Revision techniques - the good, the OK and the useless. 17 May 2013Last updated at 21:34 ET By Deborah Cohen Health Check, BBC World Service It's the time of year where students are poring over their books, trying to ensure they are prepared for their exams. Revision charts, highlighter pens and sticky notes around the room are some of the methods people use to ensure information stays in their mind. But now psychologists in the US warn many favourite revision techniques will not lead to exam success. Universities, schools and colleges offer students a variety of ways to help them remember the content of their courses and get good grades. These include re-reading notes, summarising them and highlighting the important points. Others involve testing knowledge and using mnemonics - ways of helping recall facts and lists, or creating visual representations of the knowledge. But teachers do not know enough about how memory works and therefore which techniques are most effective, according to Prof John Dunlovsky, of Kent State University.
Plan ahead. Improving Classroom Performance by Challenging Student Misconceptions About Learning. In an overview of the preparedness of high school seniors for college level work, Kuh (2007) comes to conclusions familiar to many teachers. Most entering students are not adequately prepared either academically or in terms of study skills for college level work. This preparation is predictive of college success. The result is that many students founder in college, despite the potential to succeed. As psychologists, we see this phenomenon in introductory psychology, among the most popular college courses and often taken in the first year.
But, as psychologists, we can help to address this situation by sharing our knowledge of how people learn with students. This article describes several demonstrations that faculty can use either for teaching psychological concepts related to learning or for instructing students how to study more effectively. The basic thesis for the presentation is the following. A key difference between strong and weak students is the quality of their metacognition. Best, Worst Learning Tips: Flash Cards Are Good, Highlighting Is Bad. In a world as fast-changing and full of information as our own, every one of us — from schoolchildren to college students to working adults — needs to know how to learn well. Yet evidence suggests that most of us don’t use the learning techniques that science has proved most effective. Worse, research finds that learning strategies we do commonly employ, like rereading and highlighting, are among the least effective.
(MORE: How to Use Technology to Make You Smarter) The scientific literature evaluating these techniques stretches back decades and across thousands of articles. It’s far too extensive and complex for the average parent, teacher or employer to sift through. Fortunately, a team of five leading psychologists have now done the job for us. The WorstHighlighting and underlining led the authors’ list of ineffective learning strategies.
(MORE: ‘Implicit Learning’: How to Remember More Without Trying) The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning. Study Skills: Engagement and Retrieval | Think for Yourself. This post acts as an introduction to the webpage betterteaching.ie/studyskills and is also the first link on that page. It also complements a previous post on the same topic: Misconceptions about how students learn – otherwise known as How to Study Hard and Still Fail. Why might this post help make me be a better teacher? Teaching students how to study more effectively at home should be a normal part of every teacher’s job description (but isn’t). The benefit of developing a student’s study skills is self-evident.Many of the these skills also relate to how a student learns best in the classroom and so should form an intrinsic part of your teaching methodology.
Key Points Students don’t know how to study because nobody has ever shown them. The fact that students don’t know how to study may come as a shock, but when you think about it it shouldn’t. So what constitutes ineffective study? Whaaaaaat? So what constitutes effective study? Now you have to go back and check the answers. Like this: