Augustine of Hippo (circa 400 A.D.), in a remarkable chapter on the nature of time in Confessions, confesses the following: If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not”.
This is why I tell students that it’s very important to try and explain aloud their answers to conceptual questions. You think you know it in your head, but you actually don’t know what you don’t know until you try to verbalize it or write it out in full. Several years ago, I revamped my daily study guides to phrase what students needed to know in question form, and I also added “test yourself” questions to each of the study guides. Whether or not students use them effectively is an open question, but this semester I have assignments requiring students to turn in a subset of their answers. (The students get full credit for the attempt regardless if they got the answers right, wrong, or something in between.)
In my course materials, I have a section on “how to be successful in this class” that informs students what they should be doing from the get-go. I also provide detailed information on what students should read before class, and the main things we will cover in class. It’s short and pithy. Students follow it to varying degrees, or at least they claim to do so. But if they really wanted to be successful in any class, they should read Daniel Willingham’s new book, Outsmart Your Brain. It doesn’t just provide strategies; it explains the why behind them. It also explains why your brain’s instinct is to resort to less optimal strategies that require less effort but give you a false sense of thinking you’ve learned when you haven’t. I’ve read many of Willingham’s research articles over the years but these were not aimed primarily at students. Now there’s a good book I can recommend to students!
Each chapter of the book also ends with notes to instructors on how to facilitate student learning. A number of those are things I already do in my classes, but there were others I had forgotten or not thought as deeply about. This week I’ve been making a better effort to not assume students know how and why I have organized the material for each class in a particular way; I’ve been making more statements about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we will proceed. I have not been putting these up on a slide, because as Willingham says, students just copy things from a slide regardless of whether it’s useful to them or not instead of paying attention to what I am saying.
So how should students prepare for exams? They should prepare a study guide, according to Willingham. Turns out I already help them with this by posing questions in my guides. But Willingham has helpful tips of how to pose questions bidirectionally and at multiple levels. And he tells students you need to memorize some of your answers, not necessarily word-for-word but meaningfully. Forcing oneself to recall in different places and at different times works best in solidifying the material. And saying it aloud, of course! While I encourage students to study together, Willingham explains why this is useful, and how to do it effectively. When students discuss with each other their fragmented knowledge, it introduces variation to how questions and answers are posed. Different individuals help notice things others have missed. And students can test each other! Being tested is one of the best ways to prepare for exams.
Chapter 7 (“How to Judge Whether You’re Ready for an Exam”) had some particularly good reminders. It’s not enough to ‘understand’ something when someone else explains it, you have to try and explain it yourself – and not just in your head. Rereading can mislead you into thinking you know something you don’t really know it; rather you just have a passing familiarity and unless you’re forced to recall (without looking) you won’t know if you actually know. (Willingham recommends letting at least thirty minutes pass between reading and testing yourself.) I’ve stopped giving previous year’s exams to students because they fail to utilize it effectively, either giving themselves a false sense of readiness or going into a panic. (Read Willingham’s book for the explanation!) In distinguishing learning from performance, Willingham recommends overlearning – essentially “study until you know it, and then keep studying… It protects against forgetting [even though] it feels as though it’s not working.” He has a great quote from a friend when he was in college who said: “When leaves blowing around on the quad look like organic compounds to me, I know I’m ready.”
There’s also a chapter on how to take exams including what’s effective and what’s not. This mirrors some of what I highlighted from Barbara Oakley’s book. But I liked the early chapters on the importance of active listening in lectures, how to prepare for a lecture class, how to take notes, and how to reorganize one’s notes. Willingham thinks students should take their own notes in class, regardless of whether the instructor provides notes or slides or recordings. He also explains why being in class and engaging your mind right there and then is more effective than missing class and getting notes later from a friend. There’s an interesting section on whether one should do the reading before or after the lecture – that’s dependent on how the instructor organizes the class. And he gives good advice on how to ask good questions – ones that don’t annoy your instructors or your classmates.
Willingham reminded me that most students don’t take good lecture notes. It’s for a variety of reasons and he provides tips to students on how to improve, but I particularly appreciated his reminders to instructors. These are things I need to pay more attention to:
· Talk more slowly. (I talk too fast sometimes, okay, maybe most of the time in class.)
· Signal when something should be written and pause to allow time to write it down. (I’m getting better at this.)
· Distribute copies of figures/visuals; let students know which ones they don’t need to copy. (I think I’m good at this. Maybe, maybe not.)
· Students copy what’s on slides, whether doing so makes sense or not. (I’ve become much more judicious in the way I use slides.)
I liked Willingham’s suggestion of how students should work together and share lecture notes. Very importantly, it is not by dividing the effort among group members, but rather that everyone should take as complete notes as they can, and then once-a-week get together so each person can fill in any missing gaps and compare how different people organized their notes to see if any improvements can be made.
One thing that is emphasized in Outsmart Your Brain is how effortful learning actually is. Our brain would prefer to conserve energy and get away with quick-and-easy pattern recognition, maybe. I can’t speak to other fields, but the natural sciences are full of phenomena that are counter-intuitive, conceptually challenging, and theoretically abstract. Yet, they are crucial to understanding the field. Chemistry is hard to learn. I know it from my own experience as a learner, and I certainly see the same for my students. I hope to convey some of the tips and explanations from this book to my students.
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