- Title: Strengthening the Student Toolbox
- Authors: John Dunlosky
- Access the original paper here
- Listen to a deep-dive podcast:
Summary
This excerpt from John Dunlosky’s “Strengthening the Student Toolbox” reviews ten learning strategies, ranking their effectiveness based on research. Practice testing and distributed practice emerge as the most beneficial, significantly boosting long-term retention. Interleaved practice shows considerable promise, while elaborative interrogation and self-explanation offer potential but require further investigation. Conversely, common strategies like rereading and highlighting prove relatively ineffective, while others, such as summarization and imagery, show limited benefits without proper training or application. The text ultimately advocates for teaching students how to learn effectively, emphasizing the importance of active learning techniques over passive ones.
What are the key implications for teachers in the classroom?
Teachers should prioritize teaching students how to learn, in addition to teaching them subject-matter content. This is important because acquiring learning strategies and knowledge supports lifelong learning.
Teacher training programs should place more emphasis on teaching students how to use effective learning strategies. This is because teacher preparation typically does not focus on teaching students how to learn. In addition, many textbooks do not adequately cover effective learning strategies or provide guidance on how to use them.
Teachers should explain and encourage the use of the most effective strategies, including:
- Practice Testing: Teachers can implement this by giving low-stakes quizzes at the beginning of each class. They can also use cumulative exams to encourage students to restudy material.
- Distributed Practice: Teachers should help students map out how many study sessions they will need before an exam, when to schedule them, and what to study during each session. Teachers can also use distributed practice by returning to important material repeatedly across class days and using cumulative exams.
- Interleaved Practice: Teachers can use interleaved practice by mixing up problems of different kinds on practice tests and worksheets. In class reviews should include questions from newly taught and previously taught material.
Teachers should also explain and encourage the use of these promising learning strategies:
- Elaborative Interrogation: Teachers can encourage students to ask “why” questions about facts or concepts.
- Self-Explanation: Teachers should explain to students how to use this strategy and the difference between paraphrasing and self-explanation.
Teachers should inform students that the following commonly used learning strategies are not as effective as the ones listed above:
- Rereading: While rereading can be helpful for memorizing texts, it is not always effective for enhancing understanding.
- Highlighting: Highlighting has not been shown to be helpful and can even lead to worse performance on tests.
- Summarization: Summarization has shown some success, but students often need extensive training in order to benefit.
- Keyword Mnemonic and Imagery for Text: While these strategies increase retention in the short-term, research has shown that the benefits can be short-lived and their application limited.
Teachers should motivate students to use effective learning strategies. Even the most effective strategies won’t help if students don’t use them.
Quote
Teaching students content may help them succeed in any given class, but teaching them how to guide their learning of content using effective strategies will allow them to successfully learn throughout their lifetime
