y ago
what do you call the two midterms, the final, the reading, the lecture, and the worksheets? all cover the same material at different times. if anything, it's higher level education (4, 5, and 600 level college courses) where i saw a lack of spaced repetition, or any sort of learning beyond the professor presenting the material. I guess it's expected that at that point you have your learning technique figured out.
- drjasonharrison 4y ago
  Sometimes they don't cover the same material. In post-secondary education, the amount of material, typically due to the speed or density of delivery, may reveal that your learning technique isn't working. For example you may spend too much time on one topic rather than on a topic more heavily weighted in an exam.
- bluSCALE4 4y ago
  I'm not sure but by spread out I would assume multi-year. What you described is still problematic. I believe this is why mixed grade classrooms worked out so well because this was inherently unavoidable.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  Having an intensive course on a subject over 3-6 months doesn't really let you do much in terms of spaced repetition. If a course is a year long and material is briefly visited, then often revisited, that could work, but even with a year long course, if you see the material on a quiz, a test and (a little bit) in the final that's not even close to optimal.

sambapa 4y ago

TLDR: use Anki. Yes, really, that's it.

account-5 4y ago
I hope not. Anki did not work for me at all. I genuinely got worse at remembering things trying that spaced repetition stuff. Definitely not the way I learn things.
- sambapa 4y ago
  Unfortunately it is backed 100% by this paper. Maybe you used Anki in a wrong way (it isn't so obvious and simple)
  - account-5 4y ago
    Maybe. I created cards, and regularly reviewed them in the app, whilst creating more as I was learning new things. Is there a different way of using it? All it did was stress me out because I wasn't recalling anything and all my cards were repeated basically all the time. Is there a guide you can recommend that shows me how to use it properly?
    - jldugger 4y ago
      I can't recall which guide I read but https://zhighley.com/anki-settings/ https://zhighley.com/anki-settings/ seems to cover the relevant bits. But it honestly depends on the purpose, and the person. There are tunables about how often you see cards in the learning phase, how many new cards are released daily, and how impactful forgetting is on future reviews. Language learning cards focused on vocabulary, may need a longer "learning" stage than math or science topics. So a lot of this comes down to looking at your recall percent, and tuning / reducing new cards added cards to the review set until you are hitting 80-90 percent recall for a week straight. I don't even recall the defaults but especially if you are downloading other people's decks its easy to drown in new cards. My other suggestion is to use Cloze deletion cards where feasible. It's much easier to learn the US Bill of rights as a set of clauses than trying to recall the seventh amendment on demand in its entirety, and Cloze makes it simple to produce these.

tedyoung 4y ago

I did a talk that dives into some of these topics, aimed at developers: https://youtu.be/SdvmMPcXK0Q https://youtu.be/SdvmMPcXK0Q

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>What's the best way to learn a thing? >By doing that thing, repeatedly. Wow, really activates my almonds. That massive complex academic performance for a conclusion you could have received if you just asked your grandmother. To me, this is a branch of scientism.

ticviking 4y ago
There is an open question of what smaller things can you teach someone to do so they can do the next more difficult thing. Music education is full of standard exercises like this that build skills and fluency in them until students can combine them in ways that seem magical to outsiders.
syzarian 4y ago
There are lots of examples of counter intuitive results and lots of examples of “obviously true” statements turning out to be false after a rigorous study. Here is an example of a study that reinforces the “obvious”. That doesn’t make the study without merit or that it was a waste of time.
malshe 4y ago
"Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer" - Duncan Watts
- VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  "I could have told you that." - Grandma

kazinator 4y ago

I'm confused by the overly concise title and humbly suggest: "Improving Student's Learning with Learning Techniques That Improve Learning by virtue of being Effective". It needs to be clear that not all techniques are the same. Only some are effective. Moreover, it's not clear that what it means for a learning technique to be effective is that it improves learning. And so—aha!—that is why the study is only about the effective ones.

hummus_bae 4y ago
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RheingoldRiver 4y ago

It's so interesting to me that interleaved practice is an effective learning technique, that's probably the single method of study I used consistently throughout my entire schooling. Slightly bored of one subject? Okay switch to the next. Bored of this one? Switch to the next. CONSTANT context switching. I thought I was "cheating the system" by making my homework more interesting, who knew I was learning more effectively by employing a (moderately) effective study habit!

revskill 4y ago

Teaching students is almost the same as mentoring junior developers on how to successfully onboard them. The goal is to let them actively control the project they're working on.

ravedave5 4y ago

From years of editing wikipedia the first sentence sets off alarms for using weasel words "many students", "some people". I hope the rest of the paper is more rigorous.

golemiprague 4y ago

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billbrown 4y ago

One of the authors—Daniel T. Willingham—has a new book along these lines: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Outsmart-Your-Brain/Daniel-T-Willingham/9781982167172 https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Outsmart-Your-Brain/D... His book "Why Students Don't Like School" is one of the best books on cognition I've ever read if you can transfer its knowledge from the pedagogical form in which it's presented.

aaron695 4y ago

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wolverine876 4y ago

(2013)