UCLA Professor Says Conventional Wisdom on Study Habits Is All Washed Up

An anonymous reader writes "Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? According to Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out, all are three are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning."

Comments

Do Not Want

[ScentCone]

I do not want to hear about experts in learning from someone who non-ironically refers to one of them as a "massively renowned expert."

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to academia. If you don't tell people you are important, they won't know and won't care. There is a saying that a PhD is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. An academic career is 10% inspiration, 40% perspiration and 50% marketing.

Re:Do Not Want

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak to how true that is generally, but it's not true here. As a grad student in psychology and cognitive science, I can tell you that Bob Bjork is sufficiently well-established in the field that he doesn't need to tell anyone else he's important - they know it already. I was fortunate enough to hear him give a talk on this topic a couple of weeks ago, and he cited a number of his studies in the memory and learning literature that I'd heard of before without remembering that he was a coauthor on all of them. (It was a bit like that moment where you suddenly realize that a bunch of songs you like are all written by the same band.) In this case, at least, his renown is attributable primarily to the hard work he's put in over the last several decades.

Re:Do Not Want

[wagnerrp]

His methods all sound nice, "don't take notes!". Well, he should go and try that in engineering. Lets see how long he'll last.

Sounds reasonable to me. Your engineering textbooks contain all the equations, formula, and methodologies you need to learn to get a degree, so why do you go to class? The classes teach you the background of why those methods are used, and when is the proper occasion to use them. When you take extensive notes, half your attention is spent recording the lecture verbatim, and you're not actually taking an active part in learning it.

He's saying don't do that. Pay attention. Think about what is actually being said. At some point in the short term after the class, while all that stuff is still fresh in your mind, replay through the class and write as much of it as you can down. The forced recollection will leave a far better imprint. If there are things you missed, ask a classmate, review the text, go meet the teacher in their office. You've got more than one chance to acquire all this information.

Re:Forget everything you know about learning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to the old system, it was easy.

Not to me.

Endless rote memorization: writing, flash cards, drills, ugh!

Humans naturally want to learn. It's innate in our being and yet, we get to school and hate it - at least 90% of us do. (The other 10% are the A students. )

When we're left to our own devices and learning something that we're interested in, do we learn like we do in school? I don't. It's all one big discovery. And the wonderful thing about the internet, it makes following curiosities even easier - until you tired and head over to Fark.

Re:His brain is better than mine

[The Wild Norseman]

That might work for him because his brain has the capacity to recall all the stuffs _after_ the class is over. Not me.

If I waited till the class is over and _then_ started to write down the notes based on what I recall, I probably can recall 15% to 20% of the total thing.

That might be true, right now. How about after a little bit of practice? You might be surprised to find out that it won't take too long for you to be able to improve your after-class recall ability.

Re:Forget everything you know about learning.

[causality]

Thanks to the old system, it was easy.

Not to me.

Endless rote memorization: writing, flash cards, drills, ugh!

Humans naturally want to learn. It's innate in our being and yet, we get to school and hate it - at least 90% of us do. (The other 10% are the A students. )

When we're left to our own devices and learning something that we're interested in, do we learn like we do in school? I don't. It's all one big discovery. And the wonderful thing about the internet, it makes following curiosities even easier - until you tired and head over to Fark.

This is easily the most insightful yet commonsense comment in the entire discussion. Modern schooling sucks the life and soul out of learning and produces factory-style people who have forgotten what curiosity and the joy of discovery is all about.

I believe that's by design. It results in people who can't or won't educate themselves, who were raised to believe that education is something another person must give to you. They're simply easier to rule, especially when propaganda (particularly framing) and soundbites are your major tools.

Re:His brain is better than mine

[TheRaven64]

One of my father's lecturers said that information was transferred from him to his students notes without going through their brains. I never took notes in lectures when I went to university and I generally did better than people who did. If you don't understand something, go and read a book about it after the lecture. Distracting yourself from the lecturer while you're trying to understand what he's saying isn't going to help.

The learning assumption

[loteck]

The problem with this approach is that it assumes students are in class to learn.

But that's not the system we live in.

Increasingly, students are in class to memorize material so that they can quickly recall it on one of many tests.

Tests. Memory. That's what we're teaching to these days. Not learning. Key difference.

Re:Mod parent up!

[swalve]

Again as with the initial "notes after class". How do you KNOW that you have NOT forgotten something?

Because instead of being a stenographer, you were paying attention and learning. If you listen to the lecture knowing that you will have to summarize it right after, you will remember what needs to be remembered. It's the difference between learning something and memorizing something.

Derive on the fly

[LeDopore]

There's a lot of talk as to what you should do while an after the prof is speaking, but so far very little has been said about what to do *before* the professor speaks it. During my Physics undergrad, I would challenge myself to try to derive results and formulas before the prof finished. I was often wrong, and I usually had to have my notes at least nudged along at least a few times per lecture, but trying to derive on the fly is an awesome way to learn something. There's nothing quite like figuring out a problem by yourself to have it really gel with your overall understanding.

That's my advice: rather than just trying to learn, as much as possible *do your own thinking* in class and you'll be amazed at how little you have to work later to recall it.

Re:That might work for him

[TaoPhoenix]

I looked over half the thread of comments and glanced at the summary, and it seems that everyone is still missing the way I used to study.

1. Diagram/Map/Lay out the book chapter(s) before the class.

2. In class, just put little dots or something that's a repeat of the book.

3. Then when the Prof. goes off into some other topic, then take real notes, sometimes in a different color. A lot of times those notes are the ones that show up on exams when you get a mean Prof. who prides themselves on making exams "that you had to be in class to pass".

Even better, *Record* the lectures! What's with all this "try to recall it later?" On the couple times I tried it, I did better listening to the lecture *three times* and mapping that out on paper next to the book notes.

It was enough to get me B's and B+'s. (I didn't get A's because I'd always miss something, but overall, I didn't mind the half-grade slide once I left college.)

Re:Traditional education = poor fit for today's wo

[grcumb]

We need more apprenticeship like learning for lot's of fields.

Less need college for jobs that DON'T need it.

Er, judging by the above, I'd say:

No, son. You really should keep taking English courses. Really. Trust me on this one.

Re:His brain is better than mine

[Anonymous Coward]

I went through the Navy Nuclear training pipeline about 15 years ago. The nuclear power school portion was not easy for me. It was in a classroom environment day after day and I spent 14-16 hours 6 days a week for 6 straight months in those classrooms. Not even leaving the building for lunch or dinner. It was not until about 3/4 of the way through and on the verge of failing out that it finally started to "click". Everything suddenly made complete sense and I was able to tie everything past and present that we were learning together and just started to make sense. I ended up doing very well on the final (even better then most in my class that had much higher GPA there than I did. I went on to the next school which was 90% hands on at a nuclear reactor plant and then to a submarine as an operator. The rest of my nuclear training and work was a breeze from that point where it clicked and I made rank and qualified all of my nuclear watch positions very fast. I learn by understanding, strict memorization without understanding does not work for me. I can rattle off neutron life cycle and reactivity equations and give you detailed explanations of theory and power plant operational characteristics but ask me to learn a list of the US Presidents and I will fail miserably.