Producer: Okay, will come back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. As always, I’m here with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, Sucheta, if I recall our previous conversations with today’s guest, I’m sure we are in for a treat. I’m anxious to continue learning from him, so lead us off. Where are we going today?
Sucheta Kamath: You know, you are doing something right when a guest agrees to come back, so I am really grateful, so I want to start a little bit about why learning matters. This is a podcast about executive function and at the heart of executive function is how do we manage our learning? So, I as a student, I want to share a quick tidbit about my journey as a student. I was a great student. My comprehension was solid, but my studying was very silent, quiet, and only limited to reviewing. I don’t remember ever being quizzed by my parents, I was never provided with any study guides or questions, I’m talking about a K-12 education. At that time, of course, just I think same holds true for you is we never had Internet, I don’t even remember having a concept called handouts. We had one textbook and we were highly encouraged to take ferocious notes, so one good thing that I came out when I entered college was I was a very good notetaker, but when I began my clinical work, I got exposed to Tony Buzan’s phenomenal book called Mind Mapping, and I studied it, I started teaching it to my brain injury college students, and that’s what really got my interest going in this idea of effective learning.
So, now that I’m an adult, and deeply committed to lifelong learning. I have many iterations of notetaking that I do, I come up with catchy titles to whatever I do, I like to write stories that pertain to anything am learning, and finally, I love to draw maps of my learning. So, the reason I’m sharing, of course, is because of our guest, so the book that I’ll be talking a lot about, it’s called Make It Stick, and in that book, I have one of my favorite quotes which says “Knowledge is more durable if it is deeply entrenched.”
So, that brings me to our incredible guest, Dr. Mark McDaniel who is a professor of psychology and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He also is a codirector of the Center of integrative research on cognition, learning, and education. What is so interesting is, he came last time and he spent quite a bit of time talking to us about prospective memory which is memory for the future. A little bit more about him to refresh our listener’s memory, Dr. McDaniel has served as associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory, and to Cognition and as the president of Rocky Mountain Psychological Association and the Division III of the American Psychological Association. He is a highly celebrated, highly published prolific cognitive psychologist, and he is one of the co-authors with Peter Brown and Henry Roediger of the book that we will be talking about which is called Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.
So, welcome, Mark, to our podcast again.
Dr. Mark McDaniel: Thank you, Sucheta.
Sucheta: So, your book has made the research in learning and memory very much accessible to all, and we will be talking about it, but the last time, I didn’t get to ask you, do you mind telling us a little bit about your own learning style when you were a young student? How are your executive function skills and at what point in your education or learning if you discover learning how to learn?
Dr. McDaniel: Well, it’s hard for me to recall my own executive skills when I was younger. I do remember that I was planful and organized, so that if there were assignments to do, I would make sure that I set aside time to sit down and do those assignments. I don’t recall anything about my strategies necessarily for her studying for exams until I was in college, and in college, I think I was faced with the kind of situation that many, many students were faced with – maybe not you, Sucheta, but many others which is that after taking the first – my first college exam, I got feedback that I wasn’t learning so well. I got a C- on my calculus exam, I was a math major, so this was very sunny to me in a negative way, and I have talked to other students who have experienced exactly precisely the same thing. They have done well in high school, they take the first university exam, it’s usually down in a C- or C level, and they have, all of a sudden, a wake-up call which is that I need to figure out how to learn in college courses where the material is more challenging, the pace is faster, the expectations are higher. So, it was at that point, I think, that I was stimulated to think more about learning what I needed to do, and one thing that I remember is that in my math class is previously, it had been enough for me look at how a problem was done and maybe practice a little bit, and then I was fine. In college, that was not nearly enough. What I needed to do was practice more solving and think more about how I was getting the solution to think about the underlying principles, and when I regrouped at midterm and started doing that, then things went very well, but one of the points that we make in the book Make It Stick and one of the things that I learned at that point was that learning is hard, learning takes work. It is not something that automatically occurs, it’s not something that we necessarily intuitively know how to do, but instead, we do have to marshal purposeful strategies. In your world, Sucheta, we can say that your executive system has to start to reflect on what you are doing, modify what you are doing, and be strategic in how you go about learning.
