A lot of students think that there's a real benefit to small classes over large classes.
Sure.
I mean, we all have experience in sitting in lecture halls, massive 500 people in a
lecture hall versus an intimate 20 people in a lecture hall. Is there any evidence that—I
mean, we like to think that small classes are substantially better than large classes.
It seems intuitive that they would be right because you get more attention potentially
from your teachers and so forth. There's quite a bit of evidence actually, enough evidence
to do meta-analysis after meta-analysis, and it turns out that the relationship between
class size and student achievement really is really small. In fact, it's almost non-significant
in many cases, which is startling that it would be that way, but in fact, small classes
aren't necessarily better. Yes.
So I suppose the reason might be that small classes aren't as good, I suppose, as the—you
can do more in small classes.
Which is great, yes.
But is it because they're doing the same things in the small class and the large class, or is it...
I mean, if you think about it from a teacher's perspective potentially to a lot of the education
reform like, "Let's get smaller and smaller classes," well, if I originally had a large
class like, say, 40 students in biology in high school or something like that, and, lo
and behold, we're all going to spend a lot of money and just have these really, really
small classes, but if I don't do anything to change my teaching style to take advantage
of the small class, then student achievement really isn't going to change. That, I think,
is probably part of the equation that just because you have a small class, if you don't
really utilize it and take advantage of the fact that you now only have to interact with
a handful of students, their achievement is just not going to get any better.
Sure. So I suppose it's what you make of it.
Absolutely what you make of it. I mean, 40 kids—you are constrained. You can't do a
lot of really good things for the students that you could potentially do with only 10
or 5 students. But then if you don't take advantage of the small class, it's just really
not going to help the students out. They might feel better about their interaction with the
teachers. They might like the teacher more because they get more interaction. That doesn't
mean they're learning more per se.
Sure, yes. One of the other ones—in Australia at the moment, our politicians are talking
about producing really good teachers.
I love it.
And so a lot of it they seem to be basing on just training. We need teacher training,
and they haven't really done much to articulate exactly what that means.
Yes.
Is there any evidence that training teachers is effective?
Unfortunately, just like with the smaller class sizes, teacher training isn't always
that highly related to student achievement. Either which just doesn't make much sense
because we train individuals to become teachers because hopefully they can effectively then
train their students with specific content and so forth. It just doesn't seem to be a
strong link between the amount of teacher training and how well students do.
Many professional development courses for teachers don't necessarily train them effective
techniques to use with their students. I mean, they feel good; they're intuitive, but there's
not a lot of real evidence to show that any particular professional development program
will necessarily lead to better outcomes.
So, in general, on average, many teacher training programs really don't translate into higher
achievement. They can if they're done well, but, on average, they just don't seem to have
a major impact on student achievement.
Right. You've done recently an enormous meta-analysis, an analysis of analyses. You've looked at
a whole bunch of different types of learning techniques, things that students can use,
or do use, to try to improve their learning.
Right.
Could you tell us a bit about what you've done and what you've found?
Sure. With a large group of collaborators who actually worked very hard in this project
for almost three years, we just reviewed lots of literature, as you've said, about the effectiveness
of a variety of strategies. What we didn't look at were strategies that involved technology
because we wanted to focus on just those things that any student could use, so just maybe
with a pencil, a piece of paper or something like that.
We chose the strategies for two reasons. Some of them we wanted to evaluate, we thought
they probably did work, but why not check out the evidence? A couple of other strategies,
however, we knew students used a lot. We wanted to know: are these really effective strategies,
or should they be doing something else instead? Something that all students use—I still
do it myself—is highlighter. We like to highlight things when reading. It's like a
security blanket or something for learning. But it turns out highlighting itself doesn't
really improve student learning. It doesn't increase achievement in any way. I would never
take a highlighter away from a student. Again, it's like a security blanket, but it's just
the beginning of the learning journey. It's not the end of it. After you highlight all
the important stuff—it turns out most textbooks highlight it for you anyway—you need to
go back and use effective techniques to learn that material.
At least some of the things that students do like highlighting and re-reading really
don't have a big bang for the time buck, so to speak. We'll spend time re-reading and
highlighting and really not learning a whole lot, when in fact they can replace those strategies
with other ones that really do boost their learning, which is exciting.
Sure.
Now we just have to retrain students, build a better student, use better strategies.
Interesting. So highlighting, rereading, doesn't have much of an effect?
No, it doesn't. Isn't that strange? You'd think everybody rereads right? You go back
to the material. Unfortunately, when you go back to reread, your eyes are moving across
the page, it's probably late at night, the night before an exam, and your mind is somewhere
else, so basically mind wandering as you're rereading . Students need to do things that
are more—to engage them more actively.
Yes. So in this analysis, you've looked at some things also that had a massive effect.
Yes.
What—obviously it makes sense. I mean, a lot people, when they are studying or cramming
for an exam, these are the things we do but they might not be the most effective. What
are the most effective? What are the things that actually work?
Certainly cramming is not that effective, right? Students think it's effective probably
because they can squeak by potentially in the exam and then they'll just forget everything.
I'm not suggesting students don't study the night before a test. It relieves anxiety and
all that sort of thing, but there are better things they could do. First, instead of just
cramming, begin studying two or three weeks before an exam so you're distributing your
practice out across time, which is very important. So you're studying the same material over
and over again. Now that does take a little planning, maybe a calendar to remind yourself,
"It's just two weeks before the exam. Now I really need to hit the books," versus just
the night before, when you're panicking and trying to cram.
Distributed practice is really good, but distributed practice just tells you kind of a schedule
of how you should be studying, kind of like the "when" of studying. But there are lots
of "whats," the things you can do instead of just rereading the material passively.
One that we find that's really effective, and many others—there's about a hundred
years of research; very exciting—showing how effective this is, is just retrieval practice.
So if you mark up your book in about all the important things, and you go back, instead
of just rereading everything you've marked up, cover it up with your hand and just try
to recall from memory the content. If the student gets that answer right from memory,
that has a really potent effect on subsequent performance. You really learn it that much
better. Of course if they can't recall it from memory, then they could restudy at that
point, but then they should come back and keep trying. Just retrieval practice is a
really effective way to boost performance, especially if students use it distributed across time.
Sure. So it's kind of like flashcards, I guess.
Absolutely like flashcards. You know, most students at least say they use flash cards
for simple, associate learning, things like foreign language vocabulary, but you can use
flashcards for complex materials as well: concepts, or you write the key term on one
side, definition on the other side, and then use that to basically test yourself, and then
to restudy. Even important concepts in textbooks—how they take notes. They can take notes in better
ways to actually support this retrieval practice, which is an effective strategy that many students
don't use. They underutilized it, yes.
Retrieval practice—so then it's, I suppose, really pretty effortful by my comparison to
rereading or highlighting, so it probably takes a fair bit of desire on the part of
the student to want to learn that.
Absolutely, it does. It's very easy to sit there and reread, especially when your mind
is somewhere else thinking about how fun it's going to be after you take your exam, that
type of thing. Where it does take a little bit more effort, that's what engages you to
try to retrieve the information. The nice thing is, out of all these studies that are
done to compare rereading to retrieval practice, the time on task is always equated, so the
students who were just rereading spent the same amount of time that the students are
who were practicing retrieval. So, yes, it might be a little bit more effortful. It's
like a little bit more painful to try to retrieve stuff from memory, but even the same amount
of time used in one strategy versus the other, the students who were practicing retrieval,
using that little bit of extra effort, are getting the major, basically, increase in their performance.
Interesting. And so the other aspect to that, the distributed learning, the spaced learning,
what does that entail? Does that entail studying a little bit each day, or is it—how many
days do you need?
That's a hundred-dollar question, or maybe even 10,000-dollar question.
This is how I think about it. Let's say you're a student getting ready for an exam, and maybe
you decide, "Okay, I can give this four hours of my time." Most students, because they think
cramming is good, they'll spend that four hours the night before the exam—just study,
study, study. They're going to do lot better off if they take the same four hours and just
basically segment it into four one-hour study sessions that are spread across, say, two
weeks prior to the exam. Again, the same amount of time, but now they're just spread across
time, where you're coming back to the same material versus just kind of going over that
material over and over again during one four-hour block.
How much they need to do for long-term retention? A whole lot. Okay, this won't be a great strategy
to learn all your course content. You got to decide what's most important, what you
think you're going to be tested on, and focus on that material.
Interesting.
But the more, the better. The more often you come back and restudy, of course, and use
retrieval practice, the longer you're going to retain that material. For stuff that students
really need to know, this is an essential strategy, or else they just forget stuff.
I mean, you don't have to tell a student that after they take a test that they crammed for,
the next day they pretty much don't remember anything that they studied. Distributed practice
ensures that you're going to remember that for a much longer period of time.
Interesting.
It's essential, yes.
Now it seems to me that the students who rely on highlighting material or rereading material...
Which, by the way, is almost all students.
All students, exactly.
Yes. When they were surveyed, about 80, 90 percent of the students say they use a highlighter,
though. In fact, I think almost everyone uses a highlighter. Everyone says they just reread.
How did they get it so wrong? How is it that that students who use these very ineffective
techniques at the expense of techniques like retrieval practice and spaced learning—certainly
they would've stumbled across something that would've been—or maybe not. Are people very
good at monitoring how well they do or their own performance?
In many cases, they're not. Just rereading, for instance—most students, when they're
rereading, they're reading fluently. So it's just easy to read. They think, "I'm understanding
it right," but it turns out that the easy reading isn't really that highly related to
how well they're understanding it. In fact, there's some really neat research that I've
done with one of my collaborators, Katherine Rawson—we scrambled sentences within a text,
scrambled them all up, and then we rewrote those sentences so that they flowed well.
It read beautifully, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense. Then we had students read
that and tell us how well they thought they understood it. Unbelievably, the students
who read this paragraph felt they understood it when in fact there was not much to understand there.
