Learning is hard, Dan Willingham tells Laura McKenna. It takes effort. But motivated students can learn effective learning and study skills. A University of Virginia psychology professor, Willingham is the author of a new book, Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.
Cramming the night before the test with music playing in the background is not effective, says Willingham. Writing down everything the teacher says? Also not effective. Highlighting everything that seems important in the textbook? If you're a beginner, you'll highlight the wrong things.
He tells students how to analyze a lecture, read a complex text and take useful notes and the importance of avoiding distractions (your brain is not good at multi-tasking) and quizzing yourself. Multiple study sessions work best.
"This message — you have to work hard to perform better and be successful — is subtly subversive," writes McKenna. "I’ve been to countless school presentations where the superintendent or another school leader told parents that students no longer need to know things, because all facts are easily found on Wikipedia." (Been there. Heard that.)
"Education nihilism — the belief that students no longer need to know things — is responsible for dumbing down schools for millions of children and is partly to blame for the massive college dropout numbers," she writes.
Study skills should be integrated into classes starting in middle school, Willingham believes.
Outsmarting Your Brain "is chock-full of useful, specific, and concrete advice" for students, but following it will not be easy, writes Stephen M. Kosslyn, an emeritus psychology professor at Harvard who's now president and CEO of Active Learning Sciences, Inc. and chief academic officer of Foundry College.
Tips 1 and 21 ask students to "analyze a lecture into a hierarchical structure," while Tip 28: is to "write a summary and about three statements for each of a book’s headings" and Tip 56 calls for categorizing exam mistakes, writes Kosslyn. Many students will give up before they start.
To use all of the advice in this book, the reader would need to be highly motivated to learn, have a lot of energy, be very organized and focused, and have a lot of time. For example, the author recommends that students meet with a study group to discuss what will probably be on the exam, then create encyclopedic individual study guides, then meet again (perhaps 48 hours before an exam) to quiz each other (Tip 38); this is no doubt a good idea but not realistic for many students.
What's hard at first can become fun, Willingham writes. I think confusion is exhausting and understanding is satisfying.
Dragging Emmanuel Goldstein into a topic about study habits?
Oh, and the whole "If you REALLY CARED about..." opening is well described as a deliberate attack by Dr Suzette Haden Elgin, (PhD, not MD) in her series of books starting with "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense" This phrase isn't even a "micro" aggression. It's an full blown attack, a hostile opening to a preset sequence of strikes intended less to influence a decision or even win an argument, but to belittle, degrade, and destroy another person AND the ideas they might be interested in.
Being interested in academic education, I have very little time or patience for verbal bullies and woke scolds. Take your concerns about deficiencies i…
The course if AFrican-American studies not African-American history. And there is a large amount of writing about the intersection of the treatment of African-Americans versus the treatment of homosexual/nonbinary/queer/trans African Americans.
Remember, the point of the course is to get credit for an African-American studies class in college and queer studies is part of that curriculum.
First the author can't seem to make up his mind. Is this about students learning or students learning what is needed to pass the test and get good grades. They aren't the same thing. Most of schooling is gameshow knowledge, "Quick 8 reasons for the fall of Rome?". Real learning is about learning to think, brood, analyze and often that leads to understanding that will get you marked off if it goes beyond the "material of the class".
But the author is close to rediscovering what was presented in 1909, in F.M. McMurry's 'How to Study and Teaching How to Study'. So it is good to see the cycle of education "scholarship" coming back around after a century.
It certainly…
If Joanne really cared about academic education, she would be posting about Gov. DeSantis wanting to end AP classe sin public schools in Florida. Since she seems determined to ignore the issue, one can only conclude that Joanne does not care that much about academic education but just repeating Republicans/conservative talking points. SD.