So, that’s when I learned how to do it, and then I refined the strategies, and then later understood that I needed engage in retrieval practice in order to be able to recall and use information during exam times, and then of course, you would be able to use that information at later point in time, so in your own training in neuropsychology, clinical neuropsychology, you were not studying just to do well on an exam; you were studying so that you would have the expertise to later on serve clients and serve people that you were interacting with helping.
Sucheta: I think your point is well-taken. The most important thing, I think, you said, that he wasn’t until you got the C- that kind of shut you up a little bit that made you introspect and take a look at your own approach to learning, and I always say thank God for those failures because only then we will begin to suspect our competence, and we will talk a little bit about that in our conversation today.
Now, let me set the stage for this discussion: can you quickly define for us what is learning and why learning is so sticky? And one thing you did mention that learning is hard and it takes work, and I love the word, you have to “marshal” your strategies – I love that. So, when you do this research and learning, how do you define it? When is learning considered completed?
Dr. McDaniel: That’s a complicated question or maybe I should say it’s a complicated answer, and it depends, I think, on what your criteria are. So, if your criterion is that somebody needs to remember definitions of terms or definitions of new vocabulary, then learning would be depleted when you are able to display memory for that information. If your definition is, “I want somebody to be able to understand the general underlying principles of certain chemical or physical, or biological aspects or processes that we are learning,” then you might say that learning involves being able to demonstrate transfer from one particular contexts to another, from one particular instantiation of a problem to another. So, in that case, somebody evaluating learning will say it’s not efficient to show me that you can remember how to solve the problem that we did in class.
Sucheta: Apply.
Dr. McDaniel: Right? What I want you to be able to do is to apply and generalize, and show that you can solve similar problems to the ones we did in class. So, I think learning has different facets, and the way that we need to demonstrate it in our career, in the classroom, and so on is to more clearly define exactly what your objectives are when you are trying to learn particular content.
Sucheta: Lovely. Thank you for clarifying that. Yes, then there is also a simple thing of how do we learn how to charge your phone? And then, when you’re at the airport and you don’t have a cord, you have to take that and applied, and borrow somebody’s quart or something, so that kind of adaptive nature to it is not limited to content on which you are tested.
So, the next question that comes to my mind is, the field of learning is riddled with myths. Learners operate under the mess that misguided their learning retention and overall success. One interesting thing I came across as I read your book and your work, that you pointed out this idea that many of us harbor this notion that learning is, and the way we retain is intuitive to humans, but your work shows that it’s not. It’s in fact the opposite of that, so can you share some of the myths that you have encountered as you began to study this as well as shared this information?
Dr. McDaniel: Yes, one big prominent myth, it can be captured in something known as the “Total Time Hypothesis.” The hypothesis is that the more time you spend studying or more particularly, the more time you spend recycling information through your working memory, the better chance that information has of being stored in long-term memory. To put it more simply, the more time you spend with the material, the better you are going to learn it, and that is a big myth, and it’s one that seems to align with an intuition that we have which is the more I study, the more I’m going to learn, and that myth gets [0:11:54] in the popular literature. So, Sucheta, I don’t know if you are aware, but maybe six or seven years ago, there was a series that – some [0:12:05] house was writing up information that was distributed to a consortium called Newspapers In Education (NIE), and so every month or so, the newspapers would print one of the pieces, and one I distinctly remember was that it was on how to prepare for a test, and it said, “To prepare for a test, what you need to do is you need to study an item over and over, and over again until it gets burned into your brain,” and that is a huge no because we know from basic memory research, many, many studies show that if you just keep recycling information over and over again in working memory, it does not get burned into the brain. It is a very superficial kind of processing that makes you feel as if you have learned the information, but in fact, objectively, when you take the test, yeah, and this is one of my problems in this first test in college was I just thought I’d just reading over and over again, I was going to learn the material and do well. Well, that is a big myth. That is not the way things work. Many, many students embrace this idea, this myth, this total time hypothesis and I think it’s one of the big obstacles starting to formulate a more sophisticated idea about how to learn.
Sucheta: Yeah, and I think what you’re talking about, if I may interject, that you have no idea how this is imprinted in K-12 education, this myth, it purveys. There is no quick course correction that is introduced or discuss, or even revisited, and I’ve seen a lot of college websites and their study strategy, or rather whatever resources section of their website talking about this as a method.
