Make It Stick: Part 2

Chapter 5 of the book that I’m currently reading, “make it stick”, is titled “Avoid Illusions of Knowing”. (See Part 1 of my post for more information on this book). The authors go through a number of ways in which we can easily be fooled into thinking or “recalling” something that isn’t true. Asking someone to vividly imagine an event can lead to later recall that the event actually took place when it did not. The power of suggestion, via leading questions or statements, can alter how someone recalls an event. A hypnosis subject who is asked to freely explore anything that comes to mind can lead him or her to later “remember” an event imagined while under hypnosis. 

I’ve found that many students have a false sense of preparedness when studying for an exam. Much of science class (mine included) is about working problems. A student who gets stuck on a problem and needs help sometimes asks me for help, but more often than not prefers to ask a fellow student. One reason may be that my typical response to a question is to ask a question back, typically at a more fundamental level to get the student to think about the basics. This is much more time-consuming both for the student and the teacher. On the other hand, fellow students tend to just “show how they worked out their answer”. The original inquirer then exclaims, “Oh, that’s how it’s done!” and has a false sense of knowing how to “work the problem”. Sometimes I interject to force the student to think a little more carefully about whether he or she understood the basics, but other times I don’t. It depends on how busy the class is (if group work is being done) or how many students are in my office simultaneously. I’ve seen enough to know that this is widespread outside my classroom and office hours.

I try encouraging students to work other problems (there are many to choose from in the textbook) that were not assigned as homework, but very few actually choose to do so. They prefer to go over problems previously covered in class, or previously assigned in homework. And to go over usually means to read through, rather than attempt the problem again from scratch. Why? Because it’s faster and gives one a (false) sense of fluency. I warn students against this self-deceptive strategy, but they still use it. I also provide past-year exams so students get the sense of how I ask questions, but very few students actually try to take them “under exam conditions” on their own, despite my telling them that this is how they can best take advantage. Then having “practiced” the exam, the student “feels prepared”. Makes me wonder if I should stop providing my students with practice tests.

As mentioned in my previous post, what I really need to do is help my students adopt meta-cognitive strategies to monitor their own learning. I will have to look up more resources since this is not my area of expertise. I haven’t figured out how exactly to handle the reflective student writing assignments yet although I have some ideas percolating.

The authors of the book also reminded me of something I need to watch out for as a teacher: the curse of knowledge, i.e., “our tendency to underestimate how long it will take another person to learn something new or perform a task that we have already mastered.” I try to mix up my teaching schedule as much as possible, i.e., teach many different types of classes. Given the standard load of three classes per semester (I have some release time because I am chair), I would opt to teach three different classes. Most of my colleagues would prefer fewer preps and instead teach multiple sections of the same course in the same semester. Where possible, I also am happy to skip teaching one of my “standard” courses in a particular year because it forces me to work harder when I teach it again. (Memory fades!) I also try to revamp a class after teaching it four times to keep the material fresh. Now all this takes a lot of time, and I could have probably been more productive on the research front if I put less time into teaching. (Research is almost always the first thing to take the hit when you’re a professor at a liberal arts college with no graduate students in your department.)

The chapter ends with a section called “Tools and Habits for Calibrating Your Judgment”. Suggestions include: (1) frequent testing and retrieval practice, (2) learning with others in teams to better self-calibrate, (3) altering conditions to learn things flexibly, but also make the learning more effortful. Earlier in the chapter, the authors write: “The answer to illusion and misjudgment is to replace subjective experience as the basis for decisions with a set of objective gauges outside ourselves, so that our judgment squares with the real world around us.” One of the things I’m looking forward to is, for the first time, having a (senior) student research assistant in the class that can help gauge what is going on in the classroom and help mitigate my instructor curse-of-knowledge blinkers. We’ll see how well that works.

Chapter 6 is “Get Beyond Learning Styles”, where I think the authors are going to debunk the notion that you learn best with instruction in your preferred learning style. Looking forward to reading it tonight!