Helping Students Make the Most of their Learning – What Really Works?
Posted April 2, 2014
Students of all ages engage in a wide range of activities that they hope will improve their grades and learning. They form study groups, underline passages, pull all-nighters, make vocabulary flashcards, review homework assignments and drink coffee. Although many of these strategies are traditional students—and professors—tend to be unaware of how effective or ineffective these techniques are. Without a systematic evaluation of these study behaviors students might be wasting effort that could otherwise be used more effectively elsewhere.
Fortunately, just this past year John Dunlonsky and his colleagues published a meticulously researched and truly fascinating review of research concerning the efficacy of 10 of the most commonly practiced study techniques. Their conclusions about which methods were broadly effective in improving learning outcomes (and which weren’t!) might surprise you.
The good news is that some of these techniques do-- in fact-- prove to be effective in improving learning outcomes. This is even true across academic area and across student characteristics. Surprisingly, only two of the 10 techniques under scrutiny were judged to have high efficacy where learning outcomes were concerned. Here are some of the results:
The Most Effective Study Behaviors:
1. Practice testing
2. Distributed practice (breaking up study sessions)
The Least Effective Study Behaviors:
1. Summarization
2. Highlighting and underlining
3. Keyword mnemonics
4. Imagery use for text learning
5. Rereading
If you are a student you might want to trade in that highlighter for a stopwatch, so that you can take breaks and parse apart your grueling all night study sessions; those we refer to as study-hauls. If you are an instructor you might consider giving your students information on the science of best learning practices. The full report can be found here:
