Education Week - November 5, 2014 - 32

COMMENTARY
Put the Science of Learning
In Teachers' Hands and Classrooms
By Benedict Carey
T
"
he most valuable course a student
could take is not currently a part
of any standard curriculum. It's
Learning 101-specifically, how
the brain picks up knowledge and
skills most efficiently.
If taught properly, it's a course
that would be lively, rigorous, and
immediately useful. Over the past 100 years, cognitive
psychologists have assembled an impressive
collage of surprising findings-i.e., learning
tactics-and rooted them in a fertile, disarmingly
ingenious theory that puts a new slant on many
old education debates.
It's exciting stuff, it's fun to teach, and the reason
it's not widely known is that learning scientists have
largely toiled in their labs, far away from schools and
educators. They speak a different language; they
focus primarily on individual learners; they prefer
controlled conditions to dynamic classrooms.
That's all beginning to change, and quickly. The
U.S. Department of Education has made it known
that its research arm will fund only rigorous trials
to test specific learning techniques, drawing
straight from this cognitive tradition. A host of
innovative double-blind randomized trials are underway
in public middle schools in Philadelphia
and Tampa, Fla., among other cities.
Yet teachers are far and away the most critical
component in this potential integration. They're
the ones who will judge which lab-learning techniques
actually extend to the classroom (some
certainly will not). And it's their commitment-
or skeptical reluctance-that will determine
whether these principles of learning science will
have as huge an impact as claimed.
Thankfully, the science is as accessible as it is
surprising.
The brain is a quirky learning machine, the science shows,
and it works best when those quirks are exploited."
The basic idea is this: The brain as a biological
organ has not adapted to institutional education,
at least not entirely. For as much as we learn in
class, the old-school advice on studying-keep to
a ritual, avoid all distractions, find a quiet study
space, hole up with the books-is severely limiting.
The brain is a quirky learning machine,
the science shows, and it works best when those
quirks are exploited.
Take so-called spaced study, a technique that's
already familiar to most teachers and students.
Many of us heard it first from our mothers:
"Honey, why not study an hour today and an hour
tomorrow instead of doing it all tonight?"
Good advice. Very good, it turns out. People who
split their study in this way remember up to two
times more on a test (say, in a week) than they
would had they studied the same material in one
night. Two times. Without having worked harder
or spent more time.
Why? Because in the second study session, the
student does three things: searches for, brings to
mind, and then re-stores the information. This
threefold mental act is vastly different from simply
reading over the material again in a single
session. And it's a far deeper learning experience.
Another example is mixed practice, or what
scientists call interleaving. Interleaving is a technique
discovered by sports researchers, beginning
in the 1960s. They found that athletes sharpened
their skills, whether hitting a baseball or a badminton
serve, most quickly when they practiced
them in mixed sets. That is, instead of devoting
a large block of time to one skill (say, hitting a
curveball), it was better to execute several skills
(curveball, fastball, sinker) in one session.
How so?
Again, the brain learned to learn (evolutionarily
speaking) out in the world, executing skills
not in isolation but mixed with others-hunting,
tracking, foraging, making split-second decisions.
This technique is hardly confined to athletics.
In the case of math tests in particular, students
must learn to distinguish types of problems before
solving them. Math teachers know this too
well, having watched students who do very well
on unit quizzes collapse on cumulative exams, in
which choosing the proper approach is as important
as executing it.
Doing mixed-problem homework assignments
forces them to do just that. In studies ongoing in
Tampa, researchers have found that this technique-simply
mixing math homework assignments-has
improved test scores by almost 50
percent. No change in teaching, no disruption
in normal class, no top-down reform required.
In effect, the students are doing review-like assignments
every day, rather than at the end of
a given unit.
Improvements in testing do not get much
higher than 50 percent.
Creative assignments like term papers and art
projects are another matter altogether. No lab
study can possibly capture the ineffable steps
that go into completing those longer-term, indiPAGE
27 >
BENEDICT CAREY is a science reporter at The New York
Times who focuses on brain and behavior topics. His latest
book is How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When,
Where, and Why It Happens (Random House, 2014).
| INSIDE |
24 AN OPEN LETTER TO
RANDI WEINGARTEN
24 BEST PRACTICES
FOR ASSESSING
TEACHER
EDUCATION
PROGRAMS
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25 LESSONS FROM
EBOLA:
HOW SCHOOLS CAN
STAY HEALTHY
26 LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR
32 | EDUCATION WEEK | November 5, 2014 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary
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Education Week - November 5, 2014

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