A Must Read: Learning Scientists Take on Students, Studying, and Test-Taking

I'm pretty passionate about teaching my students optimal learning strategies, teaching students how to study, and best practices in "making things stick." In fact, it is my SLO Goal this year (Shout out to my AP, Lori!). When I recently came across a pair of cognitive psychologists, Dr. Yana Weinstein, Ph.D. and Dr. Megan Smith, Ph.D., who were using Twitter to get out the message about how students learn best, I knew we'd be fast friends… and, that I wanted them to have a platform on the THSP page to talk about their craft, their blog/Twitter presence, and how high school students can best use their research and expertise. You can find these ladies on Twitter at @AceThatTest and on their blog http://www.learningscientists.org

How did the two of you decide to start the "Learning Scientists" blog? What were your motivations?

Yana: Honestly, I had recently started to listen to NPR on my daily commute, and I started feeling guilty that I wasn’t doing more to help the community. They had this one story in particular about “College Bound Dorchester”, which is a program that gets kids with troubled pasts (e.g., former drug dealers) college-ready. Suddenly I thought, hey, how come someone figured out how to help the community like that, while I have some skills to share, but am stuck in my ivory tower? This prompted me to start thinking more about what I could do to help promote good learning and teaching strategies.

Megan: I teach a number of the experimental courses at Rhode Island College (cognition, perception, and learning). I have been trying to come up with creative ways to help my students link the concepts from class to the real world. Improving learning is one connection. But, there are many others, such as how we might frame an advertisement to help it sell, or how we can improve procedures in the criminal justice system to avoid false convictions.

I decided to create an assignment requiring my students to interact with one another and make connections with popular articles on Twitter. In building up my Twitter profile I saw that Yana was tweeting learning strategies to students.  I decided to join in, and we created @AceThatTest to work together.

What is the single most annoying myth about learning, studying, or cognition?

Yana: Learning styles.

Megan: Yes, definitely learning styles. So much time and effort seems to go into worrying about this, and the whole concept of matching instruction to “style” doesn’t help learning! Students and teachers may have a preference, but that’s really a different issue and can be addressed in a different way than this concept of “matching.” We’re all for being interested and engaged with the material, but “matching” isn’t the way.

What would current you (PhD you) tell High School (or undergrad you) about studying that could dramatically change your life?

Yana: I would let undergrad me know about my ADHD diagnosis (which I only just got, at the age of 32, and am trying to be frank about). I would tell myself it’s quite unusual to be so painfully bored in a bad lecture that you can’t physically bring yourself to stay (I could never figure out how everyone else was capable of staying!), that it’s not my fault, and that there are things I can do about it.

Megan: Try to make connections between what you are learning and the things you need to know in later life, even if the connection is “learning this will help me learn how to learn.” I was very much worried about grades in high school. While grades are very important, I wish I had spent more time applying what I was learning in high school. It would have made the transition to college a lot easier! I had to completely re-learn how to learn, and how to be successful, and remind myself why all of this was important once I got to college.

Why don't students listen to us when we try and teach them how to study? (And...why does highlighting and reading over your notes continue to be their #1 study technique?)

Yana: Because highlighting and re-reading FEEL good. Every time you read something yet another time, it feels more fluent as you run your eyes over the letters. And who doesn’t love highlighting? The colors are so pretty, and the way the highlighter glides across the page…

Megan: Perfect answer, Yana! It is unfortunate, but just because something feels like it’s helping you learn, does not mean that it is.

As a high school teacher, I hear "I'm just a bad test taker. I KNOW the information...I just freeze on tests..." a lot. Is test anxiety real, or do they just not know the material?

Yana: It could be that students really are so anxious about tests, that it causes them to underperform. Rather than saying this doesn’t happen, it might help to validate students’ feelings, but then try to reframe them. Promising results are coming out of research into arousal reattribution interventions, where students are told that the heightened state they are experiencing is actually helpful – not hurtful – to their test performance.

Megan: I agree. As a person who can be very anxious (about everything, not tests in particular) I can say that anxiety can be very debilitating. I actually realized in graduate school that my general anxiety was making my life more difficult than it needed to be, and started seeking treatment for it.

When it comes to test anxiety, I think we need to combat anxiety not by saying “I can’t do tests,” but by acknowledging that they’re scary and trying to move past that fear. Make test anxiety something you’re working on, not an excuse for a grade. If the anxiety is really causing a problem, it might be a good idea to talk to a professional about it. There’s no harm in that, and as Yana mentioned earlier, it isn’t your fault, but it is something you can work on!

If you could only have one study technique to use for now until eternity - which would you choose?

Yana: Retrieval practice

Megan: Yes, we both LOVE retrieval practice. Sit down and write, draw, or doodle everything you know!

Who are your Cognitive Psychologist heros?

Yana: Oliver Sacks (RIP).

Megan: My hero is someone most people will have never heard of. Her name is Dr. Janet Proctor, and she works at Purdue where I went as an undergraduate. Dr. Proctor has her PhD in psychology, and could have made a wonderful professor and researcher. However, she took a job as a full-time academic advisor instead, and uses her skills to help college students succeed. She helps undergraduates to find their passions and identify career goals, do well in college classes, and gain experiences they need to become competitive when they go off to graduate school or try to get a job. She’s working “in the trenches” but is making a huge difference for her advisees.  I owe her for my career.

What are 5 quick tips that HS teachers can teach and students can use to start studying better and more effectively?

Here’s our list!

1. Study a little every day.
2. Practice remembering things.
3. Don’t study the same thing for a long time – switch it up.
4. Take breaks often.
5. Read feedback carefully.

