Research Finds Students Short on Study Savvy

Education Week:

Students are least likely to choose to test themselves while studying, although it has been shown to be the most effective study strategy, according to researchers here at the Association for Psychological Science conference.

“It’s a remarkable feature of our educational system that we give students so much stuff to learn and rarely tell them how to go about learning that stuff,” said Purdue University psychologist Jeffrey D. Karpicke. “Learners tend to think of ‘how do I get all this stuff into my head?’ and they don’t spend much time considering how they will get all of that stuff back out of their heads when the time comes to retrieve it. If you use effective strategies, you can spend less time studying and learn more; you stop wasting time in studying and get more out of it.”

While K-12 educators often argue that students are tested too much in U.S. schools, research from the Memory Lab at Washington University in St. Louis has found that repeated attempts to recall information, either during a class quiz or by the students quizzing themselves or each other, can cause students to remember as much as twice the information, both facts and concepts, as other study habits.

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