Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

Some new and some familiar ideas from a New York Times article published yesterday:

- Instead of sticking to one study location, alternating the room where a person studies improves retention.

- Studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting improves retention, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing.

- Theories of Learning styles lack credibility [1]

- Spacing out study sessions is more effective than cramming

- Testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — are an incredibly powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The discomfort and additional effort required to complete practice tests lead to greater retention than other forms of active review.

More detail here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=2&hp

[1] Do students learn optimally if teaching material is presented according to their individualized, learning style preference?

“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 [2], 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”. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?_r=2&hp

[2] “The authors of the… review were charged with determining whether [learning styles] practices are supported by scientific evidence. We concluded that any credible validation of learning-styles-based instruction requires robust documentation of a very particular type of experimental finding with several necessary criteria. First, students must be divided into groups on the basis of their learning styles, and then students from each group must be randomly assigned to receive one of multiple instructional methods. Next, students must then sit for a final test that is the same for all students. Finally, in order to demonstrate that optimal learning requires that students receive instruction tailored to their putative learning style, the experiment must reveal a specific type of interaction between learning style and instructional method: Students with one learning style achieve the best educational outcome when given an instructional method that differs from the instructional method producing the best outcome for students with a different learning style. In other words, the instructional method that proves most effective for students with one learning style is not the most effective method for students with a different learning style.

Our review of the literature disclosed ample evidence that children and adults will, if asked, express preferences about how they prefer information to be presented to them. There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information. However, we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles”.

Pashler, H. McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D. & Bjork, R. (2010). Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. 9(3). 105-119 http://psi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/105.abstract