[Music] [Music] when we set out to learn something we typically have a goal in mind maybe to do well on an important exam maybe to master a new technology will help us get a better job or maybe to shoot better scores on the golf course but whatever it is we want to learn in such a way that we will be able to perform well later when it really counts not just during instruction and practice but judging during instruction in practice whether we are actually achieving that goal is no easy task most of us have had
the experience of thinking we were well-prepared for an exam only to discover during the exam that we were drawing a lot of blanks or maybe an experience like I had after completing my training to be an AYSO soccer referee at my first game we're all out on the field parents lined up along the sidelines and I realize I can't remember how to start the game one reason we can misjudge during instruction in practice whether we are actually learning has to do with an important distinction the distinction between learning and practice it is natural to assume
that how well we are performing during instruction and practice is a good indicator of how well we are learning but that is far from true indeed conditions of instruction in practice that improve performance rapidly making us think we are learning quickly and easily often fail to support actual learning whereas other conditions of instruction and practice ones that create difficulties for us may even seem to be slowing our rate of learning can actually optimize our learning and allow us to perform well later when it really counts we've come to cause such difficulties desirable difficulties their difficulties
because they create challenges and they slow the apparent rate of learning they're desirable because they enhance our ability to perform later when it really matters there's four such difficulties we want to discuss with you today the first is varying the conditions of practice rather than keeping them constant and predictable one thing we can vary is where we choose to study in research carried out years ago when we were at the University of Michigan there were two groups of students each group of students studied a long list of words and then three hours later restarting the
words what differed between the groups as shown on the screen is whether they came back to the same place to Rhys tuddy the words or to a new place on the Michigan campus then three hours later they were brought to a new location on the campus and asked to recall the words as you can see the group that studied the words in two different locations remembered significantly more words than did the students who study the words in the same place both times now some of you I'm sure have noticed that these results run counter to
what's pretty standard advice to students which is to find one good place to study and then all of one's studying in that place another thing we can vary is what we choose to practice in one of the earliest studies on this topic children practice throwing miniature beanbags at a four by four inch target on the floor for one group of children the target was always four feet for another group of children's it was sometimes three feet away sometimes five feet away but never four feet away then later both groups of children are brought back and
tested at the four foot distance the children who practiced at three feet and five feet but never four feet were more accurate at the four foot distance then were the children who did all their practice at that distance this has now actually spread to how people practice as a trip to any golf driving range will quickly show you people practice the same shot over and over again same things and other skills such as shooting free throws over and over again from the standard 15 foot distance I should tell a little story here when Shaquille O'Neal
was playing for the LA Lakers and having trouble making free throws leading to the so-called hecka Shaq defense Bob was quoted in Time magazine is suggesting that perhaps Shaq should try shooting free throws from 14 from a mixture of 14 feet and 16 feet rather than always from the 15 foot free throw line but as far as we could tell that advice was never taken a second desirable difficulty is spacing out the time between repeated study sessions when we study something once and then study it again it matters a great deal when it is re
studied if we delay or space the Rhys tutting episode that actually produces much better recall then does studying the material right away again but what about cramming a study technique near and dear to many of us who survived college by cramming the night before maybe the entire night before important exams the truth is that cramming can work but only on a test administered right after cramming if there's something we really want to learn we should not cram because it's followed by dramatic forgetting so cramming is a very bad idea the third desirable difficulty we want
to share with you today is to practice retrieving what we are trying to learn rather than restating it or reviewing it the act of retrieving is a very powerful learning event much more powerful than isre studying every time we retrieve information after a delay we modify our memory for that information in a way that makes it much more recallable in the future say on a test or on the job so rather than restating our reviewing we should practice taking take practice quizzes answer questions at the back of chapters or explain what we are trying to
learn to someone else our motto should be retrieve our output more Ries Tutty or input less and finally another benefit of testing ourselves one way or another is that the more we practice retrieving what we will be tested on later the more we seem to lower our test anxiety which can also help us to perform later on an actual test or on the job that point leads me to recount today a lot of years ago I was on a plane watching the flight attendant demonstrate how to put on inflatable life vest I thought how many
times have I seen this 50 times a hundred times but somebody made me think do I know how to do this so I close my eyes I imagine the plane was down in the water some people were screaming there was a faint smell of smoke I began to get nervous and sweaty where's a life vest on the seat but like how under the seat in like a velcro bag anyway I managed to get it out I held it up what's the front what's the back I slipped it over my head then what then what come
on some people are yanking some I can only hope I'm not stuck on the plane behind some of you anyway I imagine that I inflated the vest gut to the exit window only to find out I wasn't supposed to inflate the vest till I got out of the window now some years later I was invited to talk at the air traffic control in Oklahoma City I suggested that there should be one place in the airport where you could actually go and put on a face mask and put on a life vest that one time of
actually doing it would be worth more than dozens of passive observations I even suggested that after that exercise you could get a little Appel pin that said follow me I know how to get out the plane the final desirable difficulty we want to share with you today is probably the most counterintuitive study technique interleaving our study or practice perhaps the best way to describe or to explain interleaving is to contrast it to the study technique that most of us use blocking blocking is studying the same topic or practicing the same scale over and over and
over again until we feel we've mastered it and then moving on to the next topic or skill but when we interleave we mix together our alternate our study and practice of the several things that we are trying to learn and a variety of research findings have shown that such interleaved practice can optimize our performance later and often when it matters the most consider for example a study involving a varsity baseball team in California half of the players were given extra batting practice in which they tried to hit fast balls curve balls and changeups in a
randomly interleague fashion while the other players were given the same number of pitches of each type but in a blocked manner not surprisingly players getting blocked practice made more solid hits during practice making it look like they were learning better but on a test some weeks later it was the players who'd gotten interleaved practice who made more solid hits particularly when thrown interleave pitches which is of course what would happen in a real game these kinds of benefits of interleaving have now been shown for a variety of motor skills and importantly they've all been also
been shown for our learning of conceptual scales such as mathematics and one study for example students learned how to calculate the volumes of different kinds of solids like cones and cylinders either by practicing problems in an interleaved manner or in a blocked manner as you can see during practice it again appears that blocking is is producing the better learning but on a weak test several weeks later there was a dramatic advantage for interleaved practice in fact a three times greater advantage what makes these kinds of results a particular importance is that they call into question
the way that problems are assigned and the typical workbooks used in math instruction where problems of the same type are usually grouped together this page is a good example as you can see the student is told that all of these are to be solved by applying the Pythagorean theorem in essence the assignment gives the student a kind of crutch but on a later high-stakes test no such crutch will be provided we entitled this talk how to study if you really want to learn we obviously thought that was a good title but it is a bad
title in one respect namely that the word study may imply that what we've had to say applies only or mostly to students in fact knowing how to learn is the ultimate survival tool not just during the years of formal education but across our lifetimes in our ever more complex and rapidly changing world we need to acquire new skills we need to update old skills not just in our jobs but as we pursue hobbies and develop new interests or maybe just want to help our children or grandchildren learn the good news is we all have an
incredible capacity to learn the key though to realizing that capacity is to be suspicious of the sense of ease and undeterred by the sense of difficulty in short we need to make things hard on ourselves but in good ways we need to very space retrieve and interleave thank you thank you you [Music]