Dr. McDaniel: That’s correct, that’s correct. You are absolutely correct, and it’s dismay. Yes, it really is because there is so much science that shows that that is not an effective method.
Sucheta: So, let’s start with the first effective method which is the self-testing process or retrieval, a value in practicing or engaging in retrieval, so it is said to be one of the potent ways to cement information in your long-term storage and transfer it from short-term to long-term storage. How does this work and why is it so potent?
Dr. McDaniel: Well, there are a number of ideas about that, Sucheta. The most simple that we can talk about is that when you are given a test or when you need to use information – for example, you are at the airport, you need to charge your phone, the task at hand is to retrieve information from long-term memory, so retrieval practice, in fact, is precisely practicing exactly what you need to do when you demonstrate learning. On the other hand, looking at things over and over is not the kind of practice you need in order to retrieve information about why a cell phone is losing charge, what it needs to have in order to recharge, or similarly, in every test that you will take, the demand is to retrieve information. In your professional life, many of the demands are to retrieve information from memory. So, retrieval practices, in fact, exact precise practice, is what you are going to have to do later to demonstrate learning, so that is one way to look at it. To put it informally, education, and most of us intuitively think that the way to learn is to cram information into the head, but in fact, part of learning is learning how to get information out of the brain, get information out of long-term memory, so retrieval practice helps you learn that. When you fail at retrieval, you get a sense of things that you have not elaborated enough, things that aren’t as richly understood as you would like, so retrieval helps you understand what you don’t know in the most accurate way possible.
Secondly, as you are retrieving information, you are reinforcing or developing pathways that will allow you to retrieve that information. These can be cognitive pathways, they can be neural pathways, so you are forming their rich pathways needed to get to that information. Retrieval, and I will say this very slowly, retrieval is not a neutral event. It is not a neutral process. Retrieval changes memory. It changes the brain. We think that it helps stimulate consolidation of information, so every time you retrieve, the idea is that memory trays become more [0:17:17] and is open to further consolidation.
So, these are some of the reasons that retrieval helps.
Sucheta: You know, I like what you mentioned just now, that there is a – somehow, there’s self-directed problem-solving component to it where you need to recognize a need, so that means when you know a test is coming, you need to recognize that I will be required to retrieve, so let me do just a dry run of that retrieval, and then also, once you try to retrieve and fail, then you say, “Uh-oh, maybe it wasn’t learned in the first place.”
Dr. McDaniel: Exactly.
Sucheta: And, I love this last comment that you made which is it stimulates consolidation and I think that is such a powerful thing that only people in the cognitive neuroscience or cognitive psychology talk about that, but I see that completely absent from discussion in the field of education. So, do you mind talking quickly about the consolidation process?
Dr. McDaniel: Well, Sucheta, that is something that I’m not as well-versed and it involves neuronal activity and it involves neurons probably developing functional synapses, actually developing new and ready material. So, consolidation involves – well, I don’t want to use the word consolidation again – involves establishing the neural networks that give rise to information being stored in memory, so it creates, if you will, new neural pathways. So, the nervous system have these temporary activations and those, or I’m going, as you are maybe learning, but then these activations can be more permanently inscribed into memory as consolidation occurs, as synapses become functional, as new dendritic material gets formed, as new areas on the dendritic axonal interface become more functional, that’s what consolidation is, so a more personal storage of the information in your neuronal networks, and that is a superficial overview. The cognitive neuroscientist could give a much more detailed picture of that, but I think that’s pretty accurate in a general level.
Sucheta: So, I think you describing this process triggered my thought about this myelination process which is kind of putting the layers on the neural endings and creating the conduction, expediting the conduction of electric impulses because no energy is lost in transaction. That process happens through consolidation.
Next question was about this idea of practice essential for learning but not all practices are created equal. So, could you talk about the varied practice seems to triumph the scene when it comes to strong learning?
