Now we talked to our students a lot about this, and certainly based on my own experiences,
I completely agree with John. Many of us spend the night before an exam just trying to cram
weeks and weeks of material into our heads. The same goes with a big presentation that
you have to give in front of people. What strikes me, though, is how we can get it so
wrong. I mean, we've had years and years of schooling. We've had lots of time to
figure out exactly what the best strategies are to get information into our head, but
we use these inefficient strategies. I mean, how is it that we can get it so wrong?
That's a really interesting problem, and it's one that people are actually working
on. It's not done and dusted. John Dunlosky, who we talked to, has done a fair bit of work.
Bob Bjork, who we're going to hear from next, is also working in that field, and Nate
Kornell, They're trying to figure out exactly that: how do people get it so wrong? How is
it that you can have a lifetime of experiences and learning; you've tried a lot of things
that work and a lot of things that don't, yet we continually make these sorts of mistakes
like cramming. Cramming is not effective for actually having things stick in your memory,
so why do we continue to use it? I think from reading their work, there are at least a couple of reasons.
One reason is that it is effective in the short-term. So if you have a big exam and
you study as hard as you possibly can, it's probably enough to get you by. It's enough
to get you over the line. You'll pass that exam, and you'll see, you'll directly
associate those efforts for studying the exam and that passing mark. Those two will go hand
in hand, and you'll see that connection. What you won't see is the lack of effect
six months later. So if you're taking an advanced course in that topic that you've
been cramming for, in six months' time, you're not going to see the fact that you
don't know anything that you've studied for six months previously. That lack of association,
I think, is important.
The second reason that people continually think that cramming is important, I think,
is something called fluency. Now we touched on this with respect to the availability heuristic.
People mistake the size of the category with the ease with which it goes down. The same
thing's kind of happening here. People are mistaking the fluency, the ease with which
the information that they're studying is going down, with learning. They're not the
same thing, and so when you're cramming, you're massing all of this information together;
you're repeating each of these things, then you reread it, and you—all of this massed
information feels like it's going down and feels genuinely like you understand that material,
and you're mistaking that ease of processing with learning.
Yes, and it's exactly the same for re-reading. Before, when you're studying for an exam
or before a presentation, you read through the material you're supposed to remember.
Then, "I've got to do something else," so I'll read through it again. Every time
you read through it, it just feels better and better. It feels like you're learning,
but obviously that's a mistake. It feels good, and it seems to be one of those things
again that our predictions about how things are actually working are completely disjointed with reality.
That's exactly right, and I think that's what we're going to work on, particularly
on this episode. It's a little bit more myth-busting, because this one is hard. This
one isn't easy because what we think works for learning is almost—it's not even that
there's no relationship between what we think and reality, but in fact it's a negative
relationship. What we think works is the exact opposite of what actually works.
So we talked to Bob Bjork about this, and he's been working in this field longer than
anyone I know, and he had some pretty good advice about what works and what doesn't.