Learning Strategies

John Nisbet, Janet Shucksmith

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351743747
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1986, designed for teachers and those concerned with the education of primary and secondary school pupils, Learning Strategies presented a new approach to 'learning to learn'. Its aim was to encourage teachers to start thinking about different approaches to harnessing the potential of young learners. It was also relevant to adult learners, and to those who teach them. Thus, although about learning, the book is also very much about teaching.

Learning Strategies presents a critical view of the study skills courses offered in schools at the time, and assesses in non-technical language what contributions could be made to the learning debate by recent developments in cognitive psychology. The traditional curriculum concentrated on 'information' and developing skills in reading, writing, mathematics and specialist subjects, while the more general strategies of how to learn, to solve problems, and to select appropriate methods of working, were too often neglected.

Learning to learn involves strategies like planning ahead, monitoring one's performance, checking and self-testing. Strategies like these are taught in schools, but children do not learn to apply them beyond specific applications in narrowly defined tasks. The book examines the broader notion of learning strategies, and the means by which we can control and regulate our use of skills in learning. It also shows how these ideas can be translated into classroom practice. The final chapter reviews the place of learning strategies in the curriculum.

1

Learning to Learn

Linda and George are both twenty. They are in the second year of their university studies, and both are doing reasonably well.

Linda is well-organised in her studying. Her friends think she is too preoccupied with her ‘system’, but being organised comes naturally to her, she says. She acknowledges the influence of her mother, who continued a professional job while raising a family and running a household, and consequently provided Linda with a model of organised efficiency. In fact, Linda was rather the opposite kind of person as a teenager in secondary school, finding difficulty in doing all the things she wanted to squeeze into a busy life. When she realised that she would have to get better results if she wanted to qualify for university entry, she had been impressed by a study methods talk about planning and organising. She started to write out detailed programmes of each day’s targets in her diary. That did not last long: it was too inflexible and laborious, besides being disheartening because her targets were too ambitious. But the experience had proved useful, for now she can do this kind of planning in her head, without being too fussy over detail. Give her an assignment – an essay or a piece of reading or a seminar paper to prepare – and she quickly reviews the scale of the task to decide what is required and how much time she should spend on it, and tries to match time and task. She likes to work to a coherent programme, with an awareness of time constraints, for this enables her to phase her work into her other commitments, including her free time. She falls back into a written programme at busy times, before examinations, when pressure mounts.

Watching her at work, you notice that she uses books selectively, glancing through the pages till she finds the passage she wants; she make notes and summarises as she reads; she checks and revises what she has written. Of course, not all her time is as productive as this description suggests. She has a habit of copying out neat versions of drafts, and is aware of this as a time-wasting activity to guard against. But the general impression is that she knows what she is doing and knows how to do it. Reflecting on it, she also realises that her preoccupation with covering the work may sometimes get in the way of a deeper understanding and a more independent, and possibly more interesting, style of study.

Though this systematic approach is now second nature to her, she has in fact learned it, first from her home which provided a model for her, and then from a fortuitous school experience which happened to meet a need which she was only vaguely conscious of. She has learned to monitor her progress, aware of targets and time whether on a long-term task (a project over a whole term or longer) or in an evening’s study (with six jobs to be done before an interesting television programme at 10.15). She is still selfconsciously practising a routine, but she is not tied to it inflexibly. When she does it intuitively (and afterwards has forgotten that she ever had to learn it), she will have aquired a strategy of working and learning which will be valuable throughout her professional life.

* * *

George has more natural talent, flair and imagination than Linda, but he is much less a paragon of method. Indeed his style of working is often haphazard, and sometimes chaotic. He prefers to study in spurts, working long hours when he feels in the mood and giving up when he feels he is making no progress. He likes to browse through books, and his reading also is of a casual and unplanned pattern. He does not make notes or summaries from his reading; but he has a powerful memory which provides him with quite an effective retrieval system. (At school, one of his teachers had insisted that he should make notes of his reading, but he had found it an unprofitable practice, merely accumulating scrappy notes which he could never find when he needed them.) In reading books, he is good at getting to the heart of the author’s meaning, and consequently he can recall the gist even if he forgets the details.

