R3 1.1: What do students know about learning?
Summary and comments on "Training college students to use learning strategies: A framework and pilot course," and "Scheduling math practice: Students’ underappreciation of spacing and interleaving"
I’m kicking off the first Research-type post with metacognition, with two articles focused on what students know about evidence-based principles for studying, and whether they’re well-equipped to use that knowledge.
Training college students to use learning strategies: A framework and pilot course.
Citation:
McDaniel, M. A., Einstein, G. O., & Een, E. (2021). Training college students to use learning strategies: A framework and pilot course. Psychology Learning and Teaching, 20(3), 364–382.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725721989489
Paywall or Open:
Paywall
Summary:
This article describes an implementation of the “KBCP” framework, a method for promoting active, evidence-based study strategies. The framework consists of knowledge, belief, commitment, and planning components. KBCP’s strength is in ensuring that students don’t just learn about strategies (the “knowledge” component), but also see those strategies in use through interactive demonstrations, and develop their own plans to use what they’ve learned. In this project, university students completed a course with assignments that touched on all four of the KBCP components, reflecting on how they were using what they learned in this course to improve performance in other courses.
Research Question(s):
What does the KBCP framework look like in practice? What are the impacts on students of going through a course built on KBCP?
Sample: 10 first- and second-year college students
Design: Qualitative, with a focus on describing the implementation of the course
Key Findings: Students reported using fewer passive strategies and more active/generative strategies, both at the end of the course and 7 months later. Study plans and reflections generated by students revealed a number of beneficial dynamics, including students realizing the effectiveness of evidence-based strategies and changing the balance of how they spend study time in favor of the more-effective approaches.
Choice Quote from the Article:
“In light of the inherent difficulties associated with discovering effective learning strategies on one’s own, it seems particularly important to teach students powerful learning strategies and how to use them. Yet, as noted earlier, students currently receive little or no comprehensive instruction in learning strategies. Teachers tend to emphasize the acquisition of content and the development of critical thinking abilities and not learning strategies (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Moreover, teacher training rarely includes extensive instruction in learning techniques (Dunlosky et al., 2013; Pomerance et al., 2016). Even if teachers had a deep understanding of effective study strategies, there is at present a major gap in our understanding of how to teach students these strategies such that they will self-regulate their learning and spontaneously engage powerful learning strategies in appropriate situations (Manalo et al., 2018; see also Kubik et al., 2020).”
Why it Matters:
This article offers an incisive critique of what I agree is a real Achille’s heel in teaching study strategies: over-reliance on the “knowledge” facet, at the expense of the belief, commitment, and planning facets. It is all too easy to tell and not show when teaching students about effective study; encouraging them to practice or commit to using what they’re learning radically enhances the impact of this kind of material. Now that there is a rich literature in which strategies are the most effective across different content areas, along with research on how unlikely students are to know about or practice them on their own, the time is right to be looking at concrete ideas for disseminating and promoting these practices. I also appreciated that there was a fully elaborated example of a student-generated plan for putting study strategies into practice, showing how richly students might engage with the concepts when offered the opportunity to use them for courses across the curriculum that they’re completing right now.
Most Relevant For:
Psychology departments looking to add to or expand on their course offerings; first-year and student success programs; faculty interested in expanding coverage of study strategies within their courses; libraries and e-learning centers interested in building free-standing resources or mini-courses on study skills
Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:
The authors stress that this isn’t designed as an in-depth empirical investigation of impacts. Rather, the purpose is mainly descriptive, showing what a full implementation of KBCP requires and giving an account of what they learned from this first run of the KBCP-based course. They didn’t attempt to look at longer-term impacts on things such as actual course grades. Sample size is small, of course, but to me, this is offset a bit by the depth of description and the amount of data they gathered from each participant.
One question I had was how this full-length course might be compressed or otherwise adapted into a different format. Something that ran alongside other courses or that could be completed outside of the constraints of the semester could attract a wider range of students and wouldn’t compete as much with other course offerings. The authors discuss scaling and adaptation briefly but that is what I was thinking about the most after reading it.
Although this study is expressly about psychology instruction, and published in a psychology-focused journal, I don’t think this necessarily limits its application. The planning and reflection exercises asked students to use what they were learning in other courses, across disciplines. The authors also explain that they tried to select study strategies that are maximally applicable across disciplines (retrieval practice, building understanding, organization, mnemonics, generation, spacing, interleaving).
If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:
Miller, M.D., Doherty, J.J., Butler, N., & Coull, W. (2020). Changing counterproductive beliefs about attention, memory, and multitasking: Impacts of a brief, fully online module. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 34, 710-723.
Chew, S. L. (2021). An advance organizer for student learning: Choke points and pitfalls in studying. Canadian Psychology / Psychologie canadienne, 62(4), 420–427. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000290
McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (2020). Training learning strategies to promote self- regulation and transfer: The knowledge, belief, commitment, and planning framework. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(16), 1363–1381.
