How to Make the Lesson Stick

Let’s watch two friends using flashcards to prepare for a vocabulary test in their Chinese course. 

Anna studies the words and tests herself. Once she knows a word, she stops testing herself on it but continues to re-read the word to keep it fresh in her mind. Her friend Bella stops studying vocabulary she knows well but keeps retesting herself on all the words. Who performs better on the test?

If you chose Bella, you’re right. Anna did what many of our students do when they “study”: she focused on reviewing, while Bella focused on repeatedly retrieving words from memory through self-testing.

Both students were using the same study tools to prepare for the test, but they used very different levels of mental effort.

As Roediger and McDaniel state when they review the studies on which this anecdote is based, “We’re easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it’s easier, but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks better” (2014, p. 43). 

We can teach effortful retrieval in our classes by pushing students to use what they’ve initially committed to memory. Use of learned material is a much more involved form of retrieval than simply recalling information.

For example, rather than ask students to restate the biggest cybersecurity threats listed in the chapter they read for homework, require them to activate what they’ve learned with a task like this: “Rank these five cybersecurity threats from most to least worrisome for national security and explain why you ranked them that way.” The mental work this task requires will increase the likelihood that the learning will last. 

Let's listen in on Anna’s friend Carlos reading his oceanography textbook: “Here’s the section on currents and tides and coastal processes. Okay, that makes sense! Here’s some more information in this graph. I got it! This stuff is pretty easy.”

Carlos, like Anna in the scenario above, is passively encountering well-organized information and decidedly not encountering his own understanding of that information. It may seem counterintuitive, but excellent lectures, well-written textbooks, and beautifully-organized notes can actually impede learning and remembering.

Because the presentation makes sense as they passively read, listen, or write, weaker students feel confident in their conceptual understanding when in fact they have not questioned or explored the content. Roediger and McDaniel warn us that this kind of unfounded confidence or illusion of knowing will actually prevent students like Carlos from doing the cognitive work that will help them regulate their learning more fully. 

We can have students work more effectively by having them spend more time confronting their misconceptions so they can monitor and adjust their own learning - and less time passively taking in well-organized presentations of information. Consider how much thinking (and evaluating of their thinking) students like Carlo will have to do to work on this problem:  

At which location in the diagram would the waves break closer to the beach? A, B, or C?* 

At first, students accustomed to being passive will resist tasks that surface their mistakes and misconceptions because it doesn’t feel like learning to them, but as teachers we must persist in the work of dispelling illusions of knowing. Their resistance reveals yet another important set of confusions about learning and memory. 

Let’s follow Anna into her child development course. Her professor is introducing the concept of resilience with a short documentary about migrant farmworkers and their family life.

After they watch the film, he asks students to respond individually and then in groups to this prompt: “The families interviewed discussed four needs: higher wages, childcare, access to quality schooling, and more time together as a family. Choose which two of these needs we should address to best ensure the healthy development of the children. Why?”

Anna is confused, thinking angrily, “Why do we have to do this? We haven’t even read the chapter on families! I wish he would just tell us what he wants us to know.”

Like many of our students, Anna’s experience has shown her that teaching starts with students passively receiving foundational facts, and only after those facts have been “covered” will they be asked to act on what they’ve learned.  

We can reverse this expectation - and help our students become better learners - by teaching with tasks that force students to generate understanding. Roediger and McDaniel emphasize the power of the “generation effect,” which is the phenomenon of remembering and understanding something well when it’s generated from our own efforts instead of being presented to us.

Why does this counterintuitive approach work so well? When we begin to activate and explore our prior knowledge on a new topic, we prepare the cognitive resources that we have and that we’ll need to make sense of that new topic.

We also become aware of what we don’t know or understand and are particularly receptive to information and solutions when they are presented. And as Roediger and McDaniel write, “the more that you can elaborate on how new learning relates to what you already know, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create to remember it later” (2014, p. 208).

So Anna’s professor is on the right track when he asks his students to begin making some meaningful decisions before they have all the information. However, as we’ll see next, this approach doesn’t come naturally. 

Anna comes home to find her roommate, Dorrie, bragging about the B she made on her biology test. She was up all night before the test writing out definitions again and again, moving chapter by chapter through the unit on cell biology in her textbook.

Although Dorrie made a good grade on the test, her efforts will not produce lasting or meaningful learning.

Psychologists Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork explain that students like Dorrie confuse performance (how they do on an exam the day after an all-night cram session) and learning (long-lasting understanding that can transfer to new and varied contexts over time).

Cramming the night before a test tempts students, especially when it leads to good grades. They do not, however, recognize that “conditions that create challenges and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimize long-term retention and transfer” (Bjork & Bjork, 2011, p. 57). In fact, the study strategies that help them perform well in the short term may not lead to learning. 

We can help students develop better strategies by interleaving topics throughout our courses. Students tend to see learning as a process that moves in a linear fashion from one topic to the next, in part because this is how traditional courses are structured. However, Roediger and McDaniel’s review of the research suggests that interleaving topics and distributing student practice will lead to better retention. 

Interleaving means moving back and forth between topics or concepts throughout the semester, switching to new topics before students fully understand the topic they are currently working on.

This counterintuitive approach more accurately reflects the complex nature of conceptual relationships in our disciplines.

When we structure our courses so that students encounter and grapple with key concepts throughout the semester, we help them create more meaningful connections to the material by asking them to repeatedly confront and modify their understanding of topics.

This means that instead of testing students on cell biology once, which can encourage cramming, Dorrie’s biology instructor should require students to continue retrieving and using concepts from cell biology throughout the course.