He disclaims any pattern in his studying. His priorities are decided by what is most urgent, and by what he likes doing best. When the urgency builds up, he can work right through the night; and though he grumbles when he has to do this, there is a certain satisfaction in coping successfully with a crisis.

Most of his friends share the same attitude. He gets on rather better than they do, and his friends attribute this to his intelligence and quick wits. There is more to it than this, however. He has learned to cope with pressure (a useful acquisition), responding to stress by drawing on his reserves of energy. He admits that he lacks the ability to apply himself to his work, explaining this in terms of ‘personality’. He uses the word ‘personality’ as if, at his mature stage of life, it were something to come to terms with, as if he had no choice.

George has in fact acquired a strategy of learning, and it works satisfactorily for him. It is a risk-taking strategy, and he has learned to deal with – and even enjoy – the pressures involved. His use of the strategy is reinforced by the fact that his friends do likewise: unconsciously perhaps, George is influenced by the models of his peers and of older students whose style he admires. But it is not a wholly unreflective strategy. He is sharp enough to recognise that he has to put his ideas together in a framework so that he can readily recall reading and lectures; and he works at this quite seriously, discussing and arguing with his friends until he feels secure in his convictions. This too is a useful strategy which he will continue to develop, building on the strengths of this approach to study. Or perhaps, if he comes to rely too much on scraping through with a last-minute effort, he will slide into sloppy habits of work.

* * *

Bill and Susan are secondary school pupils. Bill has an essay to write on a contemporary novel. The novel itself was not very interesting, and he skimmed through the later chapters. Fortunately, the teacher had given the class some notes; more important, she had taught them to make rough notes as they read; and as a result he has a usable outline of the plot. Also, in his first year at secondary school, his English teacher had drilled him in a procedure for essay writing: make notes, identify a theme, create a structure (beginning, development, conclusion), use quotations, and so on. He follows this routine for completing his homework essay, and is able to turn in a satisfactory but unimaginative piece of work.

Bill is one of life’s plodders, conscientiously looking for and sticking to the one ‘right’ method of working. It is a strategy which, unfortunately, pays off in many school situations, and he will probably end up with a reasonably good set of grades and a school report which describes him as a ‘good student’. His inability to adapt to changing requirements and his lack of self-knowledge may start to be a problem when he is expected to study on his own. But for the present, his teachers do not see him as a problem and are quite glad to have a few like Bill in their classes.

Susan is something of a problem to her English teacher, but not in mathematics and science. She is clearly an able girl, imaginative and talented especially in problem-solving exercises which she enjoys doing. She applies herself conscientiously to school work, but her marks in English are poor. Assessment in her English class is based on written work: in class discussion she contributes fluently and intelligently, and this patent evidence of ability adds to her English teacher’s feeling of frustration. Susan too has feelings of frustration about her writing and reporting, feelings bordering on alienation. She does not understand why this part of the curriculum is so difficult for her, and she gets no satisfaction from the additional exercises which her teacher sets for her. She is looking forward to the time when she can drop the study of this uncongenial subject and concentrate on those which she is good at.

Can either she or her teachers diagnose the problem? Can they work together to remedy it? Some of the procedures which Bill follows in his unimaginative way provide a starting point: her English teacher has tried this, but there is not the time in a busy school syllabus for following up the exercises with discussion to analyse the difficulties and with encouragement to persevere.

In the meantime Susan is making rapid progress in learning to handle mathematical reasoning. As regards her weakness in writing, she is learning to accept this as a handicap to live with.

* * * *

Tracy, Craig and Karen will soon be leaving primary school. They all are happy at school, but their primary school experience has already established habits and attitudes which will affect their later learning in very different ways.

