A Concise Guide to Improving Student Learning

Six Evidence-Based Principles and How to Apply Them

Diane Cummings Persellin, Mary Blythe Daniels

• Publisher: Stylus Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781620360910
• eBook ISBN: 9781620360941
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

This concise guidebook is intended for faculty who are interested in engaging their students and developing deep and lasting learning, but do not have the time to immerse themselves in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Acknowledging the growing body of peer-reviewed literature on practices that can dramatically impact teaching, this intentionally brief book: * Summarizes recent research on six of the most compelling principles in learning and teaching
* Describes their application to the college classroom
* Presents teaching strategies that are based on pragmatic practices
* Provides annotated bibliographies and important citations for faculty who want to explore these topics further This guidebook begins with an overview of how we learn, covering such topics such as the distinction between expert and novice learners, memory, prior learning, and metacognition. The body of the book is divided into three main sections each of which includes teaching principles, applications, and related strategies – most of which can be implemented without extensive preparation.The applications sections present examples of practice across a diverse range of disciplines including the sciences, humanities, arts, and pre-professional programs. This book provides a foundation for the reader explore these approaches and methods in his or her teaching.

1

DEEPER LEARNING AND BETTER RETENTION

Great teachers [are] those people with considerable success in
fostering deep approaches and results among their students.

—Ken Bain and James Zimmerman (2009)

Deep learning involves the critical analysis of new ideas,
linking them to already known concepts and principles
so that this understanding can be used for problem
solving in new, unfamiliar contexts.

—Julian Hermida (n.d.)

Chapter 1 examines three research-based principles for teaching and learning: (a) desirable difficulties, or requiring students to work harder in the initial learning period; (b) repetition; and (c) emotion in teaching and learning. In each section we share teaching applications. The workshops, or best practices, shaded in gray address concept maps and community-based learning (CBL).

Principle 1: Desirable Difficulties Increase Long-Term Retention

We often seek to eliminate difficulties in learning, to our own detriment.

—Jeff Bye (2011)

According to the pain is the gain.

—Ben Hei Hei, Ethics of the Fathers, 5:21 (220 CE)

Requiring students to organize new information and to work harder in the initial learning period can lead to greater and deeper learning. Although this struggle, dubbed a desirable difficulty by investigator R. A. Bjork (1994), may at first be frustrating to learner and teacher alike, ultimately it improves long-term retention. For example, the research of Rohrer and Taylor (2007) revealed that increased challenges during a math class produced better long-term performance. The authors instructed subjects how to find the volume of four geometric figures. Group 1 was taught how to find the volume of only one figure, while group 2 was taught several different types of problems. Although initially the second group performed worse in practice sessions, after a week delay they outperformed the first group on tests, answering 63% of the questions correctly compared to only a 20% correct response rate from group 1.

In the short term, conditions that make learning more challenging—such as generating words instead of passively reading them, varying conditions of practice, transferring knowledge to new situations, or learning to solve multiple types of math problems at once—might slow down performance. However, there is a yield in long-term retention. At first the learner may make more errors or forget an important process,

but it is this forgetting that actually benefits the learner in the long term; relearning forgotten material takes demonstrably less time with each iteration. The subjective difficulty of processing disfluent information can actually lead learners to engage in deeper processing strategies, which then results in higher recall for those items. (Bye, 2011)

By forcing the brain to create multiple retrieval paths, a desirable difficulty makes the information more accessible. If we can use information in multiple ways and multiple contexts, we build many pathways to memory; thus, if one pathway is blocked, we can use another.

These difficulties invite “a deeper processing of material than people would normally engage in without explicit instruction to do so” (Bjork, 1994). However, teaching with desirable difficulties can be challenging. Learners, of course, are gratified when they feel that they are processing information easily. Instructors understandably want learning to come quickly for students and may choose the method that produces immediate results. However, as Bye (2011) states, when “instructors facilitate learning by making it easier, it may increase short-term performance, but it may decrease long-term retention.” Bjork (2013) suggests that once instructors decide what they want students to remember a year after their course is over, they then think about how to implement desirable difficulties into their course. This may mean introducing an important concept multiple times in different ways throughout the semester, making the important class concepts relevant to other course material (see Principle 3: Emotion and Relevance Deepen Learning, p. 15), and asking students to analyze and produce knowledge, rather than listen to the instructor present it (see chapter 2, “Actively Engaged Learning,” p. 23).