Dr. McDaniel: I sure can. So, the idea is that – let me talk about motor skills because that is where this principle is most evident. The idea is that, let’s say that if you want to shoot a free throw, you keep practicing the same distance from the basket over and over again, or in hockey, if you want to learn how to take a pass, and then pass it off to somebody else quickly, a one-timer, the idea would be, in hockey practice, you have a coach that might stand at the blue line and send passes, and the guy is racing down the ice, they get a pass, a one-timer. Well, the idea is that we actually learn more and we are more angled to be adaptive if we vary that practice, so for example, the theory is that learn to shoot free throws, you might be better off may be shooting one a little bit closer to the basket, maybe shooting one a little bit farther from the basket, and through this varied practice, your system learns to gauge better how to make fine-grained movements to shoot the ball at the right distance. In hockey, the idea would be, don’t practice these one-timers; receiving a pass from the same place. Have the coach move around the different places of the ice to give you that passed. That is going to reinstate really what the realistic situation is going to be, plus it gives you experience in handling the part from different angles, in different speeds, and different distances, and so that variable practice is it probably recapitulates better or the natural situation which you have to display that performance, but even if it doesn’t, even going beyond what you expect in the natural contacts can produce better performance.
So, what am I basing these statements on? I’m basing them on a well-known study at which kids were taught to throw beanbags from a particular place on the floor to say 5 feet away, they were trying to hit a target.
Sucheta: I love that study.
Dr. McDaniel: So, you know this study, Sucheta?
Sucheta: Yes. Yeah, do share though. I think –
Dr. McDaniel: There were two groups. One group of children was practicing at the distance that they were going to be tested on. Let’s say 4 feet. Another group of children was practicing on 3 feet and 5 feet but never practiced on the test [0:22:54] 4 feet, then later, a day later or so, the kids come back and they are given the test and they are asked, [0:23:01] get this target 4 feet away with the beanbag, and the researchers measured how close the students were to the target, and the error that is the amount of distance students missed was lower than the students missed by a few were interests when they were trained on three and 5 feet then when they were trained on 4 feet. In other words, training at variable distances, none of which mimic of the actual target distance, produce better performance than persistent training on that target distance. So, that is the idea of variable practice. Vary the conditions of practice. It may not even have to include the eventual target they are going to be shooting for, that’s where I mentioned training free throws and it can produce better motor performance.
Sucheta: Wonderful! So, is it possible to transfer and this discovery to content learning that does not have the motor elements?
Dr. McDaniel: It’s a good question. There has been a study on this, Ronnie Roediger who is my co-author, Make It Stick, with his graduate student in a study where they had people trying to solve anagrams. One condition got the anagram that is the scrambled letter order in exactly the same fashion as it was presented at test. Another group practiced on the same target audience, so the word is ‘elephant,’ but now the anagrams they have practiced on were not the same rearranged [0:24:42] letters as they were rearranged when it was on the test, so that is a verbal practice group, and that group solved more anagrams from the final test than the group that practice on the very same letter rearrangements that was on the final test, so that is a direct analog to the beanbag stuff.
Sucheta: Got it. So, again, how is this, like you mentioned, this test distance for not having the final questions but getting practice, so it sounds like it kind of improves your guesstimation skills, it expands your ability to kind of developed this context of learning, so kind of creating a room for adaptive adjustment. Is that fair to say that?
Dr. McDaniel: Yeah, I think so, so the idea might be that you don’t learn to just solve a particular specific anagram; you learn more generally, approaches an executive kind of strategies for dealing with anagrams in general. I think that would be the idea. Now, we need research to more clearly demonstrate that, but I think that would be the idea: you learn more general strategies of procedures that are effective for the domain rather than what I would say might be brittle strategy, really just a brittle memory of a particular solution. I think maybe you are learning abstractions rather than just particular examples. So, this is somewhat of an analog. We know from the cognitive research of problem solving that if you give somebody a problem to study, and then you later give them a new problem to try to solve, with the new problem has the same underlying principles, for example, practice problem might be that in order for an army to defeat a fortress, the army has to divide its forces into smaller units because of the larger unit cannot successfully cross the bridge that is dividing the attacking army from the defending army, and then you can give somebody a problem, a so-called x-ray problem, we have to figure out how to treat a tumor with a high dose of radiation. You don’t want to destroy healthy cells in the way that are intervening between the radiation and the tumor, and so the solution is to divide up that radiation into your many different smaller doses that are targeting the tumor from different angles, and that’s called the convergence solution, at least, problem solved.
People do not transfer very well when they see one analog from the convergence problem to a new convergence problem, but if they see three or four, and they are prompted to try to figure out what is the underlying regularity among these different problems, now, you get very good transfer to a new convergence problem. So again, the idea if you inch in their learning situation so that people are forced to try to extract the abstract underlying principles, those gets retrieved when you see a new problem with different surface features, and transfer successful. On the other hand, if you just have people work one particular problem, later, when you try to transfer, the learner may not understand as well the underlying principles, and also, they don’t have retrieval cues that match up the old problem with the new problem.
Sucheta: Yeah, and I think what is striking about this is you need a decent amount of intelligence to do that, to abstract the fundamental principle that pervades information, I think that’s when, in my work, I see that if you apply executive strategies which is teaching learners to look at the information and the cohesion or similarity differences in the content as well as some sort of way to systematically connect to the larger picture, they tend to do better, but as you mentioned, otherwise, I love this term “brittle memory,” otherwise, everything is going to collapse and won’t sustain the pressures of time.
Another thing that in your book, you talked about with your co-authors is this idea of collaboration, connecting with you know to what you have seen or learned before, and then also, connecting what you are learning to something in your life. Do you mind talking a little bit about that process and how that works, and how it helps?
Dr. McDaniel: There are several aspects of collaboration that are very important, and what is that, collaboration can help make material more meaningful to you, so we do a little demonstration at school that has people try to learn arbitrary relations between a particular actor and some actions, so things like the bald man climbing the ladder, the nervous man got into the car and things like that, and so these things are kind of arbitrary, and the argument is, has been made by cognitive scientists that one of the challenges for students is that much of the material that they are trying to learn seems arbitrary to them, it doesn’t seem to have some logic to it, it doesn’t seem to have much sense to it. Even though the expert has a very good sense of information, fits together in an organized possible logical manner, the students are novices and does not see those relations. So, elaboration helps you relating it to what you already know, related to personal experience, relating the material helps you make sense of the material, helps you make it less arbitrary, helps you understand it, so in our demonstrations, we say to the students, “Well, tell me why the bald man climbed the ladder.” Well, Sucheta, you might come up with a reason why. Well, the bald man climbed the ladder to reach is toupee in the closet. Now, that is not arbitrary anymore. Now, that has some meaning. Now, you have related to real-world kinds of regularities, and at that point, the information becomes well-remembered. Understanding generates memory much more than it does trying to memorize. So, elaboration toward understanding leads to better memory and that is one benefit of collaboration, that is a big benefit of elaboration.
Another benefit of elaboration, and it’s related, is that elaboration, then if you’re relating it to what you already know, relating it to personal experience, that associates and intertwines this new material into a well-known articulated knowledge structure that you already have, and so now you have lots of retrieval cues by which to retrieve that information. Instead of something that’s kind of standing by itself, isolated in memory, you have something that is a richly interconnected in your knowledge structure, and so retrieval becomes more straightforward. You have lots of ways now help remember that information, so you create better understanding through elaboration, you create a richer retrieval structure, essentially, and you then create information that is more easily retrieved and remembered. It becomes robustly encoded in a rich network rather than as you said earlier, something that is brittle and kind of stands alone.
Sucheta: Wow, yeah, and I think what you mentioned, I love this idea that why did the bald man climbed the ladder to reach that toupee, I think of every teacher kind of brought a student to do this for themselves, that will be – and then, that becomes a process that they can inculcate for themselves and begin to form meaning. My favorite example I often give is when the teacher shows a video as part of history class language arts class, whatever the class may be, and at the end, if you ask students why did the teacher show you the video? They often say, because she can get a break.
Dr. McDaniel: I like the way you are putting that. I think you captured the essence of it beautifully in terms of the benefits of elaboration, and in terms of having teachers assist students to engage in that elaboration process to help generate understanding, that is exactly the point, is that we ought to encourage students to be doing that and I think it encouraged to do that, this is going to become part of their habit, part of their orientation to learning instead of listening to a lecture, and then going home to try to memorize. So, I think you hit it right on the head, Sucheta.