--- Posted by Amy Ramponi

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Exercise and the Brain Video

One of my students found this short video on exercise and the brain.  I enjoyed the narration because it so closely mirrors my own in class. There are lots of brain and bio connections made.  Just lots of good stuff.



posted by Chuck Schallhorn

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PedagoNet Brain Teasers

The cognition unit creates a fantastic opportunity to give your students a chance to work on various problem solving puzzles. I have found psychology students, especially AP Psychology students, seem to love brain teasers, logic problems, etc.

PedagoNet has developed sixty-one short brain teasers problems on their website. The can be found at http://www.pedagonet.com/brain/brainers.html

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Psych in the news

Phil Zimbardo does a TED talk about time. As ScienceBlog notes: "In this video, [he] says happiness and success are rooted in a trait most of us disregard: the way we orient toward the past, present and future. He suggests we calibrate our outlook on time as a first step to improving our lives."

Word Spy's word of the day: phantom fat. "People who were formerly overweight often still carry that internal image, perception, with them," says Elayne Daniels, a psychologist in Canton, Mass., who specializes in body-image issues. "They literally feel as if they're in a large body still."

If white coats are so bad (because of the spread of infection) why do doctors still wear them? Because a white lab coat says "I am a scientific healer."

Good news skinny dudes! "Beefcakes may be able to attract women by rippling their muscles, but the downside of all that brawn is a poor immune system and an increased appetite, a new study finds." (via Freakonomics)

How the outcomes in Iran's election returns reveal possible fraud: humans are bad at making up random numbers. (via Freakonomics)

"It’s the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears."

"Once people own something - they have an established or imagined "property right" to the object - that something dramatically increases in subjective value." How does this endowment effect work?

Numerous studies have now demonstrated that REM sleep is an essential part of the learning process. Before you can know something, you have to dream about it.

And finally, which dime is the right one, and why are we so bad at noticing changes to familiar things?

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Psych in the news

"Patients often have difficulty getting the help they need — partly because therapists tend to regard borderline patients as manipulative and demanding of an inordinate amount of time and attention." A nice column in the NYT by Jane Brody on borderline personality disorder. Questions can be left for a BPD expert here and she'll provide answers to some of them next week.

"I am not trying to say cats are stupid, just they are different." A British researcher finds cats none too bright in her little tests. (No word as to whether she was clawed to death shortly after publishing her findings.)

Even the world’s best pros are so consumed with avoiding bogeys that they make putts for birdie discernibly less often than identical-length putts for par, according to research by two Wharton School professors.

Is alcohol really good for you? A nice causation v. correlation piece.

One of the most celebrated findings in modern psychiatry — that a single gene helps determine one’s risk of depression in response to a divorce, a lost job or another serious reversal — has not held up to scientific scrutiny, researchers reported Tuesday.

Really, I swear this one will work! The next big weight-loss craze involves sprinkling stuff on your food to enhance the smell and taste ... so you eat less.

But now researchers are beginning to unearth clues as to how savants' formidable brains work, and that in turn is changing our view of what it means to be a savant. Also, see this related link of art done by savants (like the one at the top of this post).

How does language shape thinking? Great essay here by a Stanford prof whose research finds evidence for the old (and new again?) Whorf hypothesis.

Finally, I just found this (thanks to the fabulous Mindhacks) and haven't had a chance to check it out -- so please, if you do, leave your thoughts in the comments! -- but here is Weird Al and Al's Brain, a 3-D Journey into the Human Brain. (P.S. I love the t-shirt below if anyone's looking for the perfect birthday present ...)

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Psych in the news

Starting this week PitN will come out on a regular-ish schedule on Mondays and Thursdays. Like what you read? Post a comment below or send me (ashejones@gmail.com) a note! --Steve

"The larger point is that liberals and conservatives often form judgments through flash intuitions that aren’t a result of a deliberative process." -- Great column from Nicholas Kristof that examines various issues such as group polarization, moral values, disgust and more. There are also links to yourmorals.org (where one can take online tests in areas such as personality, war and peace, and disgust) and civilpolitics.org on moral psychology.

“Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.” Another fascinating column by Kristof that looks at the work of Richard Nisbett (new book is Intelligence and How to Get It) on how groups such Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks "help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect."

"There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. In a fascinating new article in Psychological Science, Stefan Herzog and Ralph Hertwig turned the old aphorism on its head: One head can be nearly as good as two."(Scientific American)

From BoingBoing: "Stanford's Robert Sapolsky, one of the most interesting anthropologists I've heard lecture, gives us 90 minutes on the evolutionary basis for literal religious belief, "metamagical thinking," schizotypal personality and so on, explaining how evolutionarily, the mild schizophrenic expression we called "schizotypal personality" have enjoyed increased reproductive opportunities."

I used excerpts from the book in class this past semester with great success and now someone has typed in all 50 with brief synopses. Excellent! Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (from Robert Cialdini et al.)

Utrecht University sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst surveyed 604 people about their friends and again seven years later, and found that only 48 percent of people’s original friends were still part of their network after that time period. (via Freakonomics)

Jonah Lehrer looks at research that shows that the brains of kids with ADHD really are different (in terms of cortical thickness) but that this difference disappears by adolescence. He also makes reference to his New Yorker article from last month on self-control which was terrific.



Finally, Lehrer also discusses the above dancing video (also here if the link ist kaput) in relation to Stanley Milgram's experiment on conformity where he had confederates in New York City stop and look up and then compared the number of people who also stopped and looked. And the video below (also here) is a modern re-creation of that experiment.

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