Improving Students’ Learning with Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology

In this monograph, 10 learning techniques are discussed in detail and recommendations about their relative utility are offered. The techniques are as follows: elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarisation, highlighting (or underlining), keyword mnemonics, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice.

Authors: John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, Elizabeth J. Marsh, Mitchell J. Nathan, & Daniel T. Willingham

Source: Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K.A., Marsh, E.J., Nathan, M.J., & Willingham, D.T. (2013). Improving students’ learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58, DOI: 10.1177/1529100612453266

Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. In this monograph, 10 learning techniques are discussed in detail and recommendations about their relative utility are offered. The techniques are elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarisation, highlighting (or underlining), keyword mnemonics, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice. To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, it was evaluated whether their benefits generalise across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks.

• Simple techniques are available that teachers and students can use to improve student learning and achievement. Hence, it is surprising that teachers have not been told about these techniques and many students are not using them.
• Some effective techniques are underutilised because teachers do not learn about them (hence students do not use them). This is despite evidence suggesting that the techniques could benefit student achievement with little added effort.
• Some learning techniques that are popular and often used by students are relatively ineffective.
• Some techniques (such as self-testing and distributed practice) have been chosen for this study because an initial survey of the literature indicated they could improve student success across a wide range of conditions.
• Some techniques (such as rereading and highlighting) were included in the study because students report using them frequently.
• The choices were limited to techniques that could be implemented by students without assistance.
• The review of each learning technique describes how it can be used, its effectiveness for producing long-term retention and comprehension, and its breadth of efficacy across the categories of listed variables (materials, learning conditions, student characteristics, and criterion tasks).

Evaluation of the learning techniques

• Each technique is assessed in terms of its relative utility: low, moderate, or high
• Although a technique could be designated low utility because its effects are limited to a small subset of materials that students need to learn, it could be useful in some cases and adopted in appropriate contexts. However, relative to the other techniques, it would be considered low in utility because of its limited generalisability.
• A technique could receive a low or moderate utility rating if it showed promise but lacked sufficient evidence to support confidence in assigning a higher utility assessment.

Self-explanation

What it is and why it should work?

• The core component of self-explanation involves students explaining an aspect of their processing during learning, such as by asking themselves ‘What does the statement mean?’ or ‘Is there anything I still don’t understand?’.
• Self-explanation can enhance learning by supporting the integration of new information with prior knowledge.

How general are the effects?

• Self-explanation has been found effective when accompanied by either direct instruction or discovery learning.
• Self-explanation effects have been exhibited by with both younger and older learners.
• One of the strengths of self-explanation literature is that effects have been shown across different materials within a task domain and across several different task domains.
• Self-explanation has been shown to support many kinds of logic puzzles and mathematics problems, has helped younger learners to overcome various kinds of misconceptions, and has improved their understanding of false belief, number conservation, and principles of balance.
• Self-explanation appears to be broadly applicable.
• Studies involving text learning have also shown the effects of self-explanation on measures of comprehension.
• Studies have shown self-explanation effects on near-transfer tests, in which students are asked to solve problems that have the same (but not identical) structure as practice problems.
• Self-explanation effects on far-transfer tests have been demonstrated for the solving of mathematics problems and pattern learning.

Issues for implementation

• A particular strength of the self-explanation strategy is its broad applicability across a range of tasks and content domains.
• Most students can profit from self-explanation with minimal training.
• Some students may require more instruction to implement self-explanation successfully. Thus, the benefit of self-explanation might be enhanced by teaching students how to implement the self-explanation technique effectively.
• Self-explanation was rated as having moderate utility.

Highlighting and underlining

What it is and why it should work?

• Highlighting and underlining typically appeal to students because they are simple to use, do not entail training, and do not require students to invest much time beyond that already required for reading the material.
• Reading marked text promotes subsequent memory of the marked material.
• Actively selecting information should benefit memory more than simply reading marked text.
• While marked text draws reader attention, additional processing should be required if the reader has to decide which material is most important. Such decisions require the reader to think about the meaning of the text and how its different pieces relate to each other.
• The quality of the highlighting is probably crucial to whether it helps students to learn.

How general are the effects?

• Prior knowledge might moderate the effectiveness of highlighting.
• Mainly in the studies reviewed, it was determined that highlighting did not improve learning.

Issues for implementation

• Given students’ enthusiasm for highlighting and underlining, discovering fail-proof ways of ensuring this technique is used effectively might be easier than convincing students to abandon it entirely in favour of other techniques.
• Highlighting and underlining is rated to have low utility.
• It can help when students have the knowledge needed to highlight more effectively or when texts are difficult. However, highlighting can actually hurt performance on higher-level tasks that require inference making.

Imagery use for text learning

What it is and why it should work?

• When students read text, they imagine the content of each paragraph using simple and clear mental images.
• Developing images can enhance one’s mental organisation or integration of information in the text. Moreover, idiosyncratic images of particular referents in the text could also enhance learning.
• Using prior knowledge to generate a coherent representation of a narrative may enhance a student’s general understanding of the text.
• The literature review suggests that the effects of using mental imagery to learn from text may be rather limited and not robust.

How general are the effects?

