Make It Stick

书籍: Make It Stick 作者: Brown, Peter C. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 Two of us, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, are cognitive scientists who have dedicated our careers to the study of learning and memory. Peter Brown is a storyteller. We have teamed up to explain how learning and memory work, and we do this less by reciting the research than by telling stories of people who have ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 found their way to mastery of complex knowledge and skills. Through these examples we illuminate the principles of learning that the research shows are highly effective. This book arose in part from a collaboration among eleven cognitive psychologists. In 2002, the James S. McDonnell Foundation of St. Louis, Missouri, in an effort to better bridge the gap between basic knowledge on learning in cognitive psychology and its application in education, awarded a research grant “Applying Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Educational Practice” to Roediger and McDaniel and nine others, with Roediger as the principal investigator. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 The team collaborated for ten years on research to translate cognitive science into educational science, and in many respects this book is a direct result of that work. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 Most books deal with topics serially—they cover one topic, move on to the next, and so on. We follow this strategy in the sense that each chapter addresses new topics, but we also apply two of the primary learning principles in the book: spaced repetition of key ideas, and the interleaving of different but related topics. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 This is a book about what people can do for themselves right now in order to learn better and remember longer. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 We write for students and teachers, of course, and for all readers for whom effective learning is a high priority: for trainers in business, industry, and the military; for leaders of professional associations offering in-service training to their members; and for coaches. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 . We also write for lifelong learners nearing middle age or older who want to hone their skills so as to stay in the game. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 While we don’t need to understand each of the actions Matt took, he certainly needed to, and his ability to work himself out of a jam illustrates what we mean in this book when we talk about learning: we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 There are some immutable aspects of learning that we can probably all agree on: First, to be useful, learning requires memory, so what we’ve learned is still there later when we need it. Second, we need to keep learning and remembering all our lives. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 Third, learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 You may not agree with the last point, but we hope to persuade you of it. Here, more or less unadorned in list form, are some of the principal claims we make in support of our argument. We set them forth more fully in the chapters that follow. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we’re not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn’t feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 Rereading text and massed practice of a skill or new knowledge are by far the preferred study strategies of learners of all stripes, but they’re also among the least productive.By massed practice we mean the single-minded, rapid-fire repetition of something you’re trying to burn into memory, the “practice-practice-practice” of conventional wisdom. Cramming for exams is an example. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 . Rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency that are taken to be signs of mastery, but for true mastery or durability these strategies are largely a waste of time. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 Retrieval practice—recalling facts or concepts or events from memory—is a more effective learning strategy than review by rereading. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 . Retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting. A single, simple quiz after reading a text or hearing a lecture produces better learning and remembering than rereading the text or reviewing lecture notes. While the brain is not a muscle that gets stronger with exercise, the neural pathways that make up a body of learning do get stronger, when the memory is retrieved and the learning is practiced. Periodic practice arrests forgetting, strengthens retrieval routes, and is essential for hanging onto the knowledge you want to gain. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 When you space out practice at a task and get a little rusty between sessions, or you interleave the practice of two or more subjects, retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning and enables more versatile application of it in later settings. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 Trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution leads to better learning, even when errors are made in the attempt. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 The popular notion that you learn better when you receive instruction in a form consistent with your preferred learning style, for example as an auditory or visual learner, is not supported by the empirical research. People do have multiple forms of intelligence to bring to bear on learning, and you learn better when you “go wide,” drawing on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, than when ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 you limit instruction or experience to the style you find most amenable. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/23 When you’re adept at extracting the underlying principles or “rules” that differentiate types of problems, you’re more successful at picking the right solutions in unfamiliar situations. This skill is better acquired through interleaved and varied practice than massed practice. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 . For instance, interleaving practice at computing the volumes of different kinds of geometric solids makes you more skilled at picking the right solution when a later test presents a random solid. Interleaving the identification of bird types or the works of oil painters improves your ability both to learn the unifying attributes within a type and to differentiate between types, improving your skill at categorizing new specimens you encounter later. We’re all susceptible to illusions that can hijack our judgment of what we know and can do. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 . In virtually all areas of learning, you build better mastery when you use testing as a tool to identify and bring up your areas of weakness. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge. You need to know how to land a twin engine plane on two engines before you can learn to land it on one. To learn trigonometry, you need to remember your algebra and geometry. To learn cabinetmaking, you need to have mastered the properties of wood and composite materials, how to join boards, cut rabbets, rout edges, and miter corners. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain—the residue of your experiences is stored. It’s true that we start life with the gift of our genes, but it’s also true that we become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create. In other words, the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your own control. Understanding that this is so enables you to see failure as a badge of effort and a source of useful information—the need to dig deeper or to try a different strategy. The need to understand that when learning is hard, you’re doing important work. To understand that striving and setbacks, as in any action video game or new BMX bike stunt, are essential if you are to surpass your current level of performance toward true expertise. Making mistakes and correcting them builds the bridges to advanced learning. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Empirical Evidence versus Theory, Lore, and Intuition Much of how we structure training and schooling is based on learning theories that have been handed down to us, and these are shaped by our own sense of what works, a sensibility drawn from our personal experiences as teachers, coaches, students, and mere humans at large on the earth. How we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition. But over the last forty years and more, cognitive psychologists have been working to build a body of evidence to clarify what works and to discover the strategies that get results. Cognitive psychology is the basic science of understanding how the mind works, conducting empirical research into how people perceive, remember, and think. Many others have their hands in the puzzle of learning as well. Developmental and educational psychologists are concerned with theories of human development and how they can be used to shape the tools of education—such as testing regimes, instructional organizers (for example topic outlines and schematic illustrations), and resources for special groups like those in remedial and gifted education. Neuroscientists, using new imaging techniques and other tools, are advancing our understanding of brain mechanisms that underlie learning, but we’re still a very long way from knowing what neuroscience will tell us about how to improve education ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 People Misunderstand Learning ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 It turns out that much of what we’ve been doing as teachers and students isn’t serving us well, but some comparatively simple changes could make a big difference. People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times—say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from an eighth grade biology class—you can burn it into memory. Not so. Many teachers believe that if they can make learning easier and faster, the learning will be better. Much research turns this belief on its head: when learning is harder, it’s stronger and lasts longer. It’s widely believed by teachers, trainers, and coaches that the most effective way to master a new skill is to give it dogged, single-minded focus, practicing over and over until you’ve got it down. Our faith in this runs deep, because most of us see fast gains during the learning phase of massed practice. What’s apparent from the research is that gains achieved during massed practice are transitory and melt away quickly. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The finding that rereading textbooks is often labor in vain ought to send a chill up the spines of educators and learners, because it’s the number one study strategy of most people—including more than 80 percent of college students in some surveys—and is central in what we tell ourselves to do during the hours we dedicate to learning. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the content. The hours immersed in rereading can seem like due diligence, but the amount of study time is no measure of mastery ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 In fact, what students are advised to do is often plain wrong. For instance, study tips published on a website at George Mason University include this advice: “The key to learning something well is repetition; the more times you go over the material the better chance you have of storing it permanently.”4 Another, from a Dartmouth College website, suggests: “If you intend to remember something, you probably will.”5 A public service piece that runs occasionally in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch offering study advice shows a kid with his nose buried in a book. “Concentrate,” the caption reads. “Focus on one thing and one thing only. Repeat, repeat, repeat! Repeating what you have to remember can help burn it into your memory.”6 Belief in the power of rereading, intentionality, and repetition is pervasive, but the truth is you usually can’t embed something in memory simply by repeating it over and over. This tactic might work when looking up a phone number and holding it in your mind while punching it into your phone, but it doesn’t work for durable learning. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . Similarly, a recent study asked faculty and students who worked in the Psychology Building at UCLA to identify the fire extinguisher closest to their office. Most failed the test. One professor, who had been at UCLA for twenty-five years, left his safety class and decided to look for the fire extinguisher closest to his office. He discovered that it was actually right next to his office door, just inches from the doorknob he turned every time he went into his office. Thus, in this case, even years of repetitive exposure did not result in his learning where to grab the closest extinguisher if his wastebasket caught fire.7 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Early Evidence The fallacy in thinking that repetitive exposure builds memory has been well established through a series of investigations going back to the mid-1960s, when the psychologist Endel Tulving at the University of Toronto began testing people on their ability to remember lists of common English nouns. In a first phase of the experiment, the participants simply read a list of paired items six times (for example, a pair on the list might be “chair—9”); they did not expect a memory test. The first item in each pair was always a noun. After reading the listed pairs six times, participants were then told that they would be getting a list of nouns that they would be asked to remember. For one group of people, the nouns were the same ones they had just read six times in the prior reading phase; for another group, the nouns to be learned were different from those they had previously read. Remarkably, Tulving found that the two groups’ learning of the nouns did not differ—the learning curves were statistically indistinguishable. Intuition would suggest otherwise, but prior exposure did not aid later recall. Mere repetition did not enhance learning. Subsequent studies by many researchers have pressed further into questions of whether repeated exposure or longer periods of holding an idea in mind ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 contribute to later recall, and these studies have confirmed and elaborated on the findings that repetition by itself does not lead to good long-term memory.8 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 These results led researchers to investigate the benefits of rereading texts. In a 2008 article in Contemporary Educational Psychology, Washington University scientists reported on a series of studies they conducted at their own school and at the University of New Mexico to shed light on rereading as a strategy to improve understanding and memory of prose. Like most research, these studies stood on the shoulders of earlier work by others; some showed that when the same text is read multiple times the same inferences are made and the same connections between topics are formed, and others suggested modest benefits from rereading. These benefits had been found in two different situations. In the first, some students read and immediately reread study material, whereas other students read the material only once. Both groups took an immediate test after reading, and the group who had read twice performed a bit better than the group who had read once. However, on a delayed test the benefit of immediate rereading had worn off, and the rereaders performed at the same level as the one-time readers. In the other situation, students read the material the first time and then waited some days before they reread it. This group, having done spaced readings of the text, performed better on the test than the group who did not reread the material.9 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 In these experiments, multiple readings in close succession did not prove to be a potent study method for either group, at either school, in any of the conditions tested. In fact, the researchers found no rereading benefit at all under these conditions. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 What’s the conclusion? It makes sense to reread a text once if there’s been a meaningful lapse of time since the first reading, but doing multiple readings in close succession is a time-consuming study strategy that yields negligible benefits at the expense of much more effective strategies that take less time. Yet surveys of college students confirm what professors have long known: ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 highlighting, underlining, and sustained poring over notes and texts are the most-used study strategies, by far. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Illusions of Knowing If rereading is largely ineffective, why do students favor it? One reason may be that they’re getting bad study advice. But there’s another, subtler way they’re pushed toward this method of review, the phenomenon mentioned earlier: rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery. As any professor will attest, students work hard to capture the precise wording of phrases they hear in class lectures, laboring under the misapprehension that the essence of the subject lies in the syntax in which it’s described. Mastering the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them. However, repeated reading provides the illusion of mastery of the underlying ideas. Don’t let yourself be fooled. The fact that you can repeat the phrases in a text or your lecture notes is no indication that you understand the significance of the precepts they describe, their application, or how they relate to what you already know about the subject. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Too common is the experience of a college professor answering a knock on her office door only to find a first-year student in distress, asking to discuss his low grade on the first test in introductory psychology. How is it possible? He attended all the ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 lectures and took diligent notes on them. He read the text and highlighted the critical passages. How did he study for the test? she asks. Well, he’d gone back and highlighted his notes, and then reviewed the highlighted notes and his highlighted text material several times until he felt he was thoroughly familiar with all of it. How could it be that he had pulled a D on the exam? Had he used the set of key concepts in the back of each chapter to test himself? Could he look at a concept like “conditioned stimulus,” define it, and use it in a paragraph? While he was reading, had he thought of converting the main points of the text into a series of questions and then later tried to answer them while he was studying? Had he at least rephrased the main ideas in his own words as he read? Had he tried to relate them to what he already knew? Had he looked for examples outside the text? The answer was no in every case. He sees himself as the model student, diligent to a fault, but the truth is he doesn’t know how to study effectively. The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don’t know is critical for decision making. The problem was famously (and prophetically) summed up by Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld in a 2002 press briefing about US intelligence on Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction: “There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know.” ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The emphasis here is ours. We make it to drive home the point that students who don’t quiz themselves (and most do not) tend to overestimate how well they have mastered class material. Why? When they hear a lecture or read a text that is a paragon of clarity, the ease with which they follow the argument gives them the feeling that they already know it and don’t need to study it. In other words, they tend not to know what they don’t know; when put to the test, they find they cannot recall the critical ideas or apply them in a new context. Likewise, when they’ve reread their lecture notes and texts to the point of fluency, their fluency gives them the false sense that they’re in possession of the underlying content, principles, and implications that constitute real learning, confident that they can recall them at a moment’s notice. The upshot is that even the most diligent students are often hobbled by two liabilities: a failure to know the areas where their learning is ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 is weak—that is, where they need to do more work to bring up their knowledge—and a preference for study methods that create a false sense of mastery ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Knowledge: Not Sufficient, but Necessary ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Albert Einstein declared “creativity is more important than knowledge,” and the sentiment appears to be widely shared by college students, if their choice in t-shirt proclamations is any indication. And why wouldn’t they seize on the sentiment? It embodies an obvious and profound truth, for without creativity where would our scientific, social, or economic breakthroughs come from? Besides which, accumulating knowledge can feel like a grind, while creativity sounds like a lot more fun. But of course the dichotomy is false. You wouldn’t want to see that t-shirt on your neurosurgeon or on the captain who’s flying your plane across the Pacific. But the sentiment has gained some currency as a reaction to standardized testing, fearing that this kind of testing leads to an emphasis on memorization at the expense of high-level skills. Notwithstanding the pitfalls of standardized testing, what we really ought to ask is how to do better at building knowledge and creativity, for without knowledge you don’t have the foundation for the higher-level skills of analysis, synthesis, and creative problem solving. As the psychologist Robert Sternberg and two colleagues put it, “one cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply.”12 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill. These are the fruits of variety in the practice of new skills, and of striving, reflection, and mental rehearsal. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Testing: Dipstick versus Learning Tool ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . The growing focus over recent years on standardized assessment, in particular, has turned testing into a lightning rod for frustration over how to achieve the country’s education goals. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 particular, has turned testing into a lightning rod for frustration over how to achieve the country’s education goals. Online forums and news articles are besieged by readers who charge that emphasis on testing favors memorization at the expense of a larger grasp of context or creative ability; that testing creates extra stress for students and gives a false measure of ability; and so on. But if we stop thinking of testing as a dipstick to measure learning—if we think of it as practicing retrieval of learning from memory rather than “testing,” we open ourselves to another possibility: the use of testing as a tool for learning. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 One of the most striking research findings is the power of active retrieval—testing—to strengthen memory, and that the more effortful the retrieval, the stronger the benefit. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Think flight simulator versus PowerPoint lecture. Think quiz versus rereading. The act of retrieving learning from memory has two profound benefits. One, it tells you what you know and don’t know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future. In effect, retrieval—testing—interrupts forgetting. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 For the most part, we are going about learning in the wrong ways, and we are giving poor advice to those who are coming up behind us. A great deal of what we think we know about how to learn is taken on faith and based on intuition but does not hold up under empirical research. Persistent illusions of knowing lead us to labor at unproductive strategies; as recounted in Chapter 3, this is true even of people who have participated in empirical studies and seen the evidence for themselves, firsthand. Illusions are potent persuaders. One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The good news is that we now know of simple and practical strategies that anybody can use, at any point in life, to learn better and remember longer: various forms of retrieval practice, such as low-stakes quizzing and self-testing, spacing out practice, interleaving the practice of different but related topics or skills, trying to solve a problem before being taught the solution, distilling the underlying principles or rules that differentiate types of problems, and so on. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 2 To Learn, Retrieve ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Reflection Is a Form of Practice ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 What inferences can we draw from this story about how we learn and remember? In neurosurgery (and, arguably, in all aspects of life from the moment you leave the womb), there’s an essential kind of learning that comes from reflection on personal experience. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Reflection can involve several cognitive activities that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The Testing Effect ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 A child stringing cranberries on a thread goes to hang them on the tree, only to find they’ve slipped off the other end. Without the knot, there’s no making a string. Without the knot there’s no necklace, there’s no beaded purse, no magnificent tapestry. Retrieval ties the knot for memory. Repeated retrieval snugs it up and adds a loop to make it fast. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Since as far back as 1885, psychologists have been plotting “forgetting curves” that illustrate just how fast our cranberries slip off the string. In very short order we lose something like 70 percent of what we’ve just heard or read. After that, forgetting begins to slow, and the last 30 percent or so falls away more slowly, but the lesson is clear: a central challenge to improving the way we learn is finding a way to interrupt the process of forgetting.2 The power of retrieval as a learning tool is known among psychologists as the testing effect. In its most common form, testing is used to measure learning and assign grades in school, but we’ve long known that the act of retrieving knowledge from memory has the effect of making that knowledge easier to call up again in the future. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 To be most effective, retrieval must be repeated again and again, in spaced out sessions so that the recall, rather than becoming a mindless recitation, requires some cognitive effort. Repeated recall appears to help memory consolidate into a cohesive representation in the brain and to strengthen and multiply the neural routes by which the knowledge can later be retrieved. In recent decades, studies have confirmed what Mike Ebersold and every seasoned quarterback, jet pilot, and teenaged texter knows from experience—that repeated retrieval can so embed knowledge and skills that they become reflexive: the brain acts before the mind has time to think. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Forget memorization, many commenters argued; education should be about high-order skills. Hmmm. If memorization is irrelevant to complex problem solving, don’t tell your neurosurgeon. The frustration many people feel toward standardized, “dipstick” tests given for the sole purpose of measuring learning is understandable, but it steers us away from appreciating one of the most potent learning tools available to us. Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against the development of creative thinking is a false choice. Both need to be cultivated. The stronger one’s knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one’s creativity can be in addressing a new problem. Just as knowledge amounts to little without the exercise of ingenuity and imagination, creativity absent a sturdy foundation of knowledge builds a shaky house ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Studying the Testing Effect in the Lab ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The testing effect has a solid pedigree in empirical research. The first large-scale investigation was published in 1917. Children in grades 3, 5, 6, and 8 studied brief biographies from Who’s Who in America. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 A second landmark study, published in 1939, tested over three thousand sixth graders across Iowa. The kids studied six-hundred-word articles and then took tests at various times before a final test two months later. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Around 1940, interest turned to the study of forgetting, and investigating the potential of testing as a form of retrieval practice and as a learning tool fell out of favor. So did the use of testing as a research tool: since testing interrupts forgetting, you can’t use it to measure forgetting because that “contaminates” the subject. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Interest in the testing effect resurfaced in 1967 with the publication of a study showing that research subjects who were presented with lists of thirty-six words learned as much from repeated testing after initial exposure to the words as they did from repeated studying. These results—that testing led to as much learning as studying did—challenged the received wisdom, turned researchers’ attention back to the potential of testing as a learning tool, and stimulated a boomlet in testing research. In 1978, researchers found that massed studying (cramming) leads to higher scores on an immediate test but results in faster forgetting compared to practicing retrieval. In a second test two days after an initial test, the crammers had forgotten 50 percent of what they had been able to recall on the initial test, while those who had spent the same period practicing retrieval instead of studying had forgotten only 13 percent of the information recalled initially. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Thus, and in agreement with later research, multiple sessions of retrieval practice are generally better than one, especially if the test sessions are spaced out.6 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 In another study, researchers showed that simply asking a subject to fill in a word’s missing letters resulted in better memory of the word. Consider a list of word pairs. For a pair like foot-shoe, those who studied the pair intact had lower subsequent recall than those who studied the pair from a clue as obvious as foot-s_ _e. This experiment was a demonstration of what researchers call the “generation effect.” The modest effort required to generate the cued answer while studying the pairs strengthened memory of the target word tested later (shoe). Interestingly, this study found that the ability to recall the word pair on later tests was greater if the practice retrieval was delayed by twenty intervening word pairs than when it came immediately after first studying the pair.7 Why would that be? One argument suggested that the greater effort required by the delayed recall solidified the memory better. Researchers began to ask whether the schedule of testing mattered. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The answer is yes. When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention than when it is massed. Researchers began looking for opportunities to take their inquiries out of the lab and into the classroom, using the kinds of materials students are required to learn in school. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Studying the Testing Effect “In the Wild” ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 In 2005, we and our colleagues approached Roger Chamberlain, the principal of a middle school in nearby Columbia, Illinois, with a proposition. The positive effects of retrieval practice had been demonstrated many times in controlled laboratory settings but rarely in a regular classroom setting. Would the principal, teachers, kids, and parents of Columbia Middle School be willing subjects in a study to see how the testing effect would work “in the wild”? ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 A sixth grade social studies teacher, Patrice Bain, was eager to give it a try. For the researchers, a chance to work in the classroom was compelling, and the school’s terms were accepted: the study would be minimally intrusive by fitting within existing curricula, lesson plans, test formats, and teaching methods. The same textbooks would be used. The only difference in the class would be the introduction of occasional short quizzes. The study would run for three semesters (a year and a half), through several chapters of the social studies textbook, covering topics such as ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and China. The project was launched in 2006. It would prove to be a good decision. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 For the six social studies classes a research assistant, Pooja Agarwal, designed a series of quizzes that would test students on roughly one-third of the material covered by the teacher. These quizzes were for “no stakes,” meaning that scores were not counted toward a grade. The teacher excused herself from the classroom for each quiz so as to remain unaware of which material was being tested. One quiz was given at the start of class, on material from assigned reading that hadn’t yet been discussed. A second was given at the end of class after the teacher had covered the material for the day’s lesson. And a review quiz was given twenty-four hours before each unit exam. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The results were compelling: The kids scored a full grade level higher on the material that had been quizzed than on the material that had not been quizzed. Moreover, test results for the material that had been reviewed as statements of fact but not quizzed were no better than those for the nonreviewed material. Again, mere rereading does not much help. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The testing effect persisted eight months later at the end-of-year exams, confirming what many laboratory studies have shown about the long-term benefits of retrieval practice. The effect doubtless would have been greater if the retrieval practice had ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 continued and occurred once a month, say, in the intervening months ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 How does giving feedback on wrong answers to test questions affect learning? Studies show that giving feedback strengthens ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 retention more than testing alone does, and, interestingly, some evidence shows that delaying the feedback briefly produces better long-term learning than immediate feedback. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Are some kinds of retrieval practice more effective for long-term learning than others? Tests that require the learner to supply the answer, like an essay or short-answer test, or simply practice with flashcards, appear to be more effective than simple recognition tests like multiple choice or true/false tests. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Is repeated testing simply a way to expedite rote learning? In fact, research indicates that testing, compared to rereading, can facilitate better transfer of knowledge to new contexts and problems, and that it improves one’s ability to retain and retrieve material that is related but not tested. Further research is needed on this point, but it seems that retrieval practice can make information more accessible when it is needed in various contexts. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 How does taking a test affect subsequent studying? After a test, students spend more time restudying the material they missed, and they learn more from it than do their peers who restudy the material without having been tested. Students whose study ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 strategies emphasize rereading but not self-testing show overconfidence in their mastery. Students who have been quizzed have a double advantage over those who have not: a more accurate sense of what they know and don’t know, and the strengthening of learning that accrues from retrieval practice ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Are there any further, indirect benefits of regular, low-stakes classroom testing? ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 classroom testing? Besides strengthening learning and retention, a regime of this kind of testing improves student attendance. It increases studying before class (because students know they’ll be quizzed), increases attentiveness during class if students are tested at the end of class, and enables students to better calibrate what they know and where they need to bone up. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The Takeaway Practice at retrieving new knowledge or skill from memory is a potent tool for learning and durable retention. This is true for anything the brain is asked to remember and call up again in the future—facts, complex concepts, problem-solving techniques, motor skills. Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . After an initial test, delaying subsequent retrieval practice is more potent for reinforcing retention than immediate practice, because delayed retrieval requires more effort. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily, in more varied settings, and applied to a wider variety of problems. While cramming can produce better scores on an immediate exam, the advantage quickly fades because there is much greater forgetting after rereading than after retrieval practice. The benefits of retrieval practice are long-term. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 3 Mix Up Your Practice ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 IT MAY NOT BE INTUITIVE that retrieval practice is a more powerful learning strategy than repeated review and rereading, yet most of us take for granted the importance of testing in sports. It’s what we call “practice-practice-practice.” Well, here’s a study that may surprise you. A group of eight-year-olds practiced tossing beanbags into buckets in gym class. Half of the kids tossed into a bucket three feet away. The other half mixed it up by tossing into buckets two feet and four feet away. After twelve weeks of this they were all tested on tossing into a three-foot bucket. The kids who did the best by far were those who’d practiced on two- and four-foot buckets but never on three-foot buckets.1 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The Myth of Massed Practice Most of us believe that learning is better when you go at something with single-minded purpose: the practice-practice-practice that’s supposed to burn a skill into memory. Faith in focused, repetitive practice of one thing at a time until we’ve got it nailed is pervasive among classroom teachers, athletes, corporate trainers, and students. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 If learning can be defined as picking up new knowledge or skills and being able to apply them later, then how quickly you pick something up is only part of the story. Is it still there when you need to use it out in the everyday world? While practicing is vital to learning and memory, studies have shown that practice is far more effective when it’s broken into separate periods of training that are spaced out. The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting that follows is not. Practice that’s spaced out, interleaved with other learning, and varied produces better mastery, longer retention, and more versatility. But these benefits come at a price: when practice is spaced, interleaved, and varied, it requires more effort. You feel the increased effort, but not the benefits the effort produces. Learning feels slower from this kind of practice, and you don’t get the rapid improvements and affirmations you’re accustomed to seeing from massed practice. Even in studies where the participants have shown superior results from spaced learning, they don’t perceive the improvement; they believe they learned better on the material where practice was massed. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Spaced Practice ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Why is spaced practice more effective than massed practice? It appears that embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces (the brain’s representations of the new learning) are strengthened, ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge—a process that unfolds over hours and may take several days ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Interleaved Practice ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The learning from interleaved practice feels slower than learning from massed practice. Teachers and students sense the difference. They can see that their grasp of each element is coming more slowly, and the compensating long-term advantage is not apparent to them. As a result, interleaving is unpopular and seldom used. Teachers dislike it because it feels sluggish. Students find it confusing: they’re just starting to get a handle on new material and don’t feel on top of it yet when they are forced to switch. But the research shows unequivocally that mastery and long-term retention are much better if you interleave practice than if you mass it. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Varied Practice ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 best had never practiced the three-foot toss that the other kids had only practiced? The beanbag study focused on mastery of motor skills, but much evidence has shown that the underlying principle applies to cognitive learning as well. The basic idea is that varied practice—like tossing your beanbags into baskets at mixed distances—improves your ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it successfully to another. You develop a broader understanding of the relationships between different conditions and the movements required to succeed in them; you discern context better and develop a more flexible “movement vocabulary”—different movements for different situations. Whether the scope of variable training (e.g., the two- and four-foot tosses) must encompass the particular task (the three-foot toss) is subject for further study. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The benefits of variable practice for cognitive as opposed to motor skills learning were shown in a recent experiment that adapted the beanbag test to verbal learning: in this case, the students solved anagrams–that is, they rearranged letters to form words (tmoce becomes comet). ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Developing Discrimination Skills ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Several studies have demonstrated the improved powers of discrimination to be gained through interleaved and varied practice. One study involved learning to attribute paintings to the artists who created them, and another focused on learning to identify and classify birds. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . The myths of massed practice are hard to exorcise, even when you’re experiencing the evidence yourself.7 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Interleaved and variable practice proved more helpful than massed practice for learning the underlying concepts that unite and differentiate the species and families. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 To paraphrase a conclusion from one of these studies, recall and recognition require “factual knowledge,” considered to be a lower level of learning than “conceptual knowledge.” Conceptual knowledge requires an understanding of the interrelationships of the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The Takeaway ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 We harbor deep convictions that we learn better through single-minded focus and dogged repetition, and these beliefs are validated time and again by the visible improvement that comes during “practice-practice-practice.” But scientists call this heightened performance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength.” ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 How big an interval, you ask? The simple answer: enough so that practice doesn’t become a mindless repetition. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Beware of the familiarity trap: the feeling that you know something and no longer need to practice it. This familiarity can hurt you during self-quizzing if you take shortcuts. Doug Larsen says, “You have to be disciplined to say, ‘All right, I’m going to make myself recall all of this and if I don’t, what did I miss, how did I not know that?’ Whereas if you have an instructor-generated test or quiz, suddenly you have to do it, there’s an expectation, you can’t cheat, you can’t take mental shortcuts around it, you simply have to do that.” ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Interleaving two or more subjects during practice also provides a form of spacing. Interleaving can also help you develop your ability to discriminate later between different kinds of problems and select the right tool from your growing toolkit of solutions. In interleaving, you don’t move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 complete. A friend of ours describes his own experience with this: “I go to a hockey class and we’re learning skating skills, puck handling, shooting, and I notice that I get frustrated because we do a little bit of skating and just when I think I’m getting it, we go to stick handling, and I go home frustrated, saying, ‘Why doesn’t this guy keep letting us do these things until we get it?’ ” This is actually the rare coach who understands that it’s more effective to distribute practice across these different skills than polish each one in turn. The athlete gets frustrated because the learning’s not proceeding quickly, but the next week he will be better at all aspects, the skating, the stick handling, and so on, than if he’d dedicated each session to polishing one skill. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Like interleaving, varied practice helps learners build a broad schema, an ability to assess changing conditions and adjust responses to fit. Arguably, interleaving and variation help learners reach beyond memorization to higher levels of conceptual learning and application, building more rounded, deep, and durable learning, what in motor skills shows up as underlying habit strength. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Spacing, interleaving, and variability are natural features of how we conduct our lives. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . Reflection is a form of retrieval practice (What happened? What did I do? How did it work out?), enhanced with elaboration (What would I do differently next time?). As Doug Larsen reminds us, the connections between the neurons in the brain are very plastic. “Making the brain work is ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 actually what seems to make a difference—bringing in more complex networks, then using those circuits repeatedly, which makes them more robust.” ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 4 Embrace Difficulties ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . Short-term impediments that make for stronger learning have come to be called desirable difficulties,a term coined by the psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 It’s one thing to feel confident of your knowledge; it’s something else to demonstrate mastery. Testing is not only a powerful learning strategy, it is a potent reality check on the accuracy of your own judgment of what you know how to do. When confidence is based on repeated performance, demonstrated through testing that simulates real-world conditions, you can lean into it. Facing the jump door may always reawaken feelings of terror, but the moment she’s out, Mia says, the fear evaporates ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 How Learning Occurs To help you understand how difficulty can be desirable, we’ll briefly describe here how learning occurs ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Encoding ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . This process of converting sensory perceptions into meaningful representations in the brain is still not perfectly understood. We call the process encoding, and we call the new representations within the brain memorytraces. Think of notes jotted or sketched on a scratchpad, our short-term memory. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Consolidation The process of strengthening these mental representations for long-term memory is called consolidation. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 New learning is labile: its meaning is not fully formed and therefore is easily altered. In consolidation, the brain reorganizes and stabilizes the memory traces. This may occur over several hours or longer and involves deep processing of the new material, during which scientists believe that the brain replays or rehearses the learning, giving it meaning, filling in blank spots, and making connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Prior knowledge is a prerequisite for making sense of new learning, and forming those connections is an important task of consolidation. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Retrieval Learning, remembering, and forgetting work together in interesting ways. Durable, robust learning requires that we do two things. First, as we recode and consolidate new material from short-term memory into long-term memory, we must anchor it there securely. Second, we must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later. Having effective retrieval cues is an aspect of learning that often goes overlooked. The task is more than committing knowledge to memory. Being able to retrieve it when we need it is just as important. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know. In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Knowledge is more durable if it’s deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory. How readily you can recall knowledge from your internal archives is determined by context, by recent use, and by the number and vividness of cues that you have linked to the knowledge and can call on to help bring it forth.5 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Here’s the tricky part. As you go through life, you often need to forget cues associated with older, competing memories so as to associate them successfully with new ones. To learn Italian in middle age, you may have to forget your high school French, because every time you think “to be” and hope to come up with the Italian essere, up pops etre, despite your most earnest intentions. Traveling in England, you have to suppress your cues to drive on the right side of the road so you can establish reliable cues to stay on the left. Knowledge that is well entrenched, like real fluency in French or years of experience driving on the right side of the road, is easily relearned later, after a period of disuse or after being interrupted by competition for retrieval cues. It’s not the knowledge itself that has been forgotten, but the cues that enable you to find and retrieve it. The cues for the new learning, driving on the left, displace those for the old, driving on the right (if we are lucky). ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The paradox is that some forgetting is often essential for new learning ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 . Having trained at the army’s jump school is cited as a distinct disadvantage for smoke jumping, because you have to unlearn one set of procedures that you have practiced to the point of reflex and replace them with another. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 It is a critical point that as you learn new things, you don’t lose from long-term memory most of what you have learned well in life; rather, through disuse or the reassignment of cues, you forget it in the sense that you’re unable to call it up easily. For example, if you’ve moved several times, you may not be able to recall a previous address from twenty years ago. But if you are given a multiple choice test for the address, you can probably pick it out easily, for it still abides, as it were, in the uncleaned closet of your mind. If you have ever immersed yourself in writing stories of your past, picturing the people and places of earlier days, you may have been surprised by the memories that started flooding back, things long forgotten now coming to mind. Context can unleash memories, as when the right key works to open an old lock. In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator grieves over his inability to recall the days of his adolescence in the French village of his aunt and uncle, until one day the taste of a cake dipped in lime blossom tea brings it all rushing back, all the people and events he thought had long since been lost to time. Most people have experiences like Proust’s when a sight or sound or smell brings back a memory in full force, even some episode you have not thought about in years. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Easier Isn’t Better ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Part of the Cal Poly team practiced in the standard way. They practiced hitting forty-five pitches, evenly divided into three sets. Each set consisted of one type of pitch thrown fifteen times. For example, the first set would be fifteen fastballs, the second set fifteen curveballs, and the third set fifteen changeups. This was a form of massed practice. For each set of 15 pitches, as the batter saw more of that type, he got gratifyingly better at anticipating the balls, timing his swings, and connecting. Learning seemed easy. The rest of the team were given a more difficult practice regimen: the three types of pitches were randomly interspersed across the block of forty-five throws. For each pitch, the batter had no idea which type to expect. At the end of the forty-five swings, he was still struggling somewhat to connect with the ball. These players didn’t seem to be developing the proficiency their teammates were showing. The interleaving and spacing of different pitches made learning more arduous and feel slower. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The extra practice sessions continued twice weekly for six weeks. At the end, when the players’ hitting was assessed, the two groups had clearly benefited differently from the extra practice, and ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 not in the way the players expected. Those who had practiced on the randomly interspersed pitches now displayed markedly better hitting relative to those who had practiced on one type of pitch thrown over and over. These results are all the more interesting when you consider that these players were already skilled hitters prior to the extra training. Bringing their performance to an even higher level is good evidence of a training regimen’s effectiveness. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Here again we see the two familiar lessons. First, that some difficulties that require more effort and slow down apparent gains—like spacing, interleaving, and mixing up practice—will feel less productive at the time but will more than compensate for that by making the learning stronger, precise, and enduring. Second, that our judgments of what learning strategies work best for us are often mistaken, colored by illusions of mastery ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 This paradox is at the heart of the concept of desirable difficulties in learning: the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it. In other words, the more you’ve forgotten about a topic, the more effective relearning will be in shaping your permanent knowledge ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 How Effort Helps Reconsolidating Memory ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Effortful recall of learning, as happens in spaced practice, requires that you “reload” or reconstruct the components of the skill or material anew from long-term memory rather than mindlessly repeating them from short-term memory.10 During this focused, effortful recall, the learning is made pliable again: the most salient aspects of it become clearer, and the consequent reconsolidation helps to reinforce meaning, strengthen connections to prior knowledge, bolster the cues and retrieval routes for recalling it later, and weaken competing routes. Spaced practice, which allows some forgetting to occur between sessions, strengthens both the learning and the cues and routes for fast retrieval when that learning is needed again, as when the pitcher tries to surprise the batter with a curveball after pitching several fastballs. The more effort that is required to recall a memory or to execute a skill, provided that the effort succeeds, the more the act of recalling or executing benefits the learning.11 Massed practice gives us the warm sensation of mastery because we’re looping information through short-term memory without having to reconstruct the learning from long-term memory ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 But just as with rereading as a study strategy, the fluency gained through massed practice is transitory, and our sense of mastery is illusory. It’s the effortful process of reconstructing the knowledge that triggers reconsolidation and deeper learning ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Creating Mental Models With enough effortful practice, a complex set of interrelated ideas or a sequence of motor skills fuse into a meaningful whole, forming a mental model somewhat akin to a “brain app”. Learning to drive a car involves a host of simultaneous actions that require all of our powers of concentration and dexterity while we are learning them. But over time, these combinations of cognition and motor skills—for example, the perceptions and maneuvers required to parallel park or manipulate a stick shift—become ingrained as sets of mental models associated with driving. Mental models are forms of deeply entrenched and highly efficient skills (seeing and unloading on a curveball) or knowledge structures (a memorized sequence of chess moves) that, like habits, can be adapted and applied in varied circumstances. Expert performance is built through thousands of hours of practice in your area of expertise, in varying conditions, through which you accumulate a vast library of such mental models that enables you to correctly discern a given situation and instantaneously select and execute the correct response ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Broadening Mastery Retrieval practice that you perform at different times and in different contexts and that interleaves different learning material has the benefit of linking new associations to the material. This process builds interconnected networks of knowledge that bolster and support mastery of your field. It also multiplies the cues for retrieving the knowledge, increasing the versatility with which you can later apply it. Think of an experienced chef who has internalized the complex knowledge of how flavors and textures interact; how ingredients change form under heat; the differing effects to be achieved with a saucepan versus a wok, with copper versus cast iron. Think of the fly fisher who can sense the presence of trout and accurately judge the likely species, make the right choice of dry fly, nymph, or streamer, judge the wind, and know how and where to drop that fly to make the trout rise. Think of the kid on the BMX bike who can perform bunnyhops, tail whips, 180s, and wall taps off the features of an unfamiliar streetscape. Interleaving and variation mix up the contexts of practice and the other skills and knowledge with which the new material is associated. This makes our mental models more ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 more versatile, enabling us to apply our learning to a broader range of situations. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Fostering Conceptual Learning How do humans learn concepts, for example the difference between dogs and cats? ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The difficulty produced by interleaving provides a second type of boost to learning. Interleaved practice of related but dissimilar geometric solids requires that you notice similarities and differences in order to select the correct formula for computing the volume. It’s thought that this heightened sensitivity to similarities and differences during interleaved practice leads to the encoding of more complex and nuanced representations of the study material—a better understanding of how specimens or types of problems are distinctive and why they call for a different interpretation or solution. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 retrieval difficulties posed by spacing, interleaving, and variation are overcome by invoking the same mental processes that will be needed later in applying the learning in everyday settings. By mimicking the challenges of practical experience, these learning strategies conform to the admonition to “practice like you play, and you’ll play like you practice,” improving what scientists call transfer of learning, which is the ability to apply what you’ve learned in new settings. In the Cal Poly batting practice experiment, the act of overcoming the difficulties posed by random types of pitches built a broader “vocabulary” of mental processes for discerning the nature of the challenge (e.g., what the pitcher is throwing) and selecting among possible responses than did the narrower mental processes sufficient for excelling during massed, nonvaried experience. Recall the grade school students who proved more adept at tossing beanbags into three-foot baskets after having practiced tossing into two- and four-foot baskets, compared to the students who only practiced tossing into three-foot basket. Recall the increasing difficulty and complexity of the simulation training in jump school, or the cockpit simulator of Matt Brown’s business jet. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Other Learning Strategies That Incorporate Desirable Difficulties ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or the solution is known as generation. Even if you’re being quizzed on material you’re familiar with, the simple act of filling in a blank has the effect of strengthening your memory of the material and your ability to recall it later. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 The act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned from an experience (or in a recent class) and asking yourself questions is known as reflection. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 After a lecture or reading assignment, for example, you might ask yourself: What are the key ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 ideas? What are some examples? How do these relate to what I already know? Following an experience where you are practicing new knowledge or skills, you might ask: What went well? What could have gone better? What might I need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might I use the next time to get better results? ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/2 Reflection can involve several cognitive activities we have discussed that lead to stronger learning. These include retrieval (recalling recently learned knowledge to mind), elaboration (for example, connecting new knowledge to what you already know), and generation (for example, rephrasing key ideas in your own words or visualizing and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time). ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 One form of reflection that is gaining currency in classroom settings is called “write to learn. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 In essence, students reflect on a recent class topic in a brief writing assignment, where they may express the main ideas in their own words and relate them to other concepts covered in class, or perhaps outside class. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 The learning benefits from the various cognitive activities that are engaged during reflection (retrieval, elaboration, generation) have been well established through empirical studies. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Failure and the Myth of Errorless Learning ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . Since those days we’ve come to understand that retrieval from short-term memory is an ineffective learning strategy and that errors are an integral part of striving to increase one’s mastery over new material. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . Even strategies that are highly likely to result in errors, like asking someone to try to solve a problem before being shown how to do it, produce stronger learning and retention of the correct information than more passive learning strategies, provided there is corrective feedback. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 To explore this theory about how fear of failure reduces test performance, sixth graders in France were given very difficult anagram problems that none of them could solve. After struggling unsuccessfully with the problems, half of the kids received a ten-minute lesson in which they were taught that difficulty is a crucial part of learning, errors are natural and to be expected, and practice helps, just as in learning to ride a bicycle. The other kids were simply asked how they had gone about trying to solve the anagrams. Then both groups were given a difficult test whose results provided a measure of working memory. The kids who had been taught that errors are a natural part of learning showed significantly better use of working memory than did the others. These children did not expend their working memory capacity in agonizing over the difficulty of the task. The theory was further tested in variations of the original study. The results support the finding that difficulty can create feelings of incompetence that engender anxiety, which in turn disrupts learning, and that “students do better when given room to struggle with difficulty.”17 These studies point out that not all difficulties in learning are desirable ones. Anxiety while taking a test seems to represent an ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 undesirable difficulty. These studies also underscore the importance of learners understanding that difficulty in learning new things is not only to be expected but can be beneficial. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . Dweck’s work shows that people who believe that their intellectual ability is fixed from birth, wired in their genes, tend to avoid challenges at which they may not succeed, because failure would appear to be an indication of lesser native ability. By contrast, people who are helped to understand that effort and learning change the brain, and that their intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within their own control, are more likely to tackle difficult challenges and persist at them. They view failure as a sign of effort and as a turn in the road rather than as a measure of inability and the end of the road. Anders Ericsson’s work investigating the nature of expert performance shows that to achieve expertise requires thousands of hours of dedicated practice in which one strives to surpass one’s current level of ability, a process in which failure becomes an essential experience on the path to mastery. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . Thomas Edison called failure the source of inspiration, and is said to have remarked, “I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” He argued that perseverance in the face of failure is the key to success. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . Failure points to the need for redoubled effort, or liberates us to try different approaches. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 An Example of Generative Learning As we said earlier, the process of trying to solve a problem without the benefit of having been taught how is called generative learning, meaning that the learner is generating the answer rather than recalling it. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Undesirable Difficulties Elizabeth and Robert Bjork, who coined the phrase “desirable difficulties,” write that difficulties are desirable because “they trigger encoding and retrieval processes that support learning, comprehension, and remembering. If, however, the learner does not have the background knowledge or skills to respond to them successfully, they become undesirable difficulties.”19 Cognitive scientists know from empirical studies that testing, spacing, interleaving, variation, generation, and certain kinds of contextual interference lead to stronger learning and retention. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . To be desirable, a difficulty must be something learners can overcome through increased effort. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 The Takeaway Learning is at least a three-step process: initial encoding of information is held in short-term working memory before being consolidated into a cohesive representation of knowledge in long-term memory. Consolidation reorganizes and stabilizes memory traces, gives them meaning, and makes connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Retrieval updates learning and enables you to apply it when you need it. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Learning always builds on a store of prior knowledge. We interpret and remember events by building connections to what we already know. Long-term memory capacity is virtually limitless: the more you know, the more possible connections you have for adding new knowledge. Because of the vast capacity of long-term memory, having the ability to locate and recall what you know when you need it is key; your facility for calling up what you know depends on the repeated use of the information (to keep retrieval routes strong) and on your establishing powerful retrieval cues that can reactivate the memories. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 When you recall learning from short-term memory, as in rapid-fire practice, little mental effort is required, and little long-term benefit accrues. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 5 Avoid Illusions of Knowing ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/10 AT THE ROOT of our effectiveness is our ability to grasp the world around us and to take the measure of our own performance ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/10 . We’re constantly making judgments about what we know and don’t know and whether we’re capable of handling a task or solving a problem. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . An important part of this skill is being sensitive to the ways we can delude ourselves. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 In this chapter we discuss perceptual illusions, cognitive biases, and distortions of memory that commonly mislead people. Then we suggest techniques for keeping your judgment squared with reality. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . The truth is that we’re all hardwired to make errors in judgment. Good judgment is a skill one must acquire, becoming an astute observer of one’s own thinking and performance. We start at a disadvantage for several reasons. One is that when we’re incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence and see little reason to change. Another is that, as humans, we are readily misled by illusions, cognitive biases, and the stories we construct to explain the world around us and our place within it. To become more competent, or even expert, we must learn to recognize competence when we see it in others, become more accurate judges of what we ourselves know and don’t know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Two Systems of Knowing ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman describes our two analytic systems. What he calls System 1 (or the automatic system) is unconscious, intuitive, and immediate. It draws on our senses and memories to size up a situation in the blink of an eye. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 System 2 (the controlled system) is our slower process of conscious analysis and reasoning. It’s the part of thinking that considers choices, makes decisions, and exerts self-control. We also use it to train System 1 to recognize and respond to particular situations that demand reflexive action. The running back is using System 2 when he walks through the moves in his playbook. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 System 1 is powerful because it draws on our accumulated years of experience and our deep emotions. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . Of course, when System 1’s conclusions arise out of misperception or illusion, they can steer you into trouble. Learning when to trust your intuition and when to question it is a big part of how you improve your competence in the world at large and in any field where you want to be expert. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Illusions and Memory Distortions ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 The filmmaker Errol Morris, in a series of articles on illusion in the New York Times, quotes the social psychologist David Dunning on humans’ penchant for “motivated reasoning,” or, as Dunning put it, the “sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 There are many ways that our System 1 and System 2 judgments can be led astray: perceptual illusions like those experienced by pilots, faulty narrative, distortions of memory, failure to recognize when a new kind of problem requires a new kind of solution, and a variety of cognitive biases to which we’re prone. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 The discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrariness is equally powerful, or more so, in our need for a rational understanding of our own lives. We strive to fit the events of our lives into a cohesive story that accounts for our circumstances, the things that befall us, and the choices we make. Each of us has a different narrative that has many threads woven into it from our shared culture and experience of being human, as well as many distinct threads that explain the singular events of one’s personal past. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . Narrative provides not only meaning but also a mental framework for imbuing future experiences and information with meaning, in effect shaping new memories to fit our established constructs of the world and ourselves. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . The psychologists Larry Jacoby, Bob Bjork, and Colleen Kelley, summing up studies on illusions of comprehension, competence, and remembering, write that it is nearly impossible to avoid basing one’s judgments on subjective experience. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Memory can be distorted in many ways. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Imagination inflation refers to the tendency of people who, when asked to imagine an event vividly, will sometimes begin to believe, when asked about it later, that the event actually occurred. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Another type of memory illusion is one caused by suggestion, which may arise simply in the way a question is asked. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 nterference from other events can distort memory. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 What psychologists call the curse of knowledge is our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . The curse-of-knowledge effect is close kin to hindsight bias, or what is often called the knew-it-all-along effect, in which we view events after the fact as having been more predictable than they were before they occurred. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Fluency illusions result from our tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Our memories are also subject to social influence and tend to align with the memories of the people around us. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Mental Models As we develop mastery in the various areas of our lives, we tend to bundle together the incremental steps that are required to solve different kinds of problems. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 The better you know something, the more difficult it becomes to teach it. So says physicist and educator Eric Mazur of Harvard. Why? As you get more expert in complex areas, your models in those areas grow more complex, and the component steps that compose them fade into the background of memory (the curse of knowledge). ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . Mazur says that the person who knows best what a student is struggling with in assimilating new concepts is not the professor, it’s another student. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Unskilled and Unaware of It Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence. This phenomenon, of particular interest for metacognition, has been named the Dunning-Kruger effect after the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Their research showed that incompetent people overestimate their own competence and, failing to sense a mismatch between their performance and what is desirable, see no need to try to improve. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . In the first experiment the results confirmed expectations that the least competent students were the most out of touch with their performance: students who scored at the twelfth percentile on average believed that their general logical reasoning ability fell at the sixty-eighth percentile. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 To sum up, the means by which we navigate the world—Daniel Kahneman’s Systems 1 and 2—rely on our perceptual systems, intuition, memory, and cognition, with all their tics, warts, biases, and flaws. Each of us is an astounding bundle of perceptual and cognitive abilities, coexisting with the seeds of our own undoing. When it comes to learning, what we choose to do is guided by our judgments of what works and what doesn’t, and we are easily misled. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 The intent is laudatory. We know that students need to take more control of their own learning by employing strategies like those we have discussed ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Tools and Habits for Calibrating Your Judgment ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Most important is to make frequent use of testing and retrieval practice to verify what you really do know versus what you think you know. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Peer instruction, a learning model developed by Eric Mazur, incorporates many of the foregoing principles. The material to be ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 covered in class is assigned for reading beforehand. In class, the lecture is interspersed with quick tests that present students with a conceptual question and give them a minute or two to grapple with it; they then try, in small groups, to reach a consensus on the correct answer ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Pay attention to the cues you’re using to judge what you have learned. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 . The apprentice model is a very old one in human experience, as novices (whether cobblers or attorneys) have traditionally learned their craft from experienced practitioners. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 In other settings, teams are formed of people with complementary areas of expertise. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Action beats reaction every time. That’s one mantra that’s drilled into our minds. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Sometimes the most powerful feedback for calibrating your sense of what you do and don’t know are the mistakes you make in the field, assuming you survive them and are receptive to the lesson. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 6 Get Beyond Learning Styles ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 ALL LEARNERS ARE DIFFERENT, and all rising to a great place, as Francis Bacon tells us, is by a winding stair.1 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 In this chapter, we acknowledge that everyone has learning preferences, but we are not persuaded that you learn better when the manner of instruction fits those preferences. Yet there are other ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 kinds of differences in how people learn that do matter ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 The way Bruce figured, rich people were probably no smarter than he was, they just had knowledge he lacked. Looking at how he went after the knowledge he sought will illustrate some of the learning differences that matter. One, of course, is taking charge of your own education, a habit with Bruce from age two that he has exhibited through the years with remarkable persistence ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 People who as a matter of habit extract underlying principles or rules from new experiences are more successful learners than those who take their experiences at face value, failing to infer lessons that can be applied later in similar situations. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 When he is asked how he accounts for his success, the lessons he cites are deceptively simple: go where the competition isn’t, dig deep, ask the right questions, see the big picture, take risks, be honest. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 ? As the story of Bruce makes clear, some learning differences matter more than others. But which differences? That’s what we’ll explore in the rest of this chapter. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 One difference that appears to matter a lot is how you see yourself and your abilities. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 The stories we create to understand ourselves become the narratives of our lives, explaining the accidents and choices that have brought us where we are: what I’m good at, what I care about most, and where I’m headed. If you’re among the last kids standing on the sidelines as the softball teams are chosen up, the way you understand your place in the world likely changes a little, shaping your sense of ability and the subsequent paths you take. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 What you tell yourself about your ability plays a part in shaping the ways you learn and perform–how hard you apply yourself, for example, or your tolerance for risk-taking and your willingness to persevere in the face of difficulty. But differences in skills, and your ability to convert new knowledge into building blocks for further learning, also shape your routes to success. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Each of us has a large basket of resources in the form of aptitudes, prior knowledge, intelligence, interests, and sense of personal empowerment that shape how we learn and how we overcome our shortcomings. Some of these differences matter a lot—for example, our ability to abstract underlying principles from new experiences and to convert new knowledge into mental structures. Other differences we may think count for a lot, for example having a verbal or visual learning style, actually don’t ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 On any list of differences that matter most for learning, the level of language fluency and reading ability will be at or near the top. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 . While it’s true that most all of us have a decided preference for how we like to learn new material, the premise behind learning styles is that we learn better when the mode of presentation matches the particular style in which an individual is best able to learn. That is the critical claim ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 In 2008 the cognitive psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Bob Bjork were commissioned to conduct a review to determine whether this critical claim is supported by scientific evidence. The team set out to answer two questions. First, what forms of evidence are needed for institutions to justify basing their instructional styles on assessments of students’ or employees’ learning styles? ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 The second question the team asked was whether this kind of evidence existed. The answer was no. They found very few studies designed to be capable of testing the validity of learning styles ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 theory in education, and of those, they found that virtually none validate it and several flatly contradict it. Moreover, their review showed that it is more important that the mode of instruction match the nature of the subject being taught: visual instruction for geometry and geography, verbal instruction for poetry, and so on. When instructional style matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better, regardless of their differing preferences for how the material is taught. The fact that the evidence is not there to validate learning styles theory doesn’t mean that all theories are wrong. Learning styles theories take many forms. Some may be valid. But if so, we can’t know which: because the number of rigorous studies is extremely small, the research base does not exist to answer the question. On the basis of their findings, Pashler and his colleagues argued that the evidence currently available does not justify the huge investment of time and money that would be needed to assess students and restructure instruction around learning styles. Until such evidence is produced, it makes more sense to emphasize the instructional techniques, like those outlined in this book, that have been validated by ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 research as benefiting learners regardless of their style preferences ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Intelligence is a learning difference that we do know matters, but what exactly is it? ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 . Psychologists today generally accept that individuals possess at least two kinds of intelligence. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 at least two kinds of intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold information in mind while working on a problem; crystallized intelligence is one’s accumulated knowledge of the world and the procedures or mental models one has developed from past learning and experience. Together, these two kinds of intelligence enable us to learn, reason, and solve problems.7 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 While Gardner helpfully expands our notion of intelligence, the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg helpfully distills it again. Rather than eight intelligences, Sternberg’s model proposes three: analytical, creative, and practical. Further, unlike Gardner’s theory, Sternberg’s is supported by empirical research.9 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 One of Sternberg’s studies of particular interest to the question of how we measure intelligence was carried out in rural Kenya, where he and his associates looked at children’s informal knowledge of herbal medicines. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 how we measure intelligence was carried out in rural Kenya, where he and his associates looked at children’s informal knowledge of herbal medicines. Regular use of these medicines is an important part of Kenyans’ daily lives. This knowledge is not taught in schools or assessed by tests, but children who can identify the herbs and who know their appropriate uses and dosages are better adapted to succeed in their environment than children without that knowledge. The children who performed best on tests of this indigenous informal knowledge did worst relative to their peers on tests of the formal academic subjects taught in school and, in Sternberg’s words, appeared to be “stupid” by the metric of the formal tests. How to reconcile the discrepancy? Sternberg suggests that the children who excelled at indigenous knowledge came from families who valued such practical knowledge more highly than the families of the children who excelled at the academics taught in school. Children whose environments prized one kind of learning over another (practical over academic, in the case of the families who taught their children about herbs) were at a lower level of knowledge in the academic areas not emphasized by their environment. Other families placed more value on the analytic ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 analytic (school-based) information and less on the practical herbal knowledge. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Into this void Robert Sternberg has introduced his three-part theory of successful intelligence. Analytical intelligence is our ability to complete problem-solving tasks such as those typically contained in tests; creative intelligence is our ability to synthesize and apply ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 apply existing knowledge and skills to deal with new and unusual situations; practical intelligence is our ability to adapt to everyday life—to ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 understand what needs to be done in a specific setting and then do it; what we call street smarts. Different cultures and learning situations draw on these intelligences differently, and much of what’s required to succeed in a particular situation is not measured by standard IQ or aptitude tests, which can miss critical competencies. