Why do we assume that ‘delivering content to students’ is a teacher’s most important thing to do?
A premium is placed on teaching students content and critical-thinking skills, whereas less time is spent teaching students to develop effective techniques and strategies to guide learning (Dunlosky et al, 2013)
One of my favourite education research papers is Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology (Dunlosky et al, 2013).
I wonder how many teachers have taken the time to read the actual 55-page paper? Well, this is my 3-minute summary to help you get to the details of the research…
The rationale behind the research is tackling the notion that education is in a crisis; that improving educational ‘outcomes’ will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise is a solution to help students to better regulate their learning through the use of effective learning techniques – something unpicked in my latest book.
Whilst there is nothing to argue with, increasingly I believe that we need more academic research to link – not just academic attainment – to other definitions of outcomes (E.g. attendance, mental health) alongside exam scores too…
The research identifies 10 key strategies (listed below) with the aim of evaluating the effects, characteristics and efficacy “that students could use to improve their success across a wide variety of content domains.” Issues for implementation are also discussed and must be considered before any teacher assumes one strategy works best…
10 study techniques
- Elaborative interrogation: Generating an explanation for why
- Self-explanation: Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem-solving
- Summarisation: Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts
- Highlighting/underlining: Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading
- Keyword mnemonic: Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
- Imagery for text: Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening
- Rereading: Restudying text material again after an initial reading
- Practice testing: Self-testing or taking (retrieval) practice tests over to-be-learned material
- Distributed (spaced) practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time
- 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.
Context to consider…
It’s important to mention that these “recommendations are based on evidence, which typically pertains to students’ objective performance on any number of criterion tasks.” For example, 4 categories are offered: materials, learning conditions, student characteristics, criterion tasks. I have offered some examples from the paper.
- Materials: vocabulary, maps, diagrams
- Learning conditions: open vs. closed books, reading vs. listening, group vs. individual
- Student characteristics: age, motivation, prior achievement
- Criterion tasks: cued recall, problem-solving, classroom quizzes
Every section of the paper offers a detailed breakdown of the above ten study techniques; a general description of [study skill] and why it should work, the effects in an educational context (very important) and issues for implementation (more important for teachers who wish to use these techniques in their classroom).
Conclusions and recommendations
On page 45 a table of ratings are offered (think, Visible Learning effect sizes) that offers readers a hierarchy of efficacy. The researchers themselves say, “Even so, some teachers may decide that the benefits of techniques with low-utility ratings match their instructional goals for their students.”
The researchers go on to recommend that teachers read the review in detail and “make informed decisions about which techniques will best meet their instructional and learning goals.”
It’s a paper that has been heavily referenced and influential in the field, including contributions from Daniel T. Willingham which many readers will recognise.
It’s also important to recognise that the paper was published in 2013 and the research concludes: “The benefit of most of the techniques in representative educational settings needs to be more fully explored.”
Download the paper: Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques
