What research says about effective study habits

One of the most popular postings on the New York Times website last week detailed research that contradicts conventional wisdom about sound study habits.

The standard advice about creating a specific place in the house for a child to do homework?

Turns out that switching locations while studying improves retention.

The idea  of that different people have different learning styles — that, for instance, some people are auditory and some are visual learners?

Research finds “almost zero support” for that concept, according to the Times.

The importance of concentrated studying?

Learning in shorter bursts is actually far more effective, experts say.

The Times story summarizes a number of studies — some recent and at least one dating back to 1978 — and quotes several experts about research on effective learning strategies.

Among the story’s conclusions:

- Studying the same material in several different locations improves retention.

“The brain makes subtle associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time ... regardless of whether those perceptions are conscious,” the Time story said about the research on this topic. “It colors the terms of the Versailles Treaty with the wasted fluorescent glow of the dorm study room, say; or the elements of the Marshall Plan with the jade-curtain shade of the willow tree in the backyard. Forcing the brain to make multiple associations with the same material may, in effect, give that information more neural scaffolding.”

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- Varying the type of material in a single study session is better than concentrating on one specific skill.

A child doing Spanish homework, for instance, should do some vocabulary, speaking and reading rather than just memorize vocabulary words, or a student working on math will learn better if the problems involve several concepts rather than doing repeated examples of the same concept. Think of how an athletes and musicians tend to mix up the types of drills they do during their practices, the Time story says; it’s the same principal for studying.

- Studying material over a period of days or weeks is much more effective than cramming the night before a test.

When material is learned gradually, the brain remembers it far better and longer “without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention,” the Times says.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” Nate Kornell, a researcher at Williams College, told the Times. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

- Practice quizzes and tests are among the most effective ways to retain information.

“The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future,” the Times story says.

  

Henry L. Roediger III, a psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told this to the Times: “Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test. Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”

Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Times that “we have known these principles” for effective studying for years, but the conventional wisdom lives on.

“It’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” Bjork told the Times. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

Read more about this here.

[From: https://www.mlive.com/opinion/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2010/09/column_what_research_says_abou.html]