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 . In tandem with Sternberg’s three-part model of intelligence, he and Grigorenko have proposed a shift away from static tests and replacing them with what they call dynamic testing: determining the state of one’s expertise; refocusing learning on areas of low performance; follow-up testing to measure the improvement and to refocus learning so as to keep raising expertise. Thus, a test may assess a weakness, but rather than assuming that the weakness indicates a fixed inability, you interpret it as a lack of skill or knowledge that can be remedied. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 . Dynamic testing has two advantages over standard testing. It focuses the learner and teacher on areas that need to be brought up rather than on areas of accomplishment, and the ability to measure a learner’s progress from one test to the next provides a truer gauge of his or her learning potential. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Dynamic testing has three steps. Step 1: a test of some kind—perhaps an experience or a paper exam—shows me where I come up short in knowledge or a skill. Step 2: I dedicate myself to becoming more competent, using reflection, practice, spacing, and the other techniques of effective learning. Step 3: I test myself again, paying attention to what works better now but also, and especially, to where I still need more work. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 There do appear to be cognitive differences in how we learn, though not the ones recommended by advocates of learning styles. One of these differences is the idea mentioned earlier that psychologists call structure building: the act, as we encounter new material, of extracting the salient ideas and constructing a coherent mental framework out of them. These frameworks are sometimes called mental models or mental maps. High structure-builders learn new material better than low structure-builders. The latter have difficulty setting aside irrelevant or competing information, and as a result they tend to hang on to too many concepts to be condensed into a workable model (or overall structure) that can serve as a foundation for further learning. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 . Knowledge is not knowhow until you understand the underlying principles at work and can fit them together into a structure larger than the sum of its parts. Knowhow is learning that enables you to go do. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 The Takeaway ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Be the one in charge. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 . Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills, and processes, is a quest. It is not a grade on a test, something bestowed by a coach, or a quality that simply seeps into your being with old age and gray hair. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Distill the underlying principles; build the structure ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Break your idea or desired competency down into its component parts. If you think you are a low structure-builder or an example learner trying to learn new material, pause periodically and ask what the central ideas are, what the rules are. Describe each idea and recall the related points. Which are the big ideas, and which are supporting concepts or nuances? If you were to test yourself on the main ideas, how would you describe them? ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 Increase Your Abilities ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 IN A FAMOUS study from the 1970s, a researcher showed nursery school children one at a time into a room with no distractions except for a marshmallow resting on a tray on a desk. As the researcher left the room, the child was told he could eat the marshmallow now, or, if he waited for fifteen minutes, he would be rewarded with a second marshmallow. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Walter Mischel and his graduate students observed through a mirror as the children faced their dilemma. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Of more than six hundred children who took part in the experiment, only one-third succeeded in resisting temptation long enough to get the second marshmallow. A series of follow-up studies, the most recent in 2011, found that the nursery school children who had been more successful in delaying gratification in this exercise grew up to be more successful in school and in their careers. The marshmallow study is sublime in its simplicity and as a metaphor for life. We are born with the gift of our genes, but to a surprising degree our success is also determined by focus and self-discipline, which are the offspring of motivation and one’s sense of personal empowerment.1 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 The brain is remarkably plastic, to use the term applied in neuroscience, even into old age for most people. In this chapter’s discussion of raising intellectual abilities, we review some of the questions science is trying to answer about the brain’s ability to change itself throughout life and people’s ability to influence those changes and to raise their IQs. We then describe three known cognitive strategies for getting more out of the mental horsepower you’ve already got. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 has been shown to be the product not just of innate gifts, as had long been thought, but of skills laid down layer by layer, through thousands of hours of dedicated practice. In short, research and the modern record have shown that we and our brains are capable of much greater feats than scientists would have thought possible even a few decades ago. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 Neuroplasticity All knowledge and memory are physiological phenomena, held in our neurons and neural pathways. The idea that the brain is not hardwired but plastic, mutable, something that reorganizes itself with each new task, is a recent revelation, and we are just at the frontiers of understanding what it means and how it works. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 The thickness of the myelin coating correlates with ability, and research strongly suggests that increased practice builds greater myelin along the related pathways, improving the strength and speed of the electrical signals and, as a result, performance. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 The study of habit formation provides an interesting view into neuroplasticity. The neural circuits we use when we take conscious action toward a goal are not the same ones we use when our ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/24 actions have become automatic, the result of habit. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Another fundamental sign of the brain’s enduring mutability is the discovery that the hippocampus, where we consolidate learning and memory, is able to generate new neurons throughout life. This phenomenon, called neurogenesis, is thought to play a central role in the brain’s ability to recover from physical injury and in humans’ lifelong ability to learn. The relationship of neurogenesis to learning and memory is a new field of inquiry, but already scientists have shown that the activity of associative learning (that is, of learning and remembering the relationship between unrelated items, such as names and faces) stimulates an increase in the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus. This rise in neurogenesis starts before the new learning activity is undertaken, suggesting the brain’s intention to learn, and continues for a period after the learning activity, suggesting that neurogenesis plays a role in the consolidation of memory and the beneficial effects that spaced and effortful retrieval practice have on long-term retention.9 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 . In the words of Ann and Richard Barnet, human intellectual development is “a lifelong dialogue between inherited tendencies and our life history.”10 The nature of that dialogue is the central question we explore in the rest of this chapter. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 IQ is a product of genes and environment. Compare it to height: it’s mostly inherited, but over the decades as nutrition has improved, subsequent generations have grown taller. Likewise, IQs in every industrialized part of the world have shown a sustained rise since the start of standardized sampling in 1932, a phenomenon called the Flynn effect after the political scientist who first brought it to wide attention.11 In the United States, the average IQ has risen eighteen points in the last sixty years. For any given age group, an IQ of 100 is the mean score of those taking the IQ tests, so the increase means that having an IQ of 100 today is the intelligence equivalent of those with an IQ 60 years ago of 118. It’s the mean that has risen, and there are several theories why this is so, the principal one being that schools, culture (e.g., television), and nutrition have changed substantially in ways that affect people’s verbal and math abilities as measured by the subtests that make up the IQ test. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Gains in IQ were found in several areas of cognitive training. When mothers in low-income homes were given the means to provide their children with educational tools, books, and puzzles and trained how to help their children learn to speak and identify objects in the home, the children showed IQ gains. When mothers of three-year-olds in low-income families were trained to talk to their children frequently and at length and to draw out the children with many open-ended questions, the children’s IQs rose. Reading to a child age four or younger raises the child’s IQ, especially if the child is an active participant in the reading, encouraged by the parent to elaborate. After age four, reading to the child does not raise IQ but continues to accelerate the child’s language development. Preschool boosts a child’s IQ by more than four points, and if the school includes language training, by more than seven points. Again, there is no body of evidence supporting the conclusion that early education, preschool, or language training would show IQ gains in children from better-off families, where they already benefit from the advantages of a richer environment ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Richard Nisbett writes of environmental “multipliers” that can deliver a disproportionate effect from a small genetic predisposition—the kid who is genetically just a little bit more curious becomes significantly smarter if she’s in an environment that feeds curiosity. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 deliver a disproportionate effect from a small genetic predisposition—the kid who is genetically just a little bit more curious becomes significantly smarter if she’s in an environment that feeds curiosity. Now stand that notion on its head. Since it’s unlikely I’ll be raising my IQ anytime soon, are there strategies or behaviors that can serve as cognitive “multipliers” to amp up the performance of the intelligence I’ve already got? Yes. Here are three: embracing a growth mindset, practicing like an expert, and constructing memory cues. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Growth Mindset Let’s return to the old saw “If you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.” If turns out there is more truth here than wit. Attitude counts for a lot. The studies of the psychologist Carol Dweck have gotten huge attention for showing just how big an impact one simple conviction can have on learning and performance: the belief that your level of intellectual ability is not fixed but rests to a large degree in your own hands.16 ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Dweck and her colleagues have replicated and expanded on their results in many studies. In one of the early experiments, she ran a workshop for low-performing seventh graders at a New York City junior high school, teaching them about the brain and about effective study techniques. Half the group also received a presentation on memory, but the other half were given an explanation of how the brain changes as a result of effortful learning: that when you try hard and learn something new, the brain forms new connections, and these new connections, over time, make you smarter. This group was told that intellectual development is not the natural unfolding of intelligence but results from the new connections that are formed through effort and learning. After the workshop, both groups of kids filtered back into their classwork. Their teachers were unaware that some had been taught that effortful learning changes the brain, but as the school year unfolded, those students adopted what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” a belief that their intelligence was largely within their own control, and they went on to become much more aggressive learners and higher achievers than students from the first group, who continued to hold the conventional view, what Dweck calls a “fixed mindset,” that their intellectual ability was set at birth by the natural talents they were born with. Dweck’s research had been triggered by her curiosity over why some people become helpless when they encounter challenges and fail at them, whereas others respond to failure by trying new strategies and redoubling their effort. She found that a fundamental difference between the two responses lies in how a person attributes failure: those who attribute failure to their own inability—“I’m not intelligent”—become helpless. Those who interpret failure as the result of insufficient effort or an ineffective strategy dig deeper and try different approaches. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Dweck came to see that some students aim at performance goals, while others strive toward learning goals. In the first case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second, you’re working to ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 acquire new knowledge or skills. People with performance goals unconsciously limit their potential. If your focus is on validating or showing off your ability, you pick challenges you are confident you can meet. You want to look smart, so you do the same stunt over and over again. But if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder. “If you want to demonstrate something over and over, ‘ability’ feels like something static that lies inside of you, whereas if you want to increase your ability, it feels dynamic and malleable,” Dweck says. Learning goals trigger entirely ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 entirely different chains of thought and action from performance goals.17 Paradoxically, a focus on performance trips up some star athletes. Praised for being “naturals,” they believe their performance is a result of innate gifts. If they’re naturals, the idea goes, they shouldn’t have to work hard to excel, and in fact many simply avoid practicing, because a need to practice is public evidence that their natural gifts are not good enough to cut the mustard after all. A focus on performance instead of on learning and growing causes people to hold back from risk taking or exposing their self-image to ridicule by putting themselves into situations where they have to break a sweat to deliver the critical outcome. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Dweck’s work has extended into the realm of praise and the power it has in shaping the way people respond to challenges. Here’s an example. A group of fifth grade students are individually given a puzzle to solve. Some of the students who solve the puzzle are praised for being smart; other students who solve it are praised for having worked hard. The students are then invited to choose another puzzle: either one of similar difficulty or one that’s harder but that they would learn from by making the effort to try solving. A majority of the students who are praised for their smarts pick the easier puzzle; 90 percent of the kids praised for effort pick the harder one. In a twist on this study, students get puzzles from two people, Tom and Bill. The puzzles Tom gives the students can be solved with effort, but the ones Bill gives them cannot be solved. Every student gets puzzles from both Tom and Bill. After working to solve the puzzles, some of the kids are praised for being smart, and some for their effort. In a second round, the kids get more puzzles from both Tom and Bill, and this time all the puzzles are solvable. Here’s ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 the surprise: of the students who were praised for being smart, few solved the puzzles they got from Bill, even though they were the same puzzles these students had solved earlier when they got them from Tom. For those who saw being considered smart as paramount, their failure to solve Bill’s puzzles in the first round instilled a sense of defeat and helplessness. When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. “Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control,” Dweck says. But “emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.” ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Paul Tough, in his recent book How Children Succeed, draws on Dweck’s work and others’ to make the case that our success is less dependent on IQ than on grit, curiosity, and persistence. The essential ingredient is encountering adversity in childhood and learning to overcome it. Tough writes that children in the lowest strata of society are so beset by challenges and starved of resources that they don’t stand a chance of experiencing success. But, and here’s another paradox, kids at the top of the heap, who are raised in cosseted settings, praised for being smart, bailed out of predicaments by helicopter parents, and never allowed to fail or overcome adversity on their own initiative, are also denied the character-building experiences essential for success later in life.19 A kid who’s born on third base and grows up thinking she hit a triple is unlikely to embrace the challenges that will enable her to discover her full potential. A focus on looking smart keeps a person from taking risks in life, the small ones that help people rise toward their aspirations, as well as the bold, visionary moves that lead to greatness. Failure, as Carol Dweck tells us, gives you useful information, and the opportunity to discover what you’re capable of doing when you really set your mind to it. The takeaway from Dweck, Tough, and their colleagues working in this field is that more than IQ, it’s discipline, grit, and a growth mindset that imbue a person with the sense of possibility and the creativity and persistence needed for higher learning and success. “Study skills and learning skills are inert until they’re powered by an active ingredient,” Dweck says. The active ingredient is the simple but nonetheless profound realization that the power to increase your abilities lies largely within your own control. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Deliberate Practice When you see stellar performances by an expert in any field—a pianist, chess player, golfer—perhaps you marvel at what natural talent must underlie their abilities, but expert performance does not usually rise out of some genetic predisposition or IQ advantage. It rises from thousands of hours of what Anders Ericsson calls sustained deliberate practice. If doing something repeatedly might be considered practice, deliberate practice is a different animal: it’s goal directed, often solitary, and consists of repeated striving to reach beyond your current level of performance. Whatever the field, expert performance is thought to be garnered through the slow acquisition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns, patterns that are used to store knowledge about which actions to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations. Witness a champion chess player. In studying the positions on a board, he can contemplate many alternative moves and the countless different directions each might precipitate. The striving, failure, problem solving, and renewed attempts that characterize deliberate practice build the new knowledge, physiological adaptations, and complex mental models required to attain ever higher levels. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/28 Deliberate practice usually isn’t enjoyable, and for most learners it requires a coach or trainer who can help identify areas of performance that need to be improved, help focus attention on specific aspects, and provide feedback to keep perception and judgment accurate. The effort and persistence of deliberate practice remodel the brain and physiology to accommodate higher performance, but achieving expertise in any field is particular to the field. It does not confer some kind of advantage or head start toward gaining expertise in another domain. A simple example of practice remodeling the brain is the treatment of focal hand dystonia, a syndrome affecting some guitarists and pianists whose repetitive playing has rewired their brains to think that two fingers have been fused into one. Through a series of challenging exercises, they can be helped gradually to retrain their fingers to move separately. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/6/3 8 Make It Stick ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 In the preceding chapters, we resisted the temptation to become overtly prescriptive, feeling that if we laid out the big ideas from the empirical research and illustrated them well through examples, you could reach your own conclusions about how best to apply them. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 But early readers of those chapters urged us to get specific with practical advice. So we do that here. We start with tips for students, thinking in particular of high school, college, and graduate school students. Then we speak to lifelong learners, to teachers, and finally to trainers. While the fundamental principles are consistent across these groups, the settings, life stages, and learning materials differ. To help you envision how to apply these tips, we tell the stories of several people who, one way or another, have already found their way to these strategies and are using them to great effect. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Learning Tips for Students Remember that the most successful students are those who take charge of their own learning and follow a simple but disciplined strategy. You may not have been taught how to do this, but you can do it, and you will likely surprise yourself with the results. Embrace the fact that significant learning is often, or even usually, somewhat difficult. You will experience setbacks. These are signs of effort, not of failure. Setbacks come with striving, and striving builds expertise. Effortful learning changes your brain, making new connections, building mental models, increasing your capability. The implication of this is powerful: Your intellectual abilities lie to a large degree within your own control. Knowing that this is so makes the difficulties worth tackling. Following are three keystone study strategies. Make a habit of them and structure your time so as to pursue them with regularity. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Practice Retrieving New Learning from Memory What ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 does this mean? “Retrieval practice” means self-quizzing. Retrieving knowledge and skill from memory should become your primary study strategy in place of rereading. How to use retrieval practice as a study strategy: When you read a text or study lecture notes, pause periodically to ask yourself questions like these, without looking in the text: What are the key ideas? What terms or ideas are new to me? How would I define them? How do the ideas relate to what I already know? Many textbooks have study questions at the ends of the chapters, and these are good fodder for self-quizzing. Generating questions for yourself and writing down the answers is also a good way to study. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 The harder it is for you to recall new learning from memory, the greater the benefit of doing so. Making errors will not set you back, so long as you check your answers and correct your mistakes. What your intuition tells you to do: Most studiers focus on underlining and highlighting text and lecture notes and slides. They dedicate their time to rereading these, becoming fluent in the text and terminology, because this feels like learning. Why retrieval practice is better: After one or two reviews of a text, self-quizzing is far more potent for learning than additional rereading. Why might this be so? This is explained more fully in Chapter 2, but here are some of the high points. The familiarity with a text that is gained from rereading creates illusions of knowing, but these are not reliable indicators of mastery of the material. Fluency with a text has two strikes against it: it is a misleading indicator of what you have learned, and it creates the false impression that you will remember the material. By contrast, quizzing yourself on the main ideas and the meanings behind the terms helps you to focus on the central precepts rather than on peripheral material or on a professor’s turn of phrase. Quizzing provides a reliable measure of what you’ve learned and what you haven’t yet mastered. Moreover, quizzing arrests forgetting. Forgetting is human nature, but practice at ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 recalling new learning secures it in memory and helps you recall it in the future. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 How it feels: Compared to rereading, self-quizzing can feel awkward and frustrating, especially when the new learning is hard to recall. It does not feel as productive as rereading your class notes and highlighted passages of text feels. But what you don’t sense when you’re struggling to retrieve new learning is the fact that every time you work hard to recall a memory, you actually strengthen it. If you restudy something after failing to recall it, you actually learn it better than if you had not tried to recall it. The effort of retrieving knowledge or skills strengthens its staying power and your ability to recall it in the future ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Space Out Your Retrieval Practice What does this mean? Spaced practice means studying information more than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions. How to use spaced practice as a study strategy: Establish a schedule of self-quizzing that allows time to elapse between study sessions. How much time? It depends on the material. If you are learning a set of names and faces, you will need to review them within a few minutes of your first encounter, because these associations are forgotten quickly. New material in a text may need to be revisited within a day or so of your first encounter with it. Then, perhaps not again for several days or a week. When you are feeling more sure of your mastery of certain material, quiz yourself on it once a month. Over the course of a semester, as you quiz yourself on new material, also reach back to retrieve prior material and ask yourself how that knowledge relates to what you have subsequently learned. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 What your intuition tells you to do: Intuition persuades us to dedicate stretches of time to single-minded, repetitive practice of something we want to master, the massed “practice-practice-practice” regime we have been led to believe is essential for building mastery of a skill or learning new knowledge. These intuitions are compelling and hard to distrust for two reasons. First, as we practice a thing over and over we often see our performance improving, which serves as a powerful reinforcement of this strategy. Second, we fail to see that the gains made during single-minded repetitive practice come from short-term memory and quickly fade. Our failure to perceive how quickly the gains fade leaves us with the impression that massed practice is productive. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Why spaced practice is better: It’s a common but mistaken belief that you can burn something into memory through sheer repetition. Lots of practice works, but only if it’s spaced. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 If you use self-quizzing as your primary study strategy and space out your study sessions so that a little forgetting has happened since your last practice, you will have to work harder to reconstruct what you already studied. In effect, you’re “reloading” it from long-term memory. This effort to reconstruct the learning makes the important ideas more salient and memorable and connects them more securely to other knowledge and to more recent learning. It’s a powerful learning strategy. (How and why it works are discussed more thoroughly in Chapter 4.) How it feels: Massed practice feels more productive than spaced practice, but it is not. Spaced practice feels more difficult, because you have gotten a little rusty and the material is harder to recall. It feels like you’re not really getting on top of it, whereas in fact, quite the opposite is happening: As you reconstruct learning from long-term memory, as awkward as it feels, you are strengthening your mastery as well as the memory. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Interleave the Study of Different Problem Types What does this mean? If you’re trying to learn mathematical formulas, study more than one type at a time, so that you are alternating between different problems that call for different solutions. If you are studying biology specimens, Dutch painters, or the principles of macroeconomics, mix up the examples. How to use interleaved practice as a study strategy: Many textbooks are structured in study blocks: They present the solution to a particular kind of problem, say, computing the volume of a spheroid, and supply many examples to solve before moving to another kind of problem (computing the volume of a cone). Blocked practice is not as effective as interleaved practice, so here’s what to do. When you structure your study regimen, once you reach the point where you understand a new problem type and its solution but your grasp of it is still rudimentary, scatter this problem type throughout your practice sequence so that you are alternately quizzing yourself on various problem types and retrieving the appropriate solutions for each. If you find yourself falling into single-minded, repetitive practice of a particular topic or skill, change it up: mix in the practice of other subjects, other skills, constantly challenging your ability to recognize the problem type and select the right solution. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Harking back to an example from sports (Chapter 4), a baseball player who practices batting by swinging at fifteen fastballs, then at fifteen curveballs, and then at fifteen changeups will perform better in practice than the player who mixes it up. But the player who asks for random pitches during practice builds his ability to decipher and respond to each pitch as it comes his way, and he becomes the better hitter. What your intuition tells you to do: Most learners focus on many examples of one problem or specimen type at a time, wanting to master the type and “get it down cold” before moving on to study another type. Why interleaved practice is better: Mixing up problem types and specimens improves your ability to discriminate between types, identify the unifying characteristics within a type, and improves your success in a later test or in real-world settings where you must discern the kind of problem you’re trying to solve in order to apply the correct solution. (This is explained more fully in Chapter 3.) How it feels: Blocked practice—that is, mastering all of one type of problem before progressing to practice another type—feels (and looks) like you’re getting better mastery as you go, whereas ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 interrupting the study of one type to practice a different type feels disruptive and counterproductive. Even when learners achieve superior mastery from interleaved practice, they persist in feeling that blocked practice serves them better. You may also experience this feeling, but you now have the advantage of knowing that studies show that this feeling is illusory. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Other Effective Study Strategies ELABORATION improves your mastery of new material and multiplies the mental cues available to you for later recall and application of it (Chapter 4). What is it? Elaboration is the process of finding additional layers of meaning in new material. For instance: Examples include relating the material to what you already know, explaining it to somebody else in your own words, or explaining how it relates to your life outside of class. A powerful form of elaboration is to discover a metaphor or visual image for the new material. For example, to better grasp the principles of angular momentum in physics, visualize how a figure skater’s rotation speeds up as her arms are drawn into her body. When you study the principles of heat transfer, you may understand conduction better if you imagine warming your hands around a hot cup of cocoa. For radiation, visualize how the sun pools in the den on a wintry day. For convection, think of the life-saving blast of A/C as your uncle squires you slowly through his favorite back-alley haunts of Atlanta. When you learned about the structure of an atom, your physics teacher may have used the analogy of the solar system with the sun as the nucleus and ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 electrons spinning around like planets. The more that you can elaborate on how new learning relates to what you already know, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create to remember it later. Later in this chapter, we tell how the biology professor Mary Pat Wenderoth encourages elaboration among her students by assigning them the task of creating large “summary sheets.” Students are asked to illustrate on a single sheet the various biological systems studied during the week and to show graphically and through key words how the systems interrelate with each other. This is a form of elaboration that adds layers of meaning and promotes the learning of concepts, structures, and interrelationships. Students who lack the good fortune to be in Wenderoth’s class could adopt such a strategy for themselves. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 GENERATION has the effect of making the mind more receptive to new learning. What is it? Generation is an attempt to answer a question or solve a problem before being shown the answer or the solution. For instance: On a small level, the act of filling in a missing word in a text (that is, generating the word yourself rather than having it supplied by the writer) results in better learning and memory of the text than simply reading a complete text. Many people perceive their learning is most effective when it is experiential—that is, learning by doing rather than by reading a text or hearing a lecture. Experiential learning is a form of generation: you set out to accomplish a task, you encounter a problem, and you consult your creativity and storehouse of knowledge to try to solve it. If necessary you seek answers from experts, texts, or the Web. By wading into the unknown first and puzzling through it, you are far more likely to learn and remember the solution than if somebody first sat you down to teach it to you. Bonnie Blodgett, an award-winning gardener and writer, provides a strong example of generative learning in Chapter 4. You can practice generation when reading new class material by trying to explain beforehand the key ideas you expect to find in the material and how you expect they will relate to your prior knowledge. Then read the material to see if you were correct. As a result of having made the initial effort, you will be more astute at gleaning the substance and relevance of the reading material, even if it differs from your expectation. If you’re in a science or math course learning different types of solutions for different types of problems, try to solve the problems ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 before you get to class. The Physics Department at Washington University in St. Louis now requires students to work problems before class. Some students take umbrage, arguing that it’s the professor’s job to teach the solution, but the professors understand that when students wrestle with content beforehand, classroom learning is stronger. REFLECTION is a combination of retrieval practice and elaboration that adds layers to learning and strengthens skills. What is it? Reflection is the act of taking a few minutes to review what has been learned in a recent class or experience and asking yourself questions. What went well? What could have gone better? What other knowledge or experiences does it remind you of? What might you need to learn for better mastery, or what strategies might you use the next time to get better results? For instance: The biology professor Mary Pat Wenderoth assigns weekly low-stakes “learning paragraphs” in which students are asked to reflect on what they learned the previous week and to characterize how their class learning connects to life outside the class. This is a fine model for students to adopt for themselves and a more fruitful learning strategy than spending hours transcribing lecture slides or class notes verbatim into a notebook. CALIBRATION is the act of aligning your judgments of what you know and don’t know with objective feedback so as to avoid being carried off by the illusions of mastery that catch many learners by surprise at test time. What is it? Everyone is subject to a host of cognitive illusions, some of which are described in Chapter 5. Mistaking fluency with a text for mastery of the underlying content is just one example. Calibration is simply the act of using an objective instrument to clear away illusions and adjust your judgment to better reflect reality. The aim is to be sure that your sense of what you know and can do is accurate. For instance: Airline pilots use flight instruments to know when their perceptual systems are misleading them about critical factors like whether the airplane is flying level. Students use quizzes and practice tests to see whether they know as much as they think they do. It’s worth being explicit here about the importance of answering the questions in the quizzes that you give yourself. Too often we will look at a question on a practice test and say to ourselves: Yup, I know that, and then move down the page without making the effort to write in the answer. If you don’t supply the answer, you may be giving in to the illusion of knowing, when in fact you would have difficulty rendering an accurate or complete response. Treat ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 practice tests as tests, check your answers, and focus your studying effort on the areas where you are not up to snuff. MNEMONIC DEVICES help you to retrieve what you have learned and to hold arbitrary information in memory (Chapter 7). What are they? “Mnemonic” is from the Greek word for memory, and mnemonic devices are like mental file cabinets. They give you handy ways to store information and find it again when you need it. For instance: Here is a very simple mnemonic device that some schoolchildren are taught for remembering the US Great Lakes in geographic order, from east to west: Old Elephants Have Musty Skin. Mark Twain used mnemonics to teach his children the succession of kings and queens of England, staking the sequence and length of their reigns along the winding driveway of his estate, walking it with the children, and elaborating with images and storytelling. Psychology students at Bellerbys College in Oxford use mnemonic devices called memory palaces to organize what they have learned and must be prepared to expound upon in their A-level essay exams. Mnemonics are not tools for learning per se but for creating mental structures that make it easier to retrieve what you have learned. Brief stories follow of two students who have used these strategies to rise to the top of their classes. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Tips for Lifelong Learners ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Retrieval Practice ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Generation ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 This is the crux: Learning works the same way as McPhee’s “awful blurting.” Your grasp of unfamiliar material often starts out feeling clumsy and approximate. But once you engage the mind in trying to make sense of something new, the mind begins to “knit” at the problem on its own. You don’t engage the mind by reading a text over and over again or by passively watching PowerPoint slides. You engage it by making the effort to explain the material yourself, in your own words—connecting the facts, making it vivid, relating it to what you already know. Learning, like writing, is an act of engagement. Struggling with the puzzle stirs your creative juices, sets the mind to looking for parallels and metaphors from elsewhere in your experience, knowledge that can be transferred and applied here. It makes you hungry for the solution. And the solution, when you arrive at it, becomes more deeply embedded with your prior knowledge and abilities than anything pasted onto the surface of your brain by PowerPoint. So take a page from McPhee: when you want to master something new, delete the whimpering and go wrestle the bear. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Reflection In Chapter 2 we tell how the Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon Mike Ebersold uses the habit of reflection to improve his skills in the operating room. Reflection involves retrieval (What did I do? How did it work?) and generation (How could I do it better next time?), invoking imagery and mental rehearsal as well (What if I take a smaller bite with the needle?). It was this habit of reflection that brought him to devise a surgical solution for the repair of a delicate sinus structure in the back of the skull that cannot be tied off because the structure is somewhat flat and tears when you snug the suture. Vince Dooley, Georgia Bulldogs football coach (Chapter 3), helped his players use reflection and mental rehearsal to learn their playbooks and their adjustments for next Saturday’s game. The Minneapolis cop David Garman (Chapter 5) uses reflection to improve his undercover strategies. The power of reflection as a learning technique is apparent throughout the personal memoir Highest Duty, by Captain Chesley Sullenberger. “Sully” is the pilot who successfully and miraculously ditched US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009. Time and again, in reading his autobiography, we see how he refined his understanding of flight and the control of his aircraft through training, personal experience, and the close observation of others. The process started from his earliest days at the stick of a single-engine crop duster, continued to his jet fighter days, his time investigating commercial airline disasters, and his granular analysis of the few available examples of the ditching of commercial aircraft, where he paid particular attention to the lessons for pitch, speed, and level wings. The evolution of Captain Sullenberger shows us that the habit of reflection is more than simply taking stock of a personal experience or the observed experiences of others. At its most powerful this habit involves engagement of the mind through generation, visualization, and mental rehearsal. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Elaboration When we met the pianist Thelma Hunter, she was learning four new works for an upcoming concert performance: pieces by Mozart, Faure, Rachmaninoff, and William Bolcom. Hunter, who is eighty-eight, won her first prize as a pianist at age five in New York and has been performing ever since. She is not a prodigy, she insists, nor even particularly renowned, but she is accomplished. In addition to a busy life raising six kids with her husband, Sam, a heart surgeon, Hunter has enjoyed a long life of learning, teaching, and performing at the piano, and she is still in the game, sought after and bent to her life’s pleasure at the keyboard. Giving new learning multiple layers of meaning has been central to Hunter’s methods and illustrates the way elaboration strengthens learning and memory. When she studies a new score, she learns it physically in the fingering, aurally in the sound, visually in the notes on the score, and intellectually in the way she coaches herself through transitions. Hunter has made some concessions to age. She never used to warm up before playing, but now she does. “My stamina is not as great as it used to be. My reach is not as big. Now, if I memorize something, I have to think about it. I never used to have to do that, I just worked through all the aspects of it and the memorizing came.”5 She visualizes the score and makes mental marginalia. “When I’m practicing, sometimes I say it out loud, ‘Up an octave, at this point,’ but in my mind’s eye I visualize the place on the sheet music, as well.” In comments that resonate with John McPhee’s observations about writing, Hunter says that at the point where a piece is almost memorized, “I’ll be driving, and I can think about the whole piece, which I do. The shape of it, as though I were a conductor, thinking, ‘Oh, that passage makes more sense if I speed it up. I have to practice that to get it faster.’ Those are the large things that I can think about away from the piano.” Hunter’s practice regimen is daily, working through new pieces, slowing down to parse the difficult passages, and then, because she now often performs with a cellist and violinist, the ensemble works through the pieces together to synchronize their individual interpretations. In Chapter 7 we describe Anders Ericsson’s research into how experts, through thousands of hours of solo, deliberate practice, build libraries of mental models that they can deploy to address a wide universe of situations they encounter in their area of expertise. Hunter describes experiences that would seem to manifest Ericsson’s theory. At times she must sit at the keyboard ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 and devise a fingering plan for playing a difficult passage. Oddly, she says, after having been away from the piece for a week, she will sit down and play it through, using a fingering pattern that she had not planned but feels entirely natural to her and familiar. It’s a paradox, though perhaps not entirely surprising. She credits her subconscious, drawing from her long years of playing, with finding a more fluent solution than what she has devised by puzzling it out at the keyboard. But perhaps it has been the effort at the keys, like McPhee wrestling his bear, that has set her mind to sorting through the closets of her memory for something a little more elegant and natural to fit the occasion. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Tips for Teachers ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Here again we are leery of being too prescriptive. Every teacher must find what’s right in his or her classroom. Yet specifics can be helpful. So here are some basic strategies that in our judgment will go a long way toward helping students become stronger learners in the classroom. Brief descriptions follow of what some teachers are already doing along these lines. Between the recommendations and the examples, we hope you will find practical ideas you can adapt and put to work. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Explain to Students How Learning Works Students labor under many myths and illusions about learning that cause them to make some unfortunate choices about intellectual risk taking and about when and how to study. It’s the proper role of the teacher to explain what empirical studies have discovered about how people learn, so the student can better manage his or her own education. In particular, students must be helped to understand such fundamental ideas as these: •Some kinds of difficulties during learning help to make the learning stronger and better remembered. •When learning is easy, it is often superficial and soon forgotten. •Not all of our intellectual abilities are hardwired. In fact, when learning is effortful, it changes the brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability. •You learn better when you wrestle with new problems before being shown the solution, rather than the other way around. •To achieve excellence in any sphere, you must strive to surpass your current level of ability. •Striving, by its nature, often results in setbacks, and setbacks are often what provide the essential information needed to adjust strategies to achieve mastery. These topics, woven throughout the book, are discussed in depth in Chapters 4 and 7. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Teach Students How to Study Students generally are not taught how to study, and when they are, they often get the wrong advice. As a result, they gravitate to activities that are far from optimal, like rereading, massed practice, and cramming. At the beginning of this chapter we present effective study strategies. Students will benefit from teachers who help them understand these strategies and stick with them long enough to experience their benefits, which may initially appear doubtful. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Create Desirable Difficulties in the Classroom Where practical, use frequent quizzing to help students consolidate learning and interrupt the process of forgetting. Make the ground rules acceptable to your students and yourself. Students find quizzing more acceptable when it is predictable and the stakes for any individual quiz are low. Teachers find quizzing more acceptable when it is simple, quick, and does not lead to negotiating makeup quizzes. (For one example, consider the way Kathleen McDermott, whose work we describe below, uses daily quizzing in her university class on human learning and memory.) Create study tools that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and elaboration. These might be exercises that require students to wrestle with trying to solve a new kind of problem before coming to the class where the solution is taught; practice tests that students can download and use to review material and to calibrate their judgments of what they know and don’t know; writing exercises that require students to reflect on past lesson material and relate it to other knowledge or other aspects of their lives; exercises that require students to generate short statements that summarize the key ideas of recent material covered in a text or lecture. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Make quizzing and practice exercises count toward the course grade, even if for very low stakes. Students in classes where practice exercises carry consequences for the course grade learn better than those in classes where the exercises are the same but carry no consequences. Design quizzing and exercises to reach back to concepts and learning covered earlier in the term, so that retrieval practice continues and the learning is cumulative, helping students to construct more complex mental models, strengthen conceptual learning, and develop deeper understanding of the relationships between ideas or systems. (For an example, read in Chapter 2 how Andy Sobel uses cumulative low-stakes quizzing in his university-level course in political economics.) Space, interleave, and vary topics and problems covered in class so that students are frequently shifting gears as they have to “reload” what they already know about each topic in order to figure out how the new material relates or differs. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Be Transparent Help your students understand the ways you have incorporated desirable difficulties into your lessons, and why. Be up front about some of the frustrations and difficulties this kind of learning entails and explain why it’s worth persisting. Consider having them read the profile earlier in this chapter of the medical student Michael Young, who vividly describes the difficulties and ultimate benefits of using these strategies. ======================================== *** 高亮 2016/5/30 Bloom’s taxonomy classifies cognitive learning on six levels. It was developed in 1956 by a committee of educators chaired by psychologist Benjamin Bloom. The six levels range from gaining knowledge (the most fundamental level) to developing comprehension of the underlying facts and ideas, being able to apply learning to solve problems, being able to analyze ideas and relationships so as to make inferences, being able to synthesize knowledge and ideas in new ways, and, at the most sophisticated level, being able to use learning to evaluate opinions and ideas and make judgments based on evidence and objective criteria. ========================================

We make the effort because the effort iteself extends the boundaries of our abilities.What we do shapes who we become and what we're capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do... It comes down to the simple fact that the path to complex mastery does not neccessarily start from exceptional genes, but it most certainly entails self-discipline, grit and persistence.

Three keystone study strategies: make a habit of them and structure your time ,pursue them with regularity. 1. Retrieving new learning from memory: how do the ideas relate to what I already know? Using quizzing to identify areas of weak mastery, and focus your study to make them strong. 2. Space out your retrieval practice: studying information more than once but leaving considerable time between practice sessions. Establish a schedule of self-quizzing that allows time to elapse between study sessions./ Interleave the study of two or more topics, so that alternating between them requires that you continually refresh your mind on each topic as you return to it. 3. Interleave the study of different problem types.