Sucheta: Well, thank you, and so I have last two ideas. One is that a lot of your work talks about this shifting perspective and taking a wonderful – developing a wonderful attitude towards mistake as learning is taking place, and Carol Dweck’s work about the growth mindset relates to this idea also, but at the heart of this perspective shift is that’s when one can learn to teach one’s self solve personal problems and to ultimately optimize strategy, so talk a little bit about that.
Dr. McDaniel: Well, to begin with, I think one of the challenges we face in the classroom and may be as people is that students don’t like to make mistakes and we don’t like to make mistakes. If the idea is that we should somehow be perfect, we should always have the answers and that when one gives a wrong answer, it somehow is a reflection, it reflects poorly for the person. We need to change this attitude by 180° because it is by making mistakes, by venturing guesses, by venturing hypotheses that are sometimes going to be wrong that we learn. Most of the formal theories of learning that we have in cognitive science now our error-driven theories, that is, they learn only when mistakes are made. Learning is stimulated and supported by error, so this idea that we don’t want students to make errors or that students don’t think they can make errors, I think, is very counterproductive. So, what do errors do? Errors, as you said earlier in the podcast, Sucheta, errors in form is directly when our thinking is not quite accurate, when our memory is not quite accurate, and only with that information can we then readjust, reflect, and take majors to correct the misunderstanding or to engage in further study, so that our memories for that information improves. The issue here is, Sucheta, is that our metacognition that is, what we know about our own cognitions, our meta-memory, what we know about our memory is very unreliable. It’s not very accurate. In every study you look, when you ask people to predict how well they will remember something, how will they have learned something, people are overconfident, they are overconfident. They don’t have a good sense of what they are able to reproduce later or what they have learned. Only when you allow people to test themselves for you allow people to venture guesses and get feedback is people’s metacognition and metamemory becoming more accurate. There metacognitions are more in line with what they actually know. So, in fact, we need the opportunity to make errors, we need opportunity to experience retrieval failure, we need the opportunity to generate an incorrect response in order to learn where we need to work further, to understand better. So, we need to give students more opportunities to make errors to make mistakes. Now, how do you do that? It’s very tough because oftentimes, students, if they are in high-stakes, five-evaluation situations, and I think what we have to do is understand that testing could be used as a learning exercise. I don’t even call these tests in my classroom because the students don’t like it, Sucheta. It makes them nervous. They know that I’m using them for learning purposes, the value of these quizzes is very low. So, we have reframed them. In one class, we call them learning opportunities, they are really quizzes, and my class this semester, the students like knowledge checks.
Sucheta: Oh, I love that.
Dr. McDaniel: So, in classes, we call them knowledge checks, so the students are doing them as a way to check what they learned, not as a quiz, not as a test, but it’s exactly the same thing: it’s retrieval practice combined with feedback which gives the students an opportunity to adjust their metacognition, there metamemory, so that it is more accurate.
Sucheta: I love that. I think you are just simply making it less threatening and also maybe, they don’t have awareness even though these are your undergrad or graduate psychology students. Oh, undergrad students.
Dr. McDaniel: Undergrad.
Sucheta: So, their first experience in learning to learn by reflecting on their own learning, so as we close this, can you just quickly say a few things about this metacognition process which is, when you – and I don’t think your work focuses on that, but when you have people with ADHD, they have fundamental problems with self-blindness. Their self appraisal, their assessment of performance, their assessment of outcomes is off target, and then on top of that, their assessment of their capacity and skills is quite inflated, so when you take these two counteracting forces, their relationship to their own self-monitoring is really poor, and that creates a big disadvantage because van, they tend to depend heavily on other people’s strategy generation, and if you get a cooperative person with ADHD or learning disability, it’s great, but what if they are not even cooperative on top of that which is, they have stubbornness for OCD, or ODD on top of that?
