Why We Need To Teach Study Skills

Despite all our efforts to teach students to revise using effective methods they often revert back to less effective methods such as copying and reading and rereading notes. Why is this, when we have told them that these techniques are less effective in the long term? This week's episode looks at 4 common reasons why students revision fails:

• Planning Fallacy
• Illusion of Fluency
• Misinterpreted-effort hypothesis
• Failure to reflect

The link to the episode about Roediger and Karpicke's research is https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/recall-or-re-read-the-research-into-retrieval-practice

The references for Misinterpreted-effort hypothesis is:

Afton Kirk-Johnson, Brian M. Galla, Scott H. Fraundorf, (2019) Perceiving effort as poor learning: The misinterpreted-effort hypothesis of how experienced effort and perceived learning relate to study strategy choice, Cognitive Psychology, Volume 115, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2019.101237.

This week the episode will be based around retrieval practice - a concept most of you will be familiar with, and if you aren’t then do take a listen to this episode which delves into the research underpinning the concept.

Many students when learning, make the error of being passive recipients of information, reading, listening, watching or copying. Whilst a few bits may stick, more information will stick if they actively reconstruct the information through some sort of recall activity. 

Today we will cover 4 retrieval concepts you will know but thinking about the why.  My hope is that this episode will perhaps reframe some of these basic ideas so that students use them even more effectively.

Just in case the link above doesn't work here it is in full to copy and paste: 

https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/recall-or-re-read-the-research-into-retrieval-practice

You know that thing, you're listening to the radio and minding your own business and a song comes on the radio and memories flood back (possibly embarrassing teenage ones!). That song is a cue to unlocking your memory - all sorts of things can be cues - smells, images, letters, words. In an exam the main cues are going to be words - specifically those in the question. If we understand that cues help us remember and that they are important at the time of learning then we can ensure that when we learn information we learn it with specific cues at the forefront of our mind. This week we consider how to leverage the theory of 'cue dependent forgetting' during revision to help us recall more when we are in an exam.

If you want to watch my very embarrassing 'Mind Palace' video here you go: https://youtu.be/l4kPShjm9mM?si=0rkcOEa4PXrLJYKv

As I mention too in the podcast I am really seeking listener feedback so please spare 2 minutes to complete this form: https://forms.gle/d3ehS8citt2NvsSy7

Finally you can find out more on this podcast: https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/cues-to-recall-0

This week we move from the practialities of starting and planning revision to the learning itself.  The focus is on how we can help students to build learning so that it is retained in long term memory. Whilst there are lots of ways to approach this today's episode focused on 3 key concepts: Levels of processing, spacing and interleaving.

I mentioned that there are several podcasts that delve into these concepts in more depth. Further information can be found here:

Levels of processing: https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/getting-stuff-to-stick-in-long-term-memory

Interleaving: https://changingstatesofmind.libsyn.com/interleaving-a-useful-learning-strategy

Finally please do fill in the podcast feedback form so I can make the content even better!

https://forms.gle/jJzpJwWDNovwAPez5

I would argue that good planning is an art or at the very least a skill that needs to learned and perfected and yet we often cut our planning teeth on a revision timetable just before we do exams. How many student's plans turn out to be too vague, over ambitious or too rigid? This week's episode explores this skill and how we can best encourage students to become effective planners: understanding what they need to get done, what the time frame is in which they need to do it and how best they can plan to suit their own context. 

If you want to watch the youtube video I made you can take a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UuJiwvfppg

What is it that motivates students to study? A few lucky people may genuinely enjoy the process of memorising facts and preparing for exams, but this is probably rare. For most people studying requires effort and despite the high stakes, the reward of good exam results (or fear of bad ones) in the distant future is not enough of a motivation when there are far more exciting and immediately rewarding things to do instead. So this week we consider how we can motivate students to engage in independent study by bringing in short term, tangible rewards.

If you want to learn more about planning the link I mention is here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/237946151500100205

In this second episode we explore why study habits may help students with independent study and how we as teachers can support students to build effective study habits. Behavioural change is really hard, as anyone who had already forgotten their new year's resolution, can attest to! There are a few key things that we can help students with if they want to build in independent learning to their schedule. We consider the role of homework in building habits, habit stacking, cueing habits and reducing friction. Finally we think about how we can help students embed behaviour change when it needs to happen outside of the classroom context. These behavioural change tips are equally applicable to other behaviours such as exercise, sleep and work, so worth a listen if you want to change your habits too! 

The two books for further reading are Wendy Wood's Good Habits, Bad Habits and James Clear's Atomic Habits.

Inherent in our educational system is the expectation that students will study independently to achieve at the higher levels.  Some students are lucky and hit on strategies that work, others flounder whilst motivated to do well they don’t know how to learn. As educators why leave the effectiveness of independent study largely up to chance when we have a whole host of excellent tools at our disposal, we need to share them with our students in a strategic and coherent way to give students the confidence to use these tools effectively in a wide range of different scenarios and ultimately to take control of their own educational success.

Welcome back to the new term of podcasts. We are starting off with an episode about wellbeing with Dr Ros McLellan from Cambridge University. We take a deep dive into exactly what wellbeing means and its impact on educational attainment. Rather than taking wellbeing as a homogenous concept this discussion considers the difference between eudaimonic and hedonic wellbeing and how they have differing impacts on educational outcomes.

You can find the original paper here:

Tania Clarke, Ros McLellan & Gordon Harold (2023) Beyond Life Satisfaction: Wellbeing Correlates of Adolescents’ Academic Attainment, School Psychology Review: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/2372966X.2023.2217980

Companion Paper: https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rev3.3393

Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory posits that an individual’s development is influenced by a series of interconnected environmental systems, ranging from the immediate surroundings (e.g., family) to broad societal structures (e.g., culture).

In this second 'takeover' Niamh and Summer, from Bootham School, ask you to think about autism and some common misconceptions - which peice of research is real and which is fake. Test your understanding in this fun podcast.