Tracy is a busy worker, though often she is busy to little purpose. She takes part actively in group work, especially in conversation, but she does not seem to understand what the task demands. Her work is obsessively neat and she takes pains over the appearance of her notebooks (as do her parents). She copies out sections of reference texts tidily for her projects, without being aware whether or not they are relevant. Her writing is fluent and neat, and this tends to obscure its lack of structure and meaning. She tries to guess what the teacher wants: school work is for her, as for many primary school children, a matter of diligent application to meet the requirements imposed by the teacher. Her teacher commends her diligence, but berates her as a chatterbox and silently bemoans the sheep-like way she follows the actions and accepts the ideas of others in her class. Tracy will leave primary school with quite a good report, and she is certainly competent in reading and arithmetic. Probably she will not be ‘found out’ by the system until she is thirteen or fourteen, when her style of working will begin to prove inadequate.

Craig is fond of reading and has developed a wide range of interests, which he can talk and write about fluently. His parents have encouraged him in this, and in talking with him about his reading they provide him with practical help and a model of their own way of life. They help in a practical way with guidance on how to find interesting books in the local library and encouragement in following up ideas for things to do. The school does this also: school and home together have already given Craig a sound introduction to working with books. However, Craig has trouble with arithmetic. (When he is older, he will have decided that he is no use at maths.) He works too fast and makes many errors. He never checks his work. He frequently uses the wrong method with arithmetic problems, for he has little idea of what the questions require. Thinking about things like that takes time; and when you have twenty sums to do, you attract unwelcome attention if you are the last to finish. So he makes sure that he finishes whatever he is given to do, and this keeps him out of trouble in the arithmetic lessons.

Karen is learning to use a computer. She spends a lot of time sitting at the machine. She reads the instructions for the program and uses trial and error to find her way through the procedure. When she makes a mistake, she repeats the sequence, and then repeats it with different input, testing alternative possibilities. No one has taught her this, but she is intrigued by the machine and is resolved to explore its operation. She is working thoughtfully and systematically according to a mental plan which is at least partially conscious and deliberate. Her teacher is sceptical about computers, for the software seems trivial or irrelevant, and though the children enjoy playing with them – as she describes it – they do not seem to be learning anything. Karen is learning something from the experience, not just how to operate the keyboard but also how to anticipate and check, and her experimenting becomes more efficient and more systematic as the days pass, though she herself is unaware of the change.

* * * *

What are the differences among these learners? And what are the reasons for these differences?

Effective learning is not just a matter of age or years of experience. In the example described in the first part of this chapter, the university students are applying sophisticated strategies in studying, but this is because their work demands this, and Linda and George are examples of the successful survivors in the process of formal education. But many young children set about their learning efficiently – Craig in following his interest in books, Karen working with the computer – and many students labour ineffectively. As adults, most of us avoid the need to learn if we can, by keeping to familiar routines. Faced with an unfamiliar learning task, few of us know how to set about it, like Susan with her writing problems. We tend to fall back on routines which we know, like Bill in his essay writing, even when they are inappropriate. Diligent effort is misplaced if the strategy is wrong, as Tracy and Craig with his sums will soon find out.

Nor is effective learning just a matter of intelligence, unless we define ‘intelligence’ as the collection of procedures and insights which we have learned. The strategies which George and Linda apply to their university studies have been learned or taught. Even the limited strategies which Bill and Craig use are ones which they have learned to adopt or which are implicit, unintentionally, in the tasks their teachers set. Admittedly, some people are more competent than others in learning appropriate procedures and in applying these appropriately; but some apparently intelligent people can be remarkably unintelligent in their approach to learning – for example, in learning to drive a car or how to diagnose the fault when it won’t start, to use a computer, to speak a foreign language, to converse with social skill, to read a map or to remember names or telephone numbers. Each of these competences requires different ways of learning, and ‘intelligence’ alone will not enable us to master them.

The successful learner is not necessarily the person who has discovered and mastered the ‘correct’ procedure for each situation. In this book we use the term ‘strategies’ to refer to integrated sequences of procedures selected with a purpose in view, and successful learners have developed a range of strategies from which they are able to select appropriately and adapt flexibly to meet the needs of a specific situation. To do this, they need to be aware of what they are doing and of their own learning style, and to monitor their learning so as to be able to make appropriate decisions and to switch their choice if it appears to be ineffective. Thus, successful learners are more likely to be those who are fine-tuned to the complexities of their learning style, who are perceptive of the requirements in learning, and who have developed a range of strategies which they can apply according to their own style.

