The Long Game
I’m in the middle of our teaching semester right now, and the question first year students keep asking me is “how should I be studying?”.
I’m a microbiologist - not a behavioural or cognitive psychologist - so I decided to do some googling before giving out any “unqualified” advice. I expected to find a mess of competing learning theories, but on YouTube there appeared to be two “universally” agreed upon studying techniques – Active Recall and Spaced Repetition.
In a nutshell Active Recall is doing practice tests. The more often we actively recall or retrieve information by testing ourselves, the more likely we are to remember it. Spaced repetition involves revisiting a topic repeatedly over an extended period of time, and strategically revising easy topics less frequently than harder topics. Both active recall and spaced repetition are trying to slow down the rate at which we forget newly acquired information – by actively testing ourselves again and again and spacing out these quizzes to focus on the hardest content. It can work even better if you can write your own questions and test yourself before and after each revision session.
Both Active Recall and Spaced Repetition are targeted towards remembering large volumes of information. It’s not a shortcut, and actually take a lot of effort to maintain over an extended period of time. Teachers don’t talk about these techniques because we know memorising is not the same as learning. In science, you simply can’t memorise everything because the knowledge is always changing. Bloom’s taxonomy presents a framework that facilitates our conceptualisation of different learning goals. It outlines 6 educational goals, from simple to complex, with remembering or memorising - being the simplest of all. As the complexity increases, students need to be able to apply existing information towards new situations, analyse connections between ideas, evaluate different approaches, and ultimately create new knowledge.
Bloom’s Taxonomy - a framework for understanding the complexity of learning goals
Can answering the same problems again and again help us apply the information towards new situations, or will our thinking be confined by the parameters of these problems? Will our judgement be clouded by the Dunning-Kruger effect – we don’t know what we don’t know, irrespective of our confidence levels – and compromise our ability to connect new ideas together or evaluate strategies we’ve never heard of?
And that is why teachers don’t force students to adopt active recall or spaced repetition. We’re not trying to create graduates with perfect memorisation techniques, we’re trying help students play the long game - learn higher-order cognitive skills to create new knowledge and innovation. Of course teachers fall short of this goal more often than we’d like, and this is just as big a problem for us as it is for students. Even if our courses have complex learning objectives higher up on Bloom’s taxonomy, our final exams still tend to reward lower-level learning and raw memorisation.
What all of this tells me actually is that teachers need to up our game. Focus more on core threshold concepts to incentivise higher-order learning rather than vast amounts of content. Designing classes, writing lectures, creating tutorials all work best with a solid pedagogical foundation and it still takes a lot of training and experience to get it right.
Jack.