Instructional Applications

Quiz Students

Quiz students on material rather than having them simply restudy or reread it (Karpicke & Blunt, 2011; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006). Even if quizzes are low-stakes assessments, they force students to generate information rather than passively read (see Principle 6: Formative Assessment or Low-Stakes Evaluation Strengthens Retention, p. 43).

Generate Knowledge

Ask learners to generate target material through an active, creative process, rather than simply by reading passively. This could involve role playing, structured debates, puzzles, or scientific study (McDaniel & Butler, 2010; see chapter 2, “Actively Engaged Learning,” p. 23).

Space Practice Sessions

Have students rehearse or practice important skills during different sessions. Dempster and Farris (1990) and Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, and Rohrer (2006) found that when sessions were spaced further apart, students were more likely to retain material (see Principle 2: Meaningful and Spaced Repetition Increases Retention, p. 12).

Allow for Confusion

When a concept is difficult, allow students to experience and work their way through their frustration. When students are able to resolve their initial confusion themselves, deeper learning takes place.

Challenge the Reader

When learners perceive that material is more difficult to read, they tend to read it with more care and process it more deeply (McNamara, Kintsch, Songer, & Kintsch, 1996). Studies suggest that even using fonts that are slightly more difficult to read affects engagement and processing (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007; Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011; Yue, Castel, & Bjork, 2013).

Wait for an Answer

Allowing time to think between asking a question and requiring an answer gives students the opportunity to better formulate their answers and, therefore, increases the depth of answers. It also lets students know the instructor will not be answering his or her own questions.

Interleave Material

Teach several skills or concepts in the same class rather than focusing on only one specific idea.

Create Concept Maps

Ask students to create a concept map. This requires them to generate relationships based on the class discussions or readings (see Workshop 1.1: Concept Maps).

Annotated Research Studies

Dempster, F., & Farris, R. (1990). The spacing effect: Research and practice. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 23(2), 97–101.

In this study investigators found that spaced instruction yielded significantly better learning than massed presentations. Two spaced presentations were nearly twice as effective as two massed presentations. In many cases effectiveness increased as the frequency of the presentations increased.

Diemand-Yauman, C., Oppenheimer, D., & Vaughan, E. (2011). Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition, 118(1), 111–115. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.012

This article reports the results of two studies examining the impact on learning of a font that is slightly more difficult to read. Both studies found that information in harder-to-read fonts was better remembered than information shared in easier-to-read fonts. The struggle to read the material was thought to contribute to deeper processing.

Karpicke, J., & Blunt, J. (2011). Retrieval practice produces more learning than elaborative studying with concept mapping. Science, 331(6018), 772–775. doi:10.1126/science.1199327

Two hundred college students were divided into four groups and asked to read several paragraphs about a scientific topic. Each group performed one of the following learning strategies: (a) reading the text for 5 minutes, (b) reading the text in four consecutive 5-minute sessions, (c) drawing diagrams about information from the excerpt they were reading, and (d) reading the passage once and taking a “retrieval practice test” that required them to write down what they recalled. A week later all four groups took a quiz asking them to recall facts from the passage they had read and to draw conclusions on the basis of those facts. The students in the fourth group, who took the practice test, recalled 50% more of the material than those in the other three groups. The investigators concluded that by organizing and creating meaningful connections, struggling to remember information, and identifying areas of weakness, students were able to better recall information.

McDaniel, M., Hines, R., Waddill, P., & Einstein, G. (1994). What makes folk tales unique: Content familiarity, causal structure, scripts, or superstructures? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20(1), 169–184.

Investigators asked students to generate new material by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• TitlePage
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Michael Reder
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Knowing About Learning Informs Our Teaching
• 1 Deeper Learning and Better Retention
• 2 Actively Engaged Learning
• 3 Assessment
• Appendix A: Course Design Workshops
• Appendix B: Workshop on Lectures and Mini-Lectures
• Appendix C: Workshop on Classroom Discussions
• Bibliography
• Index
• AddPage
• Back Cover