Analysis of Effective Study Methods

The meta-analysis is Here

Practice Testing

Utility: High

“The active recall of a fact from within is, as a rule, better than its impression from without.”

Practice testing could involve practicing recall of target information via the use of actual or virtual flashcards, completing practice problems or questions included at the end of textbook chapters, or completing practice tests included in the electronic supplemental materials that increasingly accompany textbooks.

Participants completed a final cued-recall test for all pairs either 10 minutes or 1 week

later. Final-test performance was better for pairs that were

practice tested than pairs that were not (53% versus 36% after 10 minutes, 35% versus 4% after 1 week)

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, and this activated information may then be encoded along with the retrieved target, forming an elaborated trace that affords multiple pathways to facilitate later access to that information.

Practice testing may enhance how well students mentally organize information and how well they process idiosyncratic aspects of individual items, which together can support better retention and test performance

Distributed Practice

Utility: High

To-be-learned material is often encountered on more than one occasion, such as when students review their notes and then later use flashcards to restudy the materials, or when a topic is covered in class and then later studied in a textbook. Even so, students mass much of their study prior to tests and believe that this popular cramming strategy is effective. Although cramming is better than not studying at all in the short term, given the same amount of time for study, would students be better off spreading out their study of content? The answer to this question is a resounding “yes.” The term distributed practice effect refers to the finding that distributing learning over time (either within a single study session or across sessions) typically benefits long-term retention more than does massing learning opportunities back-to-back or in relatively close succession.

Interleaved Practice

Utility: Moderate

In virtually every kind of class at every grade level, students are expected to learn content from many different subtopics or problems of many different kinds. For example, students in a neuroanatomy course would learn about several different divisions of the nervous system, and students in a geometry course would learn various formulas for computing properties of objects such as surface area and volume. Given that the goal is to learn all of the material, how should a student schedule his or her studying of the different materials? An intuitive approach, and one we suspect is adopted by most students, involves blocking study or practice, such that all content from one subtopic is studied or all problems of one type are practiced before the student moves on to the next set of material. In contrast, recent research has begun to explore interleaved practice, in which students alternate their practice of different kinds of items or problems. Our focus here is on whether interleaved practice benefits students’ learning of educationally relevant material.

On the positive side, interleaved practice has been shown to have relatively dramatic effects on students’ learning and retention of mathematical skills, and teachers and students should consider adopting it in the appropriate contexts. Also, interleaving does help (and rarely hinders) other kinds of cognitive skills. On the negative side, the literature on interleaved practice is currently small, but it contains enough null effects to raise concern. Although the null effects may indicate that the technique does not consistently work well, they may instead reflect that we do not fully understand the mechanisms underlying the effects of interleaving and therefore do not always use it appropriately.

Elaborative Interrogation

Utility: Moderate

Using the power of explanatory questioning to promote learning.

Prompting students to answer "Why?" questions can facilitate learning.

The prevailing theoretical account of elaborative-interrogation effects is that elaborative interrogation enhances learning by supporting the integration of new information with existing prior knowledge. During elaborative interrogation, learners presumably “activate schemata . . . These schemata, in turn, help to organize new information which facilitates retrieval”

Both correlational and experimental evidence suggest that prior knowledge is an important moderator of elaborative-interrogation effects, such that effects generally increase as prior knowledge increases.

High knowledge learners will benefit most. One intuitive explanation for why prior knowledge moderates the effects of elaborative interrogation is that higher knowledge permits the generation of more appropriate explanations for why a fact is true.

Elaborative-interrogation effects are relatively robust across factual material of different kinds and with different contents. However, it is important to note that elaborative interrogation has been applied (and may be applicable) only to discrete units of factual information.

This method of learning may be limited when you have low levels of domain knowledge, for example when learning a completely new subject, presumably because you have less of a foundation to which you can chain new information.

*Appears effective and also fits nicely into the learning process. Asking "why?" prompts you to manipulate the new information to try and fit it with what you already know.

Self-explanation

Utility: Moderate

The core component of self-explanation involves having students explain some aspect of their processing during learning. Consistent with basic theoretical assumptions about the related technique of elaborative interrogation, self-explanation may enhance learning by supporting the integration of new information with existing prior knowledge.

Retrospective self-explanation did enhance performance relative to no self-explanation, but the effects were not as pronounced as with concurrent self-explanation.

Self-explanation effects were significantly diminished when learners could access explanations, presumably because learners made minimal attempts to answer the explanatory prompts before consulting the provided information.

Self-explanation has been shown to support the solving of other kinds of logic puzzles. Self-explanation has also been shown to facilitate the solving of various kinds of math problems, including simple addition problems for kindergartners, mathematical-equivalence problems for elementary-age students, and algebraic formulas and geometric theorems for older learners.

