Math Lessons Collaboration Daily 09/08/2010

• Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - Annotated

  • “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.”

  • 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.

    • Break up study sessions and include practice tests with the study sessions to improve longevity of retention. 

• Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com - Annotated

  • 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.
    • I find it intriguing that teachers latch on to certain ideas and ignore research that contradicts their ideas. I thought learning styles was a more proven entity but there may be an issue with this.
  • 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.
    • Varying the environment around the student may then provide more stimulation and a greater opportunity for the student to learn/associate the information being provided/developed.

• Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com

  tags: research education study habits comprehension

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