10 techniques to massively increase retention

 

 

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10 techniques to massively increase retention

via Donald Clark Plan B by Donald Clark on 28/05/10

This is the classic 'forgetting curve' by Ebbinghaus, a fundamental truth in memory theory, totally ignored by most educators and trainers. Most fixed 'courses' or 'lectures' take no notice of the phenomenon, condemning much of their effort to the world of lost memories. Most educational and training pedagogies are hopelessly inefficient because they fail to recognise this basic truth. Smart learners get it. They revise over a period, with regular doses to consolidate their memories.

Little and often

The real solution, to this massive problem of forgetfulness, is spaced practice, little and often, the regular rehearsal and practice of the knowledge/skill over a period of time to elaborate and allow deep processing to fix long-term memories. If we get this right, increases on the productivity of learning can be enormous. We are not talking small increase in knowledge and retention but increases of 200-700%. It has the potential to radically alter the attainment levels in schools, colleges, universities and organisations. OK, that's the theory, what about the practice?

What strategies enable spaced practice?

I'll start with a few 'learner' tips, then a few 'teacher/trainer' practices and end on some technical techniques.

1. Self- rehearsal – This is very powerful, but needs self-discipline. You sit quietly, and recall the learning on a regular, spaced practice basis. The hour/day/week/month model is one, but a more regular pattern of reinforcement will be more successful. Research suggests that the spacing different for individuals and that it is good to rehearse when you have a quiet moment and feel you are in the mood to reflect. Recent research has shown that rehearsal just prior to sleep is a powerful technique. Another bizarre, but effective, model is to place the textbook/notes in your toilet. It's something you do daily, and offers the perfect opportunity for repeated practice!

2. Take notes – write up your learning experience, in your own words, diagrams, analogies. This can result in dramatic increases in learning (20-30%). Then re-read a few times afterwards or type up as a more coherent piece. It is important to summarise and re-read your notes as soon as possible after the learning experience.

3. Bogging – if the learner blogs his/her learning experience after the course, then responds to the tutors', and others' comments for a few weeks afterwards, we have repeated consolidation, and the content has a much higher chance of being retained.

4. Repetition – within the course, but also at the start of every subsequent period, lesson or lecture, repeat (not in parrot fashion) the ground that was covered previously. Take five or ten minutes at the start to ask key questions about the previous content.

5. Delayed assessment – give learners exercises to do after the course and explain that you will assess them a few weeks, months after the course has finished. This prevents reliance on short-term memory and gives them a chance to consolidate their knowledge/skills.

6. Record – it is education and training' great act of stupidity, not to record talks, lectures and presentations. They give the learner subsequent access to the content and therefore spaced practice.

7. Games pedagogy – Games have powerful pedagogies. They have to as they are hard. It works through repeated attempts and failure. You only progress as your acquired competence allows. Most games involve huge amounts of repetition and failure with levels of attainment that take days, weeks and months to complete.

8. Spaced e-learning – schedule a pattern in your online learning, so that learners do less in one sitting and spread their learning over a longer period of time, with shorter episodes. Free your learners from the tyranny of time and location, allowing them to do little and often. In education this is homework and assignments, in training subsequent talks that need to be emailed back to the trainer/tutor.

9. Mobile technology – the drip feed of assessment over a number of weeks after the course or redesign the whole course as a drip-feed experience. We have the ideal device in our pockets – mobiles. They're powerful, portable and personal. Push out small chunks or banks of questions, structured so that repetition and consolidation happens. This usually involves the repeated testing of the individual until you feel that the learning has succeeded.

10. Less long holidays – it terms of public policy, increasing school results would be betters served by avoiding the long summer holiday and restructuring the school, college and University years around more regular terms and less long vacations.

Benefits

The retention benefit works like compound interest as you're building on previous learning, deepening the processing and consolidating long-term memory. It is, in my opinion, the single most effective strategic change we could make to our learning interventions.

 

 

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I Got a C on My Orgo Exam! What Should I Do?

 

 

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I Got a C on My Orgo Exam! What Should I Do?

via Study Hacks by Study Hacks on 01/04/10

Note: Though my new format focuses on publishing in-depth articles twice a month, I still reserve the right to occasionally publish one my classic-style student advice articles. 

The Pre-Med's Lament

I recently received the following e-mail:

"I've failed both of my tests in Organic Chemistry 2…I don't know what I'm doing wrong…no matter how much I review or study my class notes, nothing seems to work."

This is a familiar lament. I recently reviewed the student e-mails I've received so far in 2010, and discovered that I average around one "I failed my Orgo exam!" e-mail per week.

That's a lot of unhappy pre-meds.

I decided it was time to write a definitive answer to this common issue.  This post details my famous three-step plan for turning around a chemistry disaster.

Step #1: Reset Your Mindset

In 2002, the psychologist Carol Dweck, then at Columbia University, working with her graduate student Heidi Grant, received permission to study the students enrolled in the fall semester offering of general chemistry. Earlier research by Dweck found that most students sort into one of two mindsets: fixed versus growth. As she explained in a 2009 speech:

• "Fixed mindset students believe their intelligence is just a fixed trait…they worry about how clever they are…they don't want to take on challenges and make mistakes."
• The "growth mindset [students] think 'no,' [it's] something that you can develop."

In their Columbia study, Dweck and Grant explored how these mindsets affected performance in the chemistry classroom. Their results were striking.

As they concluded in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper describing the experiment: students with the growth mindset scored higher grades in the course and, perhaps more crucially, were much more likely to recover from a bad midterm grade to score high on the final. By contrast, once a fixed mindset student scored low, he was unlikely to escape the spiral of self-doubt that followed.

Put another way, Dweck and Grant demonstrated: pre-med courses do weed out students, but they're not culling the smart from the dumb, instead they're separating the adaptable from the non-adaptable.

(In the context of medicine,  of course, this makes a lot of sense: students who are able to adapt to novel and difficult situations, aggressively trying different strategies until finding one that works, will fare better under the pressures of med school, residency, and eventually full time medical practice.)

This research indicates that a student faced with a bad grade on his first exam must embrace the following ideas…

• This grade is a reflection of your study strategies and previous experience with this style of course.
• It has nothing to do with innate intelligence.
• It has nothing to do with the amount of time you spent studying. (A factor which is often irrelevant to academic performance.)
• Therefore: If you want to improve, you need to improve your study strategies.

TO SUMMARIZE: A bad grade doesn't mean you're lacking some mythical chemistry gene, it simply means your approach to the course is sub-par — hardly a catastrophe.

Step #2: Redesign Your Strategies

There's no magic bullet study strategy that will guarantee you an A on future exams. But there are some high-level guidelines that most successful strategies follow.

Let's start with an important law of (academic) nature that any smart plan should obey:

The Law of Mental Energy
Every concept presented in your chemistry class will require between 15 - 60 minutes of hard focus, including time spent asking clarifying questions, before you understand it well enough to ace related questions on an exam.

There's no escaping this law. This is why the standard strategy of taking haphazard notes throughout the semester, and then holing up in the library three days before the exam, is destined to fail — there's simply way more hard focus required than you can cram into such a small time frame.

Remember: hard focus is hard. You can't sidestep this hardness in a course such as chemistry. If you don't build a study plan that respects the need for this difficult work, then you're unlikely to succeed.

Here's a simple rule to help keep this respect central to your efforts:

The 48 Hour Rule
Within 48 hours of first being presented a concept, learn it well enough that you could teach it to a classroom of your peers — walking them through related sample problems while giving an insightful running commentary.

If you respect the 48 hour rule, you'll avoid the hard focus pile ups that scuttle many students' grades. This rule takes the mental labor necessitated by the law of mental energy, and spreads it throughout the semester — maximizing the chances that it all gets done.