• Imagery has more benefits among students who have listened to texts compared to students who have read them.
• In some studies, students’ spontaneous use of imagery in control conditions was deemed partly responsible for the failure of imagery to benefit performance in some cases. However, this has not been quantified.
• Despite the promise of imagery, the patchwork of inconsistent effects for Grade 4 students has been replicated with students of other ages.
• While Grade 3 students have been shown to benefit from using imagery, younger students do not appear to benefit from attempting to generate mental images when listening to a story.
• Although imagery instructions can boost performance, sometimes they have no effect.
• In general, imagery instructions do not tend to enhance students’ understanding or application of the content of a text.

Issues for implementation

• The majority of studies have examined the influence of imagery by using relatively brief instructions that encouraged students to generate images of text content while studying.
• Imagery can improve students’ learning of text materials and imagery production and is more broadly applicable than keyword mnemonics.
• The benefits of imagery are largely constrained to imagery-friendly materials and memory tests.
• The use of imagery for learning text is rated as low utility.

Practice testing

What it is and why it should work?

• Testing is viewed by many students as an undesirable necessity of education. This is unfortunate because it overshadows the fact that testing also improves learning.
• The century of research on practice testing demonstrates the broad generalisability of the benefits of practice testing.
• Testing can enhance retention by triggering elaborative retrieval processes. Attempting to retrieve target information involves a search of long-term memory that activates related information. Further, this activated information may then be encoded along with the retrieved target, forming an elaborated trace that affords multiple pathways to facilitate subsequent access to that information.
• Practice testing may enhance how well students mentally organise information and how well they process idiosyncratic aspects of individual items. Together, these can support better retention and test performance.

How general are the effects?

• Practice tests can benefit learning even when their format does not match the format of the criterion test.
• Practice tests that require more generative responses (such as recall or short answer) are more effective than practice tests that require less generative responses (such as filling in the blank or recognition).
• Concerning dosage, more is better.
• Concerning time intervals, longer is better.
• Repeated practice testing produces greater benefits when lags between trials within a session are longer rather than shorter, when trials are completed in different practice sessions rather than all in the same session, and when intervals between practice sessions are longer rather than shorter.
• The testing effects have been demonstrated across participants with a wide variety of ages.
• Some form of testing effect has been demonstrated with preschool and kindergarten children, elementary school students, middle school students, high school students, more advanced students, middle-aged learners, and older adults.

Issues for implementation

• Practice testing appears to be relatively reasonable with respect to time demands.
• Practice testing can be implemented with minimal training.
• The advantage of practice testing with feedback over restudy is it is extremely robust.
• The implementation of feedback with practice testing protects against perseveration errors when students respond incorrectly.
• Several studies have reported positive outcomes from administering summative assessments that are shorter and more frequent rather than longer and less frequent. This is true for both learning outcomes and student ratings of factors (such as course satisfaction and preference for more frequent testing).
• Practice testing is rated as having high utility.

Interleaved practice

What it is and why it should work?

• In interleaved practice, students alternate their practice of different types of items or problems. In contrast, blocking practice requires that all content from one subtopic is studied (or all problems of one type are practiced) before the student progresses to the next set of material.
• During practice, performance was better with blocked practice compared to interleaved practice. However, this advantage dramatically reversed on the criterion test.
• One explanation for the impressive effect of interleaved practice is that interleaving gives students practice at identifying which solution method should be used for a given item or problem.
• Interleaved practice helps students to discriminate between the different kinds of problems, meaning they will be more likely to use the correct solution method for each one.

How general are the effects?

• Interleaved practice may further enhance a student’s ability to develop accurate concepts when exemplars of different concepts are presented simultaneously.
• Interleaved practice may only be most beneficial after a certain level of competency has been achieved using blocked practice with an individual concept or problem type.
• The majority of studies on interleaved practice have included college-aged students. Sometimes performance was improved and sometimes there was no effect.
• It seems plausible that motivated students could easily use interleaving without help.

Issues for implementation

• After a given type of problem (or topic) has been introduced, practice should first focus on that particular problem. After the next type of problem is introduced (such as during another lecture or study session), that problem should first be practiced. However, this should be followed by extra practice involving interleaving the current type of problem with others introduced during previous sessions.
• Interleaved practice may take more time to implement compared to blocked practice, because solution times often lengthen during interleaved practice. However, slowing down probably indicates the recruitment of other processes that boost performance.
• Interleaved practice is rated as having moderate utility.
• Interleaved practice has been shown to have a relatively dramatic effect on student learning and the retention of mathematical skills.
• Interleaving helps with other cognitive skills.

Implications

• Beyond training students to use these techniques, teachers could also incorporate some of them into their lesson plans.
  • When beginning a new section of a unit, a teacher could begin with a practice test (with feedback) on the most important ideas from the previous section.
  • When students are practicing problems from a unit on mathematics, recently studied problems could be interleaved with related problems from previous units.
  • Teachers could also harness distributed practice by re-presenting the most important concepts and activities over the course of several classes.
  • When introducing key concepts or facts in class, teachers could engage students in explanatory questioning by prompting them to consider how the information is new to them, how it relates to what they already know, or why it might be true.
  • Even homework assignments could be designed to take advantage of many of these techniques.
• Teachers should be encouraged to train students to use learning techniques more consistently (and explicitly) when they are engaged in pursuing various instructional and learning goals.