10 Smart Study Tactics That Support How The Brain Actually Works
10 Smart Study Tactics That Support How The Brain Actually Works
What’s especially ba!ing is that these principles are actually quite easy to
put into practice. Here’s one: instead of sticking to one location, simply
alternate the room where you study in order to remember new information
better. Here’s another: studying for one hour each night works; studying all
weekend doesn’t. Still we haven’t caught on.
“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that
[institutions] don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and
error,” says 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.”
So the question is, what can we do to change this? What can we do save
ourselves from ignoring the facts and perpetuating an endless cycle of poor
learning habits?
It’s called “pre-testing.” Benedict Carey, author of How We Learn, says it’s
“one of the most exciting developments in learning-science.” What does it
entail? Pretty much exactly what it sounds like: quizzing yourself on new
material before you’ve reviewed your notes.
On one hand, it alerts students to the scope of the subject and what they
will likely be tested on in a final exam. UCLA psychologist Elizabeth
Bjork says, “Taking a practice test and getting wrong answers seems to
improve subsequent study, because the test adjusts our thinking in some way
to the kind of material we need to know.”
Also, pretesting helps with something called “fluency illusion.” This is the
little voice in your head that says that you “know” the answer to a question
when, really, you might not. Pretesting will often reveal these fallacies that
we’re carrying around in our heads.
we’re carrying around in our heads.
UC Irvine neurobiologists Christine Gall and Gary Lynch found that mice
trained in three short, repetitious episodes spaced one hour apart performed
best on memory tests. The mice performed poorly on memory tests when
trained in a single, prolonged session–which is a standard K-12 educational
practice in the U.S.
It’s been known since classic 19th century educational psychology studies
that people learn better when using multiple, short training episodes rather
than one extended session. Two years ago, the Lynch and Gall labs found out
why. They discovered a biological mechanism that contributes to the
enhancing e#ect of spaced training: brain synapses encode memories in the
hippocampus much better when activated briefly at one-hour intervals.
Rather than sitting at your desk or the kitchen table studying for hours,
finding some new scenery will create new associations in your brain and
make it easier to recall information later. Also, by changing your environment,
your brain is forced to retrieve the same information in di#erent places and
will therefore see that information as more useful and worth holding onto.
“The brain wants variation,” says Carey. “It wants to move, it wants to take
periodic breaks. You don’t have to have the same chair, the same cubicle, the
same room, to do your memorisation.”
The researchers concluded that students should take into consideration the
context of testing while studying, in order to maximise their performance on
both recall and recognition tasks.
To explore the e#ect of sleep stages and whether memories were actively
processed during the nap, the researchers recruited an additional 14
preschoolers who came to a sleep lab and underwent polysomnography, a
record of biophysiological changes, during their average 73-minute naps. Here
Spencer and colleagues noted a correlation between brainwave activity and
memory consolidation during sleep.
“Essentially we are the first to report evidence that naps are important for
preschool children,” Spencer says. “We o#er scientific evidence that the
midday naps for preschoolers support the academic goals of early education.”
When you reinforce your memories by testing them, they get much stronger
than if you simply re-read a passage. Don’t waste your time trying to re-read
rules or textbooks in order to memorise them. Test yourself to bolster your
memory.
For best results, do this on all levels: for a specific chapter, a whole unit, and
your entire course. Refer to your syllabus if you have one so you can see the
bigger picture.
The learning process never ends. Don’t let all your hard work go to waste by
abandoning a subject after the course is over.
Making mistakes while learning can benefit memory and lead to the correct
answer, but only if the guesses are close-but-no-cigar, according to
new research findings from Baycrest Health Sciences.
“Making random guesses does not appear to benefit later memory for the
right answer, but near-miss guesses act as stepping stones for retrieval of
the correct information — and this benefit is seen in younger and older
adults,” says lead investigator Andree-Ann Cyr, a graduate student with
Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute and the Department of Psychology at
the University of Toronto.
“These results have profound clinical and practical implications. They turn
traditional views of best practices in memory rehabilitation for healthy
seniors on their head by demonstrating that making the right kind of errors
can be beneficial. They also provide great hope for lifelong learning and
guidance for how seniors should study,” says Dr. Nicole Anderson, senior
scientist with Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute and senior author on the
study.
Bjork agrees, adding that forgetting can actually be good for the brain. In fact,
it can serve as a powerful spam filter. Under a principle she calls “desirable
di#culty,” when the brain has to work hard to retrieve a half-forgotten
memory, it re-doubles the strength of that memory.
If you sit down to study a load of material, “of course you’re not going to
remember most of it the next day,” Carey adds. You do have to go back and
build your knowledge. “But it’s not that you don’t remember well, or you’re
not a good learner. It’s that forgetting is a critical part of learning.”
When students expect to teach new material to others, they remember more
of that material correctly and organise their recall more e!ectively, says John
Nestojko, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology Washington University
in St. Louis.
“When teachers prepare to teach, they tend to seek out key points and
organise information into a coherent structure,” Nestojko says. “Our results
suggest that students also turn to these types of e!ective learning strategies
when they expect to teach.”
Think about how you phrase things during a study session: “I know Newton’s
law,” “I don’t know marginal utility theory,” “Do you know the quadtratic
formula?” When we study in order to “know” things, that knowing often
becomes quite shallow, because all it really means is “Will I remember this
long enough to regurgitate it on a test?” Viewing information this way
undermines deep learning. Instead, approach new material with the goal of
truly learning it, with the goal of remembering it well enough to use it or refer
to it some day ten years down the road. Doing so will boost your ability to
retain it in the first place.
What we’re seeing here are smart, actionable strategies to promote better
learning. And not just learning for the test–learning for life. It’s possible that
the current educational climate, which emphasises standardised tests and
measures of performance, isn’t conducive to improved learning habits. We
tend to focus on short-term achievement, and maybe that’s why practices
like cramming and intense, cell-block style study sessions are the norm.
When we do get over this hurdle, and begin valuing learning over performing,
maybe we’ll start to see more genuine interest in adopting these principles.
By Open Colleges