Here are a few tactics to help make the 48 hour rule a reality…

1. Insist on active review.
   Reading highlighted notes is worthless. Stop doing it. The best way to learn material is to explain the idea out loud, as if lecturing an imaginary class, without peeking at your notes. This is mentally draining, which is why most students skip it, but that discomfort is a good thing; it's the sensation of your brain stretching to internalize the concepts.
2. Take notes in a format that's ready for active review.
   Reformatting notes is a waste of time. Take your notes in a format that's ready for active review. For example: write the sample problem clearly;  put the steps on separate lines, adding little commentary notes wherever possible; conclude with a clearly marked answer. To review this problem later, you can cover over everything below the problem and then try to recreate the steps to the answer out loud. If you falter, everything you need to improve your understanding is right there. The key is to minimize steps between the classroom and active review.
3. Ask questions immediately.
   You only have 48 hours to learn this concept, so the quicker you tackle confusions, the better. Here are five lines of defense to help make this a reality:
   • Concentrate hard in class, trying to understand the concepts as they are presented. (Remember the law of mental energy: you cannot escape hard focus, so it's better to pay off some of this mental debt while you're in the classroom.)
   • As soon as you're confused, raise your hand to ask for clarification.
   • If you're still confused, talk to the professor immediately following class.
   • If you're still confused, use your textbook to guide you, and talk to a TA or classmate for additional clarification.
   • You're final line of defense is to bring the question to office hours. Because you've already gone through the previous steps, you should be well beyond "I don't get it," and instead be able to pinpoint the specific area of confusion.
4. Schedule your review time.
   Put aside two blocks per week in your autopilot schedule for reviewing the material from the most recent class. (You are using an autopilot schedule, right?). The key is to make this studying a part of your weekly routine.

Notice, this approach requires time. It won't devour your nights or cripple your social life, but it insists that you expend reasonably-sized blocks of hard focus on a regular basis throughout the entire semester. This truth inspires an important corollary:

The Hard Schedule Corollary
If you combined organic chemistry with multiple other demanding courses, then you're an idiot.

As I've argued before, hard course schedules are giant sources of stress and difficulty that add little to no benefit. Many students labor under the misguided belief that taking a challenging course loads matters. Here's the secret: no one cares about what specific college courses you took when, or how hard your semester schedules were. They'll see your major. They'll see your GPA. And that's it. So for God's sake, drop your double major, and stop trying to take three science courses at once, you masochistic fool! There's no extra credit given for being overloaded.

TO SUMMARIZE: Learning complicated subjects requires the expenditure of lots of uncomfortable and difficult hard focus. Build a system that respects this mental labor.

Step #3: Refactor Again and Again and Again…

My canonical article on the danger of black box studying identifies a crucial question that must be answered to turn around poor performance:

Why did the students who got the top grades on this test score so much higher than me?

Ignore your instinct to brush aside the prompt with an ego-preserving answer of "they're geniuses" or "they have no social life." Really try to identify what specifically they're doing differently. Don't be afraid to ask them for details.

This simple exercise provides targeted feedback on what you're not doing that you should be doing. Without this post-mortem, you'll devolve into trying random study habits that sound sort of right and then tenaciously clinging to them as if they were there the result of divine inspiration. It means nothing that you tried something different. (So many of my e-mails start by the student noting that they tried some new note-taking strategy or review plan, as if failing with that one random approach that popped into their mind disqualifies all possible strategies from potentially helping.) What's important is that your strategies are motivated by real world observation, and are then exhaustively evaluated and tweaked.

TO SUMMARIZE: Adaptable students constantly question why they're studying the way they are, and then seek concrete feedback on whether their hypothesis is correct. They're not afraid to make informed changes, again and again and again.

(Photo by quinn.anya)

 

 

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The Types of Evidence for the ePortfolio Generated at Various Stages

 

 

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The Types of Evidence for the ePortfolio Generated at Various Stages

via Technology in (Medical) Education by Neil on 20/04/10

Educational institutions are embracing the concept of Portfolios for their students. The hope is that creating a portfolio will help the student become more reflective and introspective and help him/her become a life long learner. Thus for these institutions, the process of creating the Portfolio is probably more important that the actual content (evidence) in the portfolio.

But when this same student graduates and goes into a residency program or into practice, the hard evidence is what seems to be the most critical piece that is used in the selection/appointment process.

Thus medical schools need to develop a model for allowing the students to create their reflective portfolios but these models should also allow for export of hard evidence in a portable format that the students can take with them when they go for residency interviews. The same process then would get repeated during residency when the ACGME gets to the point of using portfolios in a more universal manner.

