http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong
Some readers may look askance at the use of word pairs, even though it is a favorite tactic of psychologists. In another article , in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied,Lindsey Richland, Nate Kornell and Liche Kao asked the same question, but they used more educationally relevant text material (an essay on vision). Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.
This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall . Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own.
Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.
************************
My response:
Lots of useful comments!
Joney makes an interesting point:
"Unfortunately, the experimenters and the author of the article have confused getting right answers with learning. Remembering a piece of information does not mean that it is worth knowing in the first place or that you will ever use it again." I'm not sure they do, though. Not in the content-focused article test, even if the content of the article might not be very stimulating. Remember there are control groups in all the experiments, so the futility factor would be the same for both groups.
Getting things wrong/Failing to solve a problem can be useful a) if you want to get them right/solve it, b) if you know it can be done, and c) if you've got a sporting chance.
Most people know more than they know ;-) The thing is to show them they do, and show them that they can mobilize this knowledge over the board to tackle any problem that comes their way.
If you can get the pre-emptive questions to stimulate learner curiosity, you're home and dry. If you use them to bust their teeth out, you're not.
Frinstance, I once used a Latin poem by Catullus (with lots of love and kissing and ignoring wagging fingers) in a class of 14-year-olds at a school in Sweden in a Swedish lesson. Literature. Most of the class were non-Swedes, including several Latinos. With the help of the Latinos (Spanish being so closely related to Latin) we worked out key words, like life and love and kiss. Then we chorus-read it, to get the swing of things. Etc. It worked like a charm. They knew more than they knew. A Latin poem for 14-year-olds in an immigrant-rich school (second poorest district in Sweden, too, as it happens)!
I'd have generalized the piece a bit more though.
People hate being taught, but they love learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment