Two follow ups to Lance King about Learning and Mindset

How to Learn Better: Evidence for Well-Known But Little-Used Technique

The powerful effect of the right kind of learning technique.

While it’s now established that resting the mind strengthens past memories, the new research shows that it can also be beneficial to future learning.When people allow themselves to rest and reflect on things they have previously learned, they also become better at learning in the future, a new study finds.
Dr. Alison Preston, who led the research, said:

“We’ve shown for the first time that how the brain processes information during rest can improve future learning.

We think replaying memories during rest makes those earlier memories stronger, not just impacting the original content, but impacting the memories to come.”

In the research participants had to memorise pairs of photos (Schlichting & Preston, 2014).

In between tasks they were given time to rest, during which their brains were scanned.

The results showed that those who spent this time reflecting on what they’d learnt earlier in the day performed better on what they learned later on.

Dr. Preston continued:

“Nothing happens in isolation.

When you are learning something new, you bring to mind all of the things you know that are related to that new information.

In doing so, you embed the new information into your existing knowledge.”

This technique could be used in education to help students learn, Preston said:

“A professor might first get them thinking about the properties of electricity.

Not necessarily in lecture form, but by asking questions to get students to recall what they already know.

Then, the professor might begin the lecture on neuronal communication.

By prompting them beforehand, the professor might help them reactivate relevant knowledge and make the new material more digestible for them.”

In fact, it’s a technique we can all use: now we have the evidence that resting and reflecting also helps future learning, there’s all the more reason to put the book down for a moment and ponder…

How to Learn Anything Better By Tweaking Your Mindset

New study finds that changing your mindset during learning directly impacts what you recall.

The research, published in the journal Memory & Cognition, gave some participants the impression they would have to teach someone else a text after they’d learned it themselves (Nestojko et al., 2014).People recall more and learn better when they expect to teach that information to another person, a new study finds.

Relational processing

A comparison group were told they would simply be tested on the information they’d learned.

In fact both groups were given the same test afterwards and neither group had to teach the written materials to anyone else.

Dr. John Nestojko, the study’s lead author, explained the results:

“When compared to learners expecting a test, learners expecting to teach recalled more material correctly, they organized their recall more effectively and they had better memory for especially important information.

The immediate implication is that the mindset of the student before and during learning can have a significant impact on learning, and that positively altering a student’s mindset can be effectively achieved through rather simple instructions.”

The likely reason why this fairly simple trick works is that it tends to automatically activate more successful learning strategies, the kind routinely used by teachers.

The authors explain:

“When teachers prepare to teach, they tend to seek out key points and organize information into a coherent structure.

Our results suggest that students also turn to these types of effective learning strategies when they expect to teach.” (Nestojko et al., 2014).

Organising information and placing it within a coherent structure are vital components of effective learning.

Psychologists call this ‘relational processing':

“Relational processing — processing the relationships amongst units of information — is proposed to enhance recall by increasing the elements incorporated into memory traces and by allowing for an effective search strategy at the time of retrieval via generative, reconstructive means.

[a] higher degree of output organization displayed by our teaching-expectancy participants reflects their greater relational processing at encoding.” (Nestojko et al., 2014).

 http://www.spring.org.uk/