Thus as we think about ways for data from medical schools to be passed on to residency programs and then to other bodies like state licensing boards, we need to look at pieces of evidence from each stage of training and practice that would be relevant at the subsequent stage.

The schematic diagram above shows some of the evidence generated at each stage of education/practice.  The evidence below the horizontal line is likely the evidence that should be relevant to later stages.  We should keep this in mind as we develop models for data sharing for medical education and practice.

 

 

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Evidence-based undergraduate science education: About the Science Education...

 

 

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Evidence-based undergraduate science education: About the Science Education Initiative.

via sciencegeekgirl.com by sciencegeekgirl on 20/04/10

How do we transform undergraduate education?  That, of course, is the question of the century. We know there are problems with how undergraduate institutions are churning out students (and not cheaply, I might add) who can't explain why we have seasons, or how to light a lightbulb. Or, perhaps worse, think that science is a confusing mess of information that they'd rather leave to the eggheads in their ivory tower.

When Carl Wieman won the Nobel for making Bose-Einstein condensates (back in 2001) he poured all that money (and his not inconsiderable clout) into making a program (or two) to reform science education for undergraduates.  The result was the Science Education Initiative at the University of Colorado and University of British Columbia.  That's where I've been employed for the past 3 years, doing research on education.  Carl's vision (and that of co-director Kathy Perkins) is to support the teaching of science as a science — that is, to take what we know about how people learn and create effective education programs based on that research, and to then evaluate the effectiveness of the change.  In other words, a scholarly approach to teaching.

Their approach has been to hire postdocs with a PhD in the discipline (like me) and support their collaboration with faculty to this end.  They've just published a major article in Change magazine discussing this model, and its effects.  The results, overall, are positive:

We see an emerging culture in which faculty are adopting effective evidence-based teaching methods, collecting data on the results, and coming to see teaching as a rewarding scholarly activity (the SEIs have produced over a dozen research papers on science education). Discussions of teaching in these departments have both increased in frequency and shifted their focus from topical coverage to student learning, pedagogy, and evidence.

The assumptions of the SEI model, they say, are:

1. There is now an unprecedented opportunity to improve undergraduate teaching methods
2. Data are necessary to convince science faculty to teach differently
3. The department is the necessary unit of change
4. Reward structures need to align with change initiatives
5. More effective teaching need not take additional time or money, although the process of change requires additional resources

Read the whole article here, which includes thoughts on what has been effective, and an outline of the institutional structures required for the program.

See also Carl's earlier article in Change, "Why not try a scientific approach to education?"

The more the department as a whole has been involved and seen this as a general departmental priority, the more successful and dramatic have been the improvements in teaching.

 

 

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Fwd: Health Sciences and Practice Subject Centre e-bulletin April 2010

Dear Colleague,

 

Please find attached the April edition of the e-bulletin from the Health Sciences and Practice Subject Centre.

 

I would like to draw your attention to the following items:

 

1.  Workshop with CAIPE: Quality in Interprofessional education and collaborative practice. 7^th May 2010, Dr Andre Vyt, King's College London. For more information or book a place: http://www.health.heacademy.ac.uk/news-events/eventsbox/events2010/WPqualityIPE07052010/

 

2.  Departmental workshops applications 2010. Do you have a learning, teaching or assessment development on the back burner or urgently needs moving forward? There are still places available for the next set of workshops. Deadline: 24th May 2010. For information and application form: http://www.health.heacademy.ac.uk/news-events/newsbox/news-2010/deptworkshop2010/

 

3.  Interprofessional Education (IPE) Special Interest Group: 'Interprofessional competencies and capabilities – the professional body perspective - TBC.' 5th July 2010, Institution of Clinical Education, Warwick Medical School. Please note the date change. More details TBC: http://www.health.heacademy.ac.uk/news-events/eventsbox/events2010/ipesig05072010/   

 

More details of these events and many others are available in the e-bulletin and on our website.

 

Kind regards

 

Charles Kasule
Communications & Resources Officer

 

Health Sciences and Practice Subject Centre

3.12 Waterloo Bridge Wing, Franklin Wilkins Building, King's College London, 150 Stamford Street London, SE1 9NH

02078484266

www.health.heacademy.ac.uk  

 

10 years of enhancing Learning and Teaching

 

PHORUS Project http://phorus.health.heacademy.ac.uk/

 

Accessing e-learning resources in the NHS

 

 

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Accessing e-learning resources in the NHS

via e-LiME by Natalie on 14/04/10

Yesterday I was contributing to a staff development session for ST (specialty training) doctors and my stint was about e-learning.  I talked about content that's available on the web that can be reused and remixed under a creative commons licence and touching on the tools that support personalising learning and networked learning.  Then I had to say they probbaly wouldn't be able to access a lot of these sites for on the job teaching because the NHS denies access.  At the end of the session frustrations with the NHS IT infrastructure were raised, issues with old web browsers (IE6) old operating systems (pre XP) and the inability to access useful online resources.  These are all common complaints across different NHS Trusts and it's why many doctors are keen to have a University PC/Mac on their desk.

The problem of accessing e-learning resources is covered in a short commentary in the latest edition of Medical Education by Prince, Cass and Klaber from King's College Hospital, London (Medical Education 44 (5) p 436-7). Prince et al highlight the wealth of excellent resources that are being developed and made available but that there is a danger that enthusiastic learners will be unable to access them.  They pick up on a paper published in the same edition looking at accessibility issues in African medical schools due to infrastructure and resourcing issues but go on to draw attention to the significant access problems faced by postgraduate trainees in the NHS.

Prince and his colleagues surveyed doctors across 37 English NHS Trusts in April 2009 to assess the accessibility of online resources to postgraduate trainees.  Unfortunately I can't see the table with the results referred to in the online version but the paper indicates that many experience blanket 'internet denial' leaving them unable to access important clinical resources and download PowerPoint presentation or pdfs of journal articles.  Only 32% could access the The UK Department of Health 'E-learning for Healthcare' programme modules.  YouTube is identified as huge source of medical video content which is blocked and likewise there is no access to iTunesU.  The authors go on to say,

Whereas in Africa limited infrastructure is producing an information bottleneck, access in the UK is restricted by 'denial of service' restrictions placed upon a competent and fast modern system. Emerging Web 2.0 applications, such as wikis and blogs, provide creative and interactive learning environments within which all learners can contribute and interact, provided they are given 'write-access'. Shouldn't we be managing the risks more effectively in order to allow learners the freedom to use IT resources to better effect?

This question is how do we go about managing the risks more effectively to allow NHS staff to access online learning resources and tools which many of us take for granted.  There are understandable concerns about the security of patient information and quite rightly so, I don't think any of us would disagree that the NHS needs to diligent about this.  It's also essential that clinical systems take priority in terms of bandwidth, which is the reason sites with streaming video like YouTube and Vimeo are blocked in the NHS.  All of this said individuals working in the health professions are called to be lifelong learners and need access to educational resources which are being increasingly delivered and freely available online.

Is there any dialogue going on at a national level that is seeking to address these issues?  IT projects and the NHS don't have a good track record, but are there are steps that can be taken to separate  access to educational resources and tools from the clinical and management IT systems.  I agree with Prince and his colleagues who end their short commentary by saying,

There is an urgent need for commissioners, providers and users of e-learning materials to be jointly involved in planning how, when and where resources will be used. Without such a partnership, there is a significant risk that 'disconnection' will severely compromise what could be one of our most valuable learning tools.

How do we make this happen?

 

 

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Education is easy – in theory! [visualization]

 

 

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Education is easy – in theory! [visualization]

via dougbelshaw.com/blog by Doug Belshaw on 03/04/10

I can see now that it takes more than having passed through school as a student to understand the education system.* After all, it looks something like the diagram below, right?

Of course those who have worked in educational institutions know that the above is far from the truth. Instead of, for example, research being the bedrock of all that goes on, it is marginalized and distorted. The issues** along the lines linking the elements together show how it's a messy picture – not in itself a bad thing – and it's distorted by politics (which is a bad thing)

* Not that you'd know that from talking to your average member of the general public!

** N.B. The reason I didn't add 'time' as a factor in the second diagram is because, as I've said to a few people this week, time itself isn't an issue. It's priorities – which is a different matter.

 

 

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