What is it then that distinguishes good learners from poor learners, or even good learning episodes from unsatisfactory learning episodes for each of our characters? It is obviously not merely the possession of a certain intelligence quotient or even a clutch of academic study skills or ‘right’ methods. What seems to be the pivot of each child’s reaction to the learning situation is his or her ability to monitor (consciously or unconsciously) the demands of the task and to respond appropriately – to recognise and manage the learning situation.

This sort of awareness involves a range of what have been termed metacognitive skills.

In short, the essential reason for the differences in the examples is that the successful learner is one who has learned how to learn. For Linda and George and the others, some of the elements in learning to learn have been taught, and other aspects they have learned for themselves. Whether taught or learned, the elements can be unproductive unless the student or pupil can bring the parts together in a coherent management of the process of learning. Learning to manage the process of learning involves being aware of what one is doing, or being able to bring one’s mental processes under conscious scrutiny and thus more effectively under control. This awareness of one’s mental processes is termed ‘metacognition’. Linda in the first example has reached the stage (nearly) of doing it intuitively; Bill writing an essay is quite unable to do it but merely adopts unquestioningly the models he has been given; while Margaret, trying to master the computer’s mode of working, is developing a clearer awareness of her own thinking (or at least will do so if she is given prompting and encouragement).

To speak of metacognition in this way, as a sophisticated awareness of one’s mental processes, seems to place it far beyond the capacity of primary school children, or indeed of most adults. Of course it can be developed to a highly sophisticated level, but as a form of awareness it accompanies all learning. As Flavell (who invented the term, ‘metacognition’) pointed out, when I realise that I am having difficulty in learning something, I have entered into metacognition. From there, it is a small step to consider why I am having difficulty, and this sensitivity to method is by no means limited to adults. But this kind of introspection cannot be constantly conscious and deliberate, or we could never learn because of thinking about learning. What is required is an early introduction to the practice of monitoring one’s learning, and the capacity to call it into play in deciding how to tackle a task. Though learning is largely intuitive, the learner should be able to move from the intuitive to the deliberate when some difficulty intervenes, stopping to consider the source of the difficulty and to select a strategy to deal with it.

The role of metacognition in learning may be compared to awareness of movement and strategies in sport. The speed, coordination and style of top athletes seem to result naturally from their fitness and agility, spontaneously, without a moment’s hesitation or thought. But the art of the coach is to make the athletes more aware of their movements and strategies and thus to obtain better control and co-ordination. The newly acquired skill then has to be practised until it becomes intuitive, though it can be retrieved into consciousness when needed.

Following this analogy, we might call metacognition ‘the seventh sense’.

Traditionally there are five senses. The phrase, ‘a sixth sense’, is often used to imply some super-sensitivity in a person’s awareness. However, the psychologists have appropriated the ‘sixth sense’ for the more mundane kinaesthetic sense, the awareness of one’s bodily movements. My seventh sense is metacognition, the awareness of one’s mental processes, the capacity to reflect on how one learns, how to strengthen memory, how to tackle problems systematically – reflection, awareness, understanding, and perhaps ultimately control, the seventh sense is a relatively undeveloped sense among people generally. (Nisbet and Shucksmith, 1984)

How do people acquire this sophistication in learning and in being aware of their mode of thinking? Can one learn how to learn? And can teachers teach how to learn?

The answer is yes, people can learn how to learn. They learn this all the time – more perhaps in childhood because there is so much to learn, but they are always learning whenever something new comes along or old routines prove ineffective: learning to focus attention, to anticipate and hypothesise, to interpret and analyse, to master by repetition and practice, to handle numbers and other abstract symbols, to make notes, to identify key points, and so on. They also learn how to put these skills together, into what we call ‘strategies of learning’. Sometimes, the strategies we learn are poor str...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Learning to learn
• 2 Learning to learn: The study skills approach
• 3 What are learning strategies?
• 4 Young learners: Knowledge and strategies
• 5 Improving understanding
• 6 In the classroom: Teaching approaches
• 7 Working with children and teachers
• 8 Learning strategies in the curriculum
• 9 Bibliography
• Index of authors
• Subject index