File under:
Study strategies; student success; applied psychology; active learning; retrieval practice; metacognition; self-regulated learning
Scheduling math practice: Students’ underappreciation of spacing and interleaving
Citation:
Hartwig, M. K., Rohrer, D., & Dedrick, R. F. (2022). Scheduling math practice: Students’ underappreciation of spacing and interleaving. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 28(1), 100–113. https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000391
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1037/xap0000391
Paywall or Open:
Paywall
Summary:
Spacing (studying in shorter sessions over time) and interleaving (alternating categories or problem types during study) are some of the best-established principles for designing study schedules. Yet students may not know how to put them into practice, and may not be aware of the benefits of doing so. Mathematics learning is an area in which these principles are both particularly applicable. Two studies examined student opinions about the best ways to sequence and structure topics and practice problems in the time leading up to a hypothetical math test. Both studies found that students preferred less-effective alternatives to spacing and interleaving, opting for schedules in which topics and problem types were blocked rather than spaced or interleaved.
Research Question(s):
When presented with hypothetical study schedules for mathematics learning, do students choose ones with spacing and interleaving? What is their level of awareness of these principles, and what beliefs underlie preferences for blocked schedules?
Sample: 368 undergraduate college students
Design: Within-subjects, in which the measure of interest was how frequently participants maximized interleaving and spacing in the study schedules they designed (Study 1) and the types of schedules they chose when presented with alternatives (Study 2). Descriptive and qualitative data were also reported for survey questions probing students’ reasoning about and perceptions of the different alternatives.
Key Findings: Participants were relatively unlikely to design study schedules that maximized spacing between topics or that interleaved problems from different topics. When presented with different options for study schedules, they tended to choose those low in spacing and interleaving. Their perceptions of the different schedule options (assessed through survey questions in Study 2) were that the optimal ones were less pleasant and not representative of typical math courses they had taken in the past.
Choice Quote from the Article:
“Students’ beliefs about the effectiveness of learning techniques like spacing and interleaving can influence their study decisions and thereby profoundly affect learning outcomes, especially when students must manage their own study (see theories of self- regulated learning, e.g., Winne & Hadwin, 1998). Indeed, college students must make many choices about when they study and how they practice, so their beliefs about learning techniques are consequential. Thus, the present research investigated college students’ beliefs about spacing and interleaving—that is, their metacognitive knowledge about these learning techniques.”
Why it Matters:
Interleaving in particular is a frequently misunderstood principle, one that’s easily misconstrued as switching back and forth between different subjects or taking lots of breaks while studying. It actually refers to alternating between different types of problems, or between categories of items you’re learning to identify, in an unpredictable fashion. Mathematics is one of the select few academic areas where interleaving is clearly applicable, and this article gives a good overview of why interleaving works and what it looks like in practice. In particular, interleaving pushes learners to grapple not just with how to solve a particular type of problem, but also with identifying and categorizing problem types as they go along. By taking away predictability about what kind of problem is coming next, interleaving ensures that students get practice in this aspect of mathematics, which in turn makes it more likely that they’ll be able to apply what they’re learning in messier, real-world situations.
The article offers fairly clear evidence of something that many of us in the field have long suspected, that students subjectively experience interleaved, spaced study as less appealing, and that they don’t have the metacognitive knowledge to realize that blocking is counterproductive. It’s also unsettling – but important – to know that these principles are rarely followed in math classes, based on the survey responses from students.
Most Relevant For:
Mathematics center faculty and staff; homework and problem set designers; instructional designers; anyone designing study skills curricula or materials
Limitations, Caveats, and Nagging Questions:
It’s important to note that the study focuses on hypothetical scenarios, not on the actual likelihood of using different approaches in practice, nor on the impacts of the approaches when they are in use. There’s a fair amount of literature documenting these impacts, so this is not necessarily a major issue, but it is a somewhat unusual feature in the realm of articles about spacing and interleaving. As the authors acknowledge, there are some fairly arbitrary choices they made about how much time the hypothetical study plans would cover, and they didn’t offer the participants many details about exactly what type of math was involved in these hypothetical plans.
If you liked this article, you might also appreciate:
Carpenter, S.K., Pan, S.C. & Butler, A.C. (2022). The science of effective learning with spacing and retrieval practice. Nature Reviews Psychology 1, 496–511). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00089-1
Bjork, R. A., Dunlosky, J., & Kornell, N. (2013). Self-regulated learning : Beliefs, techniques, and illusions. Annual Review of Psychology,64(1), 417-444. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-113011-143823
Eglington, L. G., & Kang, S. H. K. (2017). Interleaved presentation benefits science category learning. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 6(4), 475–485. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2017.07.005
File under:
Study strategies; mathematics instruction; distributed practice; spaced practice; interleaving; metacognition; self-regulated learning