A simple and easy shift in student thinking can yield much more efficient and effective studying.
I am an AP Psychology teacher and we’ve entered the time of the school year where students are studying and reviewing all of the course material in preparation for the AP exam in a couple of weeks. A live camera into my classroom right now would show students attempting old exam multiple-choice questions and writing responses for free response questions. These forms of retrieval practice tend to yield better results on future assessments, whether they be an AP exam or even just an in-class formative assessment.
But, while my students are hard at work, I find their somewhat intuitive thinking about these reviews to be faulty. Most students are answering questions and studying and looking for what they do know. It’s certainly more enjoyable to look for and focus on the answers you get right on a review. Unfortunately, when we focus on the correct answers and somewhat ignore the incorrect answers, we’re left with a level of overconfidence about our level of understanding.
I stress with my students to place more emphasis on what they do not know. Look at and spend way more time investigating what you get wrong on these reviews. That’s where the holes in your learning are and that’s where you can gain the ground to make a better grade. Understandably, that may not be as enjoyable as only focusing on what you answered correctly, but you’d rather find out in your studying that you don’t fully understand a concept than find out on the final assessment…it’s too late at that point.
So I tell my students to think of studying and reviewing as a treasure hunt of sorts…they are on the hunt for concepts and terms they don’t know. And every time they find something they don’t know well, that’s actually a win because now they have time to correct it before the assessment. And if they review all the material and don’t find any concepts they don’t understand…great…you can feel pretty confident in your preparedness for the assessment.
This may seem like an inconsequential shift in thinking for students, but in my experience, this “on a treasure hunt for stuff I don’t know” mentality requires students to think more deeply with and about the material and leads to more efficient and effective studying. In general, more cognition = more learning. And if students are meant to identify and restudy what they answer incorrectly, that will require more cognition than simply identifying what they answered correctly and then simply move on to the next information.
And, as I stated earlier, it is so much more enjoyable and cognitively easier to ignore the wrong and only focus on the correct, but as I told one of my students in class today: Choose your difficult. You can take it cognitively easy while studying and reviewing, but this will probably result in a more difficult time on the assessment. Or, you can study in a more cognitively difficult manner, and that will probably yield a more pleasant time on the assessment.
Choose your difficult.
I would encourage any and all teachers to introduce this to their students while studying…especially as we enter exam season at the end of the school year. It’s a simple conversation to have with your students that could result in much more efficient and effective learning both in the classroom and while studying at home.
How would you reframe or change this conversation for your classroom? I would love to hear from elementary and middle school teachers.