This technique has been shown to improve adult's learning of endgame strategies in chess and can more broadly be applied to learning from text - both short narratives and lengthy descriptive texts.

An outstanding issue concerns the time demands associated with self-explanation and the extent to which self-explanation effects may have been due to increased time on task, but importantly, controlling for study time did not eliminate effects of self-explanation.

*Seems effective, but is worth nothing that, as with elaborative interrogation, explaining what you've learned or asking "why?" incurrs a time cost. Both methods of learning, however, seem intuitively useful.

Summarization

Utility: Low

Successful summaries identify the main points of a text and capture the gist of it while excluding unimportant or repetitive material.

It involves attending to and extracting the higher-level meaning and gist of the material.

More than just facilitating the extraction of meaning, however, summarization should also boost organizational processing, given that extracting the gist of a text requires learners to connect disparate pieces of the text, as opposed to simply evaluating its individual components (similar to the way in which note-taking affords organizational processing)

Summarization and note-taking were both more beneficial than was verbatim copying.

Students in the verbatim-copying group still had to locate the most important information in the text, but they did not synthesize it into a summary or rephrase it in their notes. Thus, writing about the important points in one’s own words produced a benefit over and above that of selecting important information; students benefited from the more active processing involved in summarization and notetaking.

Higher-quality summaries that contained more information and that were linked to prior knowledge were associated with better performance. Appears to help extract a higher level understanding of the main ideas of the text.

You can summarise a text after reading it, or while reading it. Having the text present might help the reader to succeed at identifying its most important points as well as relating parts of the text to one another. However, summarizing a text without having it present involves retrieval, which is known to benefit memory and also prevents the learner from engaging in verbatim copying. The answer to whether studied text should be present during summarization is most likely a complicated one, and it may depend on people’s ability to summarize when the text is absent.

On the basis of the available evidence, we rate summarization as low utility. It can be an effective learning strategy for learners who are already skilled at summarizing; however, many learners (including children, high school students, and even some undergraduates) will require extensive training, which makes this strategy less feasible.

*Quite a lot of research done on summarizing, with mixed results. I think there is a place for summarization when it comes to books/podcasts as you can filter out the noise and compress the relevant information down to make it easier to digest and process. Converting the relevant information into your own words seems to help aswell, primarily due to it being active learning and a process of generation.

Highlighting

Utility: Low

Crowd favourite primarily because it requires little effort.

Actively selecting information should benefit memory more than simply reading marked text (given that the former would capitalize on the benefits of generation and active processing).

Marking too much text is likely to have multiple consequences. First, overmarking reduces the degree to which marked text is distinguished from other text, and people are less likely to remember marked text if it is not distinctive. Second, it likely takes less processing to mark a lot of text than to single out the most important details. Consistent with this latter idea, benefits of marking text may be more likely to be observed when experimenters impose explicit limits on the amount of text students are allowed to mark.

Most studies show no benefit to highlighting over and above the benefit of simply reading.

The research on highlighting has not been particularly encouraging. It may help when students have the knowledge needed to highlight more effectively, or when texts are difficult, but it may actually hurt performance on higher level tasks that require inference making.

Rereading

Utility: Low

Rereading is one of the techniques that students most frequently report using during self-regulated study.

According to the quantitative hypothesis, rereading simply increases the total amount of information encoded,

In contrast, the qualitative hypothesis assumes that rereading differentially affects the processing of higher-level and lower-level information within a text, with particular emphasis placed on the conceptual organization and processing of main ideas during rereading.

The results have been somewhat mixed, but the evidence appears to favor the qualitative hypothesis.

Although a few studies found that rereading produced similar improvements in the recall of main ideas and of details (a finding consistent with the quantitative hypothesis), several studies have reported greater improvement in the recall of main ideas than in the recall of details .

Most effects have been shown with recall-based memory measures, whereas the benefit for comprehension is less clear.

Conclusion

All of the methods which one would associate as "passive" methods of learning, or methods that involve shallow rather than deep processing - summarizing, rereading, highlighting, - resulted in less detailed learning across time. Rereading may help when learning lists or overarching themes rather than detailed concepts. Highlighting and Summarization are, in my opinion, tools for the organisation of information rather than learning. That's not to say they don't have their place, or that I don't use them, just be cautious of using these lower level processes as the backbone of your system.

In contrast, methods such as Practice Testing, and Elaborative Interrogation force the brain to produce output, and draw links between words, concepts, and ideas. Once the information is encoded - converted from text to short term/working memory - we must consciously "think" about it, manipulate it, and reproduce it. In order to be solidified most reliably in long term memory, one should endeavor to repeat this process across time.

So in short, the best way of learning is a well rounded, active approach (who'd have thought). It might be worth mentioning now that when I speak of learning, I'm not so much referring to rote learning exam material as I am about long term understanding and consolidation of ideas - the so called latticework of mental models which Munger talks about.