Students can get a really good sense about how well they know something by using retrieval
practice, because if you can't produce it from memory, you probably don't know it well
enough. Often this kind, this ease of studying leads students down this really unfortunate
pathway so they feel they understand it when in fact, when it comes down to the test time,
they find out that they don't understand it. I mean, all teachers have this experience,
where they hand back the exam grades, and then the students will come up and say, "I
thought I really understood this well. Why did I get an F?" It's like, "Well, you probably
did think you understood it well. It's just how you are studying wasn't really going to
provide a lot of information on how well you comprehend the material." So students, they'd
use special techniques to help them monitor their learning in this context.
That seems to be really problematic, I suppose. Teachers are rewarded for making students—student
satisfaction plays a big role in high schools and in universities.
Of course it does.
So I suppose there's a real push for teachers to be—to make the material go down as easily
as possible, to be as fluent, to make it as easy as possible to process the content.
Absolutely.
Isn't that kind of working at cross purposes?
Well, unfortunately, the teachers fall prey to the same difficulties of monitoring that
students often do. If they see students picking up something very fluently, very quickly,
they'll think, "They must really understand that," but quite often, the ease of picking
something up, of understanding it initially, is not at all related to subsequent performance.
For instance, if you're just going to study something over and over and over again, boy,
it will seem fluent. You'll feel like you understand it. If teachers are watching it,
you're not making mistakes when you're solving problems. Everyone thinks this is a great
technique, when in fact come back to it three days later, and the students haven't retained anything.
Often, unfortunately, those strategies that are going to work the best are effortful,
and yet, understandably, many teachers will think they're not really making fast progress
there because it's effortful, so maybe it's not a really good way to proceed, when in
fact, no, it might be. I think we just need to inform teachers and students more about
these foibles of evaluating the quality strategies because sometimes something that looks terrible
in the moment because it's effortful is really beneficial in the long term.
Yes, interesting. The name of the course, Think101: The Science of Everyday Thinking,
so we're really interested in this sort of strategies the things that people can do to
think better. That means we're covering a lot of material in the course from the shortcuts
that people tend to use to make judgments and decisions. With respect to the research
that you've conducted over your career, what do you think might be a good take-home message
as far as improving people's everyday thinking?
Well, especially if the everyday thinking has to do with performing in the future, whether
that be performing in an exam, performing in the workplace, just doing your hobbies
better, the best way to think about, "Will I be able to do something well in the future,"
is to simulate it in the present. The more people can rely on simulations, which sometimes
can be effortful—if I'm going to wonder, "How well will I do with this context in the
future," the only way to really know is to try it out now. Then if you basically stumble
or you mess up or you don't understand, you know, "Oh, Jesus. This is going to be problematic,"
sometimes you're at least—and thinking about thinking is what I'm talking about in this
context—really can be effortful in its own way, so to evaluate how well you are basically
picking something up, the best way you could do it is simulate it.
The strange thing is, in any other context besides learning and education, students and
people of all sorts simulate their goal before they get there. If you are like a young child
and you have a dance recital, the way you're going to figure out whether, "Am I ready to
go? Is this something I can do," is basically simulate it. You're going to do your dance
routine many, many times until you feel you have it right. You take that same student
and you put it in a, say, mathematics class. For some reason, those lessons learned in
dance don't translate.
We can think a lot better about how we can perform in the future by simulating it in
the present. Without a good simulation, we're really going to make a lot of mistakes about
our own abilities and how we will perform in the future.
Interesting. Earlier you mentioned the basketball analogy. I suppose it works the same way.
Yes, absolutely.
So it seems very odd that people, on one hand, will go to basketball practice—practice
day in, day out.
Same thing over and over.
But they fail to recognize that the skills that they're learning there, the same practice
that they're using in that context, they fail to practice in the educational contexts. So
you're suggesting that if they did what they learned in basketball, apply it to mathematics
or science or something ...
It would be great, right, because most—like if you were a basketball player or a wannabe,
so to speak, you don't stop practicing after you've just missed 20 free throws in a row.
It's like, "No, I'm not getting it." You keep practicing until you get it, and then you
come back several days later, and you do it again. Really, practicing a sport, dance,
music or everything is really a lot about retrieval practice in a distributed fashion.
Why that doesn't translate to study skills, or at least for most students, I don't know.
You'd think it's like "Why don't I just use these same techniques now to get ready for
my math test?" Yet what students do is of course wait until the last moment and they
cram. Maybe mathematics isn't quite as fun as playing basketball? I don't know. Some
of us like math, but yet it just doesn't seem to translate. We're trying to get the word
out: let it translate. Start many weeks early and keep practicing, getting ready for that
exam so you can really do well, so to speak.
I think the opposite would hold true as well that cramming for basketball...
Probably not going to do well, right?
Yes, it wouldn't exactly do—wouldn't get you very far.
No, not at all. You don't want to pull an all-nighter the evening before a basketball
game. You will be tired, and you won't play well.
Practicing your free throws.
Yes. It's just not going to work.
My name is John. I think about reflection.