Dr. McDaniel: Well, Sucheta, this is a hard thing for me to respond to because as you indicated, I don’t know this area at all. I have not had experience with these kinds of learners. All of my studies have focused on the standard college students and middle school student learners, not the learners would necessarily have special challenges. So, I really have little to say about that, except that I wonder, again, if the metacognitions can become more accurate as these types of learners are given knowledge checks, many knowledge checks allow them to see that may be performance is not as up to the level that they think that they are performing. But then, you’ve got to be able to use that information to accurately adjust your metacognition, and I’m not sure whether that’s happening at all either, but I think the first thing is, you got to give a lot of external knowledge checks, externally generated probably to begin with, knowledge checks so that people, everybody needs to see firsthand exactly where their performance level is relative to what their metacognition is judging.
Sucheta: Yeah, I think that that is, in fact, the exact strategies that research in TBI and concussion, and ADHD shows, so you hit the nail on its head again, so I really appreciate, Mark, I think this was such a meaningful conversation. In closing, if you have any advice to educators regarding what should they do in terms of prioritizing and cinching learning for students, that will be great, and I have personally learned a lot from your work, as well as this book. Thank you for taking the time in collaboratively writing this book because it is such an important piece of information that can inform practices for educators, not just clinicians like me.
Dr. McDaniel: Well, thank you Sucheta. So, I will give you to opposing thoughts and I think in education, there are two challenges. One is for instructors to understand learning and incorporated to their classes, some things that will not cause exempted revision to what they are already doing now. One is to incorporate more of a retrieval practice, and we are seeing that. Another is to incorporate a bit more spacing and the presentation of material – we did not get the chance to talk about that, but that’s another important strategy to promote learning and it are leaving is another important strategy. So, what I like to say is that you don’t need to completely reinvent education, you don’t need to reinvent your classroom, but with some minor adjustments, you can get big gains in learning. Now, we have seen this from instructors who have emailed us many, many emails from around the country have indicated are now trying some of these things, and the results are very, very satisfying. The students are doing better, performance is better.
The second point is that I believe that we need to help students develop these learning strategies because you could teach the best class in the world, your classroom can be vibrant and engaged, but it remains that the student still has to leave the classroom and figure out how to learn the material on their own. They’ve got to go back to the room to their library, where ever they study, and they need to be using effective study strategies.
So, I think we need to find ways to help students develop that, and one thing I’m working on now – in fact, I’m teaching a course this semester, an experimental course on applying the signs of learning, informing students about these strategies, having to practice them in other courses, reflecting on them and developing their own personal portfolio for toolkit of learning strategies. I think we need to do that child. The way I look at it, I don’t know if this this will resonate with you, Sucheta, but if you have kids, you would never ever, ever throw your kid in the deep end of the swimming pool and say, “Get to the shore.” You’d never do that because you know that the kid has to be taught how to learn to swim. Now, if you get that, and then teach the kid how to learn to swim, what’s going to happen? Many are not going to make it. Some are going to figure it out. I think this is the state of education today. We are throwing kids into the deep end of learning and we are saying, “Figure it out, learn.” Some are making it, some are drowning, and what we need to do, what we would do with any other domain, teaching a sport, teaching music, teaching swimming is we help students acquire the skills that allow them to be successful than whatever it is we are challenging them, and I think we need to do more of that in education.
Sucheta: Brilliant, and I would love to off-line find a little bit more about your success of this particular class that you are talking about. Quickly, I will end with my personal experience. This is exactly what I teach in my private practice in a group setting, but again, as you mentioned, this is not happening in the class, it’s happening in a form simulated class, but outside the classroom where the student is actually learning content. And so, learning to learn should be explicitly taught and explicitly learned, and then intention behind learning should be self-checked, so that the student can problem solve. Finally, I think I have talked to the listeners before about a software that I have which is called EXQ where the entire focus of the software is to teach this process of learning how to learn, and help students develop their personal strategy portfolio so that it is guided by the system or me, but eventually is inculcated as a personal beacon of self-guided learning.
So, thank you so much for being on the podcast today and sharing your wisdom once again, and being so generous toward all the listeners Full PreFrontal. I really appreciate it, Mark.
Dr. McDaniel: Sucheta, it’s been enjoyable, as usual.
Producer: All right, well, that’s all the time we have for today. If you enjoy today’s episode, we sure would appreciate if you forward it to a friend or a colleague who might just benefit. So, on behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath, today’s guest, Dr. Mark McDaniel, and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for listening today. We look forward to seeing you again right here next week on Full PreFrontal.