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and for longer. For example, imagine that you have to study for two exams within the same assessment period. Perhaps you have a research methods exam on one day, and an exam about social psychology the next. Intuitively, it might make sense to study in blocks, spending one day revising research methods, and the next revising social psychology. However, Dunlosky suggests that it is far more effective to mix up your study, using a technique known as interleaved practice, so that in each study session, you study a little on each topic. This can work even within a topic; for example, if your research methods exam will test your ability to carry out several different statistical tests, and to design experiments, it is a good idea to study one of the statistical tests, then some aspect of experimental design, and then a different statistical test. In changing between topics, as you move back to a topic that you previously left behind, you must retrieve the information from your long-term memory again, and as we saw with testing, and with distributed practice, the process of retrieving a memory seems to help to consolidate it. Moving between topics also seems to help us to solve problems using the information we’ve learned, which is particularly useful if the assessment we are taking requires us to apply our knowledge to new situations (for example, having to design a new experiment ourselves, or carry out a statistical test on new data). Based on Dunlosky’s review, it seems that cognitive psychological principles can indeed help us to learn. We’ve seen that study techniques that require elaborative processing, such as self- explanation, summarising and elaborative interrogation, can help us to remember information, so long as we do them well. Tasks that encourage us to retrieve memories repeatedly, such as distributed practice, interleaved practice, and testing, can help us to consolidate our learning, especially if we spread out learning over a longer time, rather than cramming just before an exam. These different techniques resemble deep approaches to learning, discussed earlier in this chapter, in that they rely on us engaging with the meaning of the material we are learning in some way. In contrast, highlighting text and mnemonic techniques are less useful, and only seem to work well for rote learning factual information. As such, these techniques seem to promote surface learning approaches, because they are less focused on meaning, and as such involve less elaborative processing, so they are less useful for studying at university, where conceptual understanding is needed. Of course, using different techniques in combination will help you to engage in both distributed and interleaved practice, and will also encourage you to elaboratively process the ideas you are learning about in lots of different ways!

Activity

At the start of this section, I asked you what techniques you use when you study.

Refer back to your notes, and for each study technique you mentioned, add a comment about whether the technique is likely to be helping you to learn, and whether it is likely to support you in taking a deep learning approach, based the information provided above.

Now read the following article:

Dunlosky, J. (2013). Strengthening the student toolbox: Study strategies to boost learning. American Educator. Available to download from: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/dunlosky.pdf.

© Oxford University Press, 2020