The original title of this blog was going to be "why are students so bad at learning?" But I felt this was unfair - students are no different to us. It's just that if we are learning, it probably isn't in such an overtly "learning" based setting like a school. In truth, we're likely to fall into the same traps as our students; the difference is that for us there are implications for us and them. In order to unpack this, we want to first define what we mean by learning:
Learning … [is] the more or less permanent change in knowledge or understanding. *
The key takeaway here is the idea of permanence. This has crucial implications on our, and students' own, judgements of student learning. If students get something right at the end of a lesson, it's difficult to say whether that information has been learnt because they haven't necessarily demonstrated a permanent change in knowledge. Getting a question about that material correct some months after it has been taught, without help, would be pretty difficult if there hadn't been some sort of permanent change in knowledge. So we could be more confident in our judgements of learning in the latter scenario. This then leads us into one of the biggest factors that makes learning so difficult - how we judge success.
Lots of success ≠ Lots of learning
Students love to cram. In fact, we probably all do. We inherently know that cramming isn't a) sustainable and b) helpful in the long term, but we do it nonetheless. A big reason is because cramming leads to a lot of success. We're able to recall close to 100% of what we've just looked at, we get it correct, and getting it correct makes us feel good - who wouldn't want to feel good?! In reality it's likely we've been lulled us into a false sense of security. This seems counter-intuitive: how could getting close to 100% of the material correct not be good for us?
The answer: these gains are very short lived. I'm sure most if not all us can relate to cramming for an exam and then being able to recall little to none of that information a few days after we've sat the exam.
We mistakenly conflate easily recallable material with well learnt material.
This phenomenon also seems to quite particular to studying: when we're learning how to play a sport or instrument it would be absurd to rely on cramming our practice! We inherently understand that we need to regularly practice (little and often) in order to improve and build on what we're learning, but this approach is rarely taken with studying. This leads us to the final question we're going to unpack today - why is this the case?
The Cycles of Studying
Students use a strategy like cramming, they find it fairly easy because they get things right, and even when they don't they'll quickly be able to fix this, so they feel like they're learning. So the use of this strategy positively reinforces itself each time its used - students see success, feel good, and attribute that good feeling to the strategy they've just used making it more likely that they'll use the same strategy in future! This gives us the "Virtuous Cycle of Studying":
In contrast, strategies that help actual learning like spaced practice (the opposite of cramming) have the exact opposite impact: they're really hard, we get things wrong, so we feel like we're not learning as much and the use of those strategies is negatively reinforced:
So the reason we're really bad at using more beneficial strategies is quite logical: why would we actively choose the strategies that are harder, result in less success, and don't make us feel as good?!
We could try and encourage our students towards the more effective strategies, but we'll be battling against some pretty strong emotional reinforcement. It's a tall order to get students to consistently avoid taking the easy route that leads to more success, and go for the harder route that leads to more failure. Instead we want to incorporate these ideas and their implications into our own teaching. In short, we want to make sure we're practicing what we preach.
* Bjork, E.L. & Bjork, R.A. (2011) “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning”