Biology Leadership Conference Community Webinar October 26, 2011

1. How What We Know About Human Memory Can Help All Students LearnRobert A. BjorkUniversity of California, Los Angeles Biology Leadership Conference Community Webinar October 26, 2011

2. The human memory system is characterized by … • A remarkable symbiosis of forgetting, learning, and remembering • Forgetting, rather than undoing learning, enables learning and focuses remembering; • Remembering creates learning and produces forgetting; • Learning begets remembering, contributes to forgetting, and enables new learning. Bjork (2011)

3. But human memory also characterized by equally remarkable misunderstandings of the system … • By its users • We carry around a flawed mental model of how we learn and remember, or fail to learn and remember • Our judgments of whether we have learned and will remember later are unreliable; • We are subject to illusions of comprehension; • We manage our own learning in far-from-optimal ways • And our misunderstandings are coupled with counterproductive societal attitudes and assumptions about how people learn • We appear not, surprisingly, to be informed by the trials and errors of everyday living and learning

4. A fundamental problem we confront: • Conditions of instruction that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, …whereas • Conditions of instruction that appear to create difficulties for the learner, slowing the rate of apparent learning, often optimize long-term retention and transfer

5. Examples of manipulations that introduce “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994) for the learner • Varying the conditions of learning • Distributing or spacing study or practice sessions • Using tests (rather than presentations) as learning events • Providing “contextual interference” during learning (e.g., interleaving rather than blocking practice)

6. The word desirable is important … • Many difficulties are undesirable during learning, after learning, and forever after • Desirable difficulties are desirable because responding to them (successfully) engages processes that support learning, comprehension, and remembering • They become undesirable difficulties if the learner is not equipped to respond to them successfully. • Generation effects as an example.

7. Study in Room A Tested Room C Study in Room A Study in Room B Tested Room C Variation example: Even varying the environmental context of learning matters(Smith, Glenberg, & Bjork, 1978) Tested in Room A  Study in Room A Tested in Room B 

8. Distributing or spacing study or practice sessions: the spacing effect • Example: Baddeley and Longman (1979) P1 P2 Test > Test P1 P2

9. Distributing/Spacing of Practice Baddeley & Longman (1979)

10. Tests versus presentations as learning events • Testing as pedagogy versus testing as assessment • Retrieving information or procedures is a learning event • The information/procedures recalled become more recallable in the future than they would have been otherwise; • It is substantially more powerful event than is being presented the information (inflatable life vest example) • Tests provide far better feedback as to what has or has not been learned/understood (vs. presentations) • Tests potentiate the effectiveness of subsequent study

11. Example of the power of tests as learning events • Roediger and Karpicke (2006) • To-be-learned text passage on the sun or on sea otters (about 30 idea units per passage) • Three conditions • SSSS: four consecutive 5-min study periods • SSST: three study period plus a test of recall for the passage • STTT: one study period plus four consecutive tests of recall for the passage

12. Roediger & Karpicke (2006)

13. Roediger & Karpicke (2006)

14. Roediger & Karpicke (2006)

15. Providing “contextual interference” during learning • Interleaving rather than blocking practice • Motor skills, such as hitting baseballs, serving in badminton (e.g., Simon and Bjork, 2001) • Learning formulas: Rohrer and Taylor (2007) • Children’s penmanship: Ste-Marie, Clark, Findlay, & Latimer (2004) • Inducing categories and concepts (Kornell & Bjork, 2008)

16. Simon & Bjork (2001)

17. Simon & Bjork (2001) Actual High Error score Random Low Blocked Practice 24hrs

18. Actual Predicted Retention High Random Error score Random Low Blocked Practice 24hrs Practice 24hrs

19. Actual Predicted Retention High Error Random Random Low Blocked Blocked Practice 24hrs Practice 24hrs

20. Rohrer & Taylor (2007) Wedge V= Spheroid V= Spherical Cone V= Half Cone V=

21. Mixed Blocked Mixed Blocked Practice Final Test

22. Blocked versus interleaved practice Ste-Marie, Clark, Findlay, & Latimer (2004)

23. Optimizing induction • The ability to generalize concepts and categories through exposure to multiple exemplars.

24. Gentoo

25. Where’s the Gentoo?

26. Hypothesis (Kornell & Bjork, 2008): Induction is one situation where massing is superior to spacing • Blocking/massing allows the learner to notice characteristics that unify a category • Interleaving/spacing makes doing so difficult Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo Gentoo Lachesis Reinhard Gentoo

27. Lewis

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33. Lewis Lewis Lewis Lewis Lewis Lewis Pessani Wexler Schlorff Stratulat Juras Mylrea Juras Schlorff Pessani Mylrea Wexler Stratulat Hawkins Hawkins Hawkins Hawkins Hawkins Hawkins M S S M M S S M M S S M

34. Test Feedback

36. Results Actual Responses

37. Differentiation hypothesis • Original hypothesis: Blocking/massing highlights similarities • New hypothesis: Interleaving/spacing highlights differences Lewis Lewis Lewis Lewis Lewis Schlorff Hawkins Lewis

38. Desirable-difficulties findings: Implications for the design of instruction? • Variation? • Interleaving? • Spacing? • Using tests/generation as learning events?

39. Desirable-difficulties findings: Implications for the evaluation of instruction? • Students’ evaluation of teaching? • Trainees completing “happy” or “smile” sheets in industry? • Students expectations as to how courses should be taught?

40. Finally, what do college students know and not know about how to study? • Survey of 472 introductory-psychology students at UCLA • The Promise and Perils of Self-regulated Study (Kornell & Bjork, 2007)

41. How do you decide what to study next?

42. If you quiz yourself while you study (either using a quiz at the end of a chapter, or a practice quiz, or flashcards, or something else), why do you do so?

46. Enhancing education • If students do not tend to engage in the learning activities that produce durable and flexible learning, • the fault is primarily ours; • who among us, during our student days, would have answered those survey questions differently? • We need to structure courses, curricula, requirements, and activities to engage the processes that enhance learning, comprehension, and knowledge integration • Doing so requires, among other things, adopting the student’s perspective • Newton (1990) as a parable of teaching

49. Piaget (1962) “Every beginning instructor discovers sooner or later that his first lectures were incomprehensible because he was talking to himself, so to say, mindful only of his point of view. He realizes only gradually and with difficulty that it is not easy to place one’s self in the shoes of students who do not yet know about the subject matter of the course.”

50. Attitudes, assumptions, and misconceptions that impede effective learning • Misunderstanding the meaning and role of errors • Errors, rather than being viewed as an essential component of effective training, are assumed to reflect inadequacies of the instructor, the student, or both • Over-attributing differences in performance to innate differences in ability • Aptitude is over-appreciated; • The power of training, practice, and experience is under-appreciated • Assuming that efficient learning is easy learning • The styles-of-learning idea