Mind Matters -  October 20, 2009
Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn

New research makes the case for hard tests, and suggests an unusual
technique that anyone can use to learn
By Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn
For years, many educators have championed "errorless learning,"
advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do
not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill
students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very
little delay between the first and second presentations of the
problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time.
The idea embedded in this approach is that if students make errors,
they will learn the errors and be prevented (or slowed) in learning
the correct information. But research by Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays
and Robert Bjork at U.C.L.A. that recently appeared in the Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition reveals that
this worry is misplaced. In fact, they found, learning becomes better
if conditions are arranged so that students make errors.
People remember things better, longer, if they are given very
challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to
fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an
unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an
answer, they remember the information better than in a control
condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and
failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning. It's
an idea that has obvious applications for education, but could be
useful for anyone who is trying to learn new material of any kind.
In one of their experiments, students were required to learn pairs of
"weak associates," words that are loosely related such as star-night
or factory-plant. (If students are given the first word and asked to
generate an associate, the probability of generating the target word
is only 5 percent.) In the pretest condition, students were given the
first word of the pair (star- ???) and told to try to generate the
second member that they would have to later remember. They had 8
seconds to do so. Of course, almost by definition, they nearly always
failed to generate the correct answer. They might generate bright in
the case of star-???. At that point they were given the target pair
(star–night) for 5 seconds. In the control condition, students were
given the pair to study for 13 seconds, so in both conditions there
were a total of 13 seconds of study time for the pair.
The team found that students remembered the pairs much better when
they first tried to retrieve the answer before it was shown to them.
In a way this pretesting effect is counterintuitive: Studying a pair
for 13 seconds produces worse recall than studying the pair for 5
seconds, if students in the latter condition spent the previous 8
seconds trying to retrieve or guess the answer. But the effect
averaged about 10 percent better recall, and occurred both immediately
after study and after a delay averaging 38 hours.
Some readers may look askance at the use of word pairs, even though it
is a favorite tactic of psychologists. In another article, in the
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, Lindsey Richland, Nate
Kornell and Liche Kao asked the same question, but they used more
educationally relevant text material (an essay on vision). Students
were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in
the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage
before reading it such as "What is total color blindness caused by
brain damage called?" Asking these kinds of question before reading
the passage obviously focuses students' attention on the critical
concepts. To control this "direction of attention" issue, in the
control condition students were either given additional time to study,
or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in
one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding
the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies.
However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having
students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same
magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.
This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging
ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall.
Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give
yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own.
Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the
textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter.
(If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions.
If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is
Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the
questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to
the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy
that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer
the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice
up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have
learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it
long after you have left the course.
Of course, these are general-purpose strategies and work for any type
of material, not just textbooks. And remember, even if you get the
questions wrong as you self-test yourself during study the process is
still useful, indeed much more useful than just studying. Getting the
answer wrong is a great way to learn.

Source: Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong&sc=MND_20091029