High-Impact On-Demand Learning Blog

  Time to start bear wrestling! (Note:  this letter is to my daughters…one who will be a sophomore in college next year and the other will be starting nursing school in January) Dear Sunshine and Luv Bug, I am so excited for you to be starting a whole new learning adventure in the next few months.  My hope for you is that you can enjoy the process of learning and continual improvement as much as I do.  Here are a few tips that I have recently learned that can help you both to focus on learning goals rather than performance goals.  You have both been excellent students and have received amazing grades thus far on your educational paths.  However, I sometimes wonder if you are so busy focusing on the grade you will receive that you miss out on true learning…learning that will stick in your long-term memory.  This type of learning builds a strong foundation for future learning so it is very important and helpful.   When you focus on performance ...

  Dear Carlos, Congratulations on the offer and acceptance of your internship this summer with Oasis technologies!  The team at Oasis is so excited to work with you.  This is a big step for you as you will be learning all kinds of new things.  Some of these things will be technical in nature.  Specific skills directly related to coding and programming.  Some will focus more on professional skill building.  You know, those things that we all need to be able to model if we are going to be able to be a successful teammate and employee.  In order to help you succeed, below I am outlining a couple of strategies that you might find useful.   Technical skills.  We are all impressed with how you have self-taught yourself many of the foundational skills you will need to succeed in this workplace setting.  Of course, the team at Oasis will provide excellent training when you first start – I have no...

Dear Ross, Here we are. Thirty-one years into this life. A teacher and a professional learner--or so I thought. What have you been reading all this time? Who have you been listening to? And how did you manage to get this far without knowing what the empirical truth was behind the importance of spaced retrieval. Sure, you practiced critical reflection or monitoring behavior implicitly, and you even spent a good part of your study time  elaborating  on concepts, as is often required in English classes. But you also crammed and regurgitated answers to questions long forgotten, and you did so quite often. No wonder school was a nightmare for you in your early years. You were basically stumbling through school with a greased up brain--information sliding right out!  I have some information for you. And if you want to retain it, you are going to have to listen to me, you...us.  Through specific steps in structuring how we study, we can begin to arrest the constant forgetti...

Dear Oliver,   This semester I learned about strategies to support learning. Most of the strategies were about how to strengthen long-term retention of information by warding-off forgetting. Remembering basic information can in turn support deeper learning—for example, conceptual understanding, mastery of content and skills, flexible thinking, and problem-solving—by securing the essential foundational knowledge solidly in your brain for you to access, use, and build upon. These strategies for learning and remembering information are important and valuable. I will tell you about them! But first I want to tell you about growth mindset, which is also essential for supporting your lifelong learning and success.  What is a growth mindset you ask? Great question! A growth mindset is essentially the deeply-held conviction that your intellectual ability is not fixed, but depends largely on your own actions. Your brain is malleable: when you work hard and learn new things, your brain f...

Hi May, I heard that you have been staying up very late to study for your upcoming final exams. This is me when I pulled all-nighters to cram for exams and I bet you also look like this. and  this…  I used to find myself in a massive rush, trying to stuff as much information as possible a few days before exams. This approach often gave me good grades. However, it made me exhausted, stressed and it took me a long time after exams to physically recover from these crazy days. I also always forgot everything that I have learned the minute I walked out of the exam room. Realizing learning is not the same with performance, I do not let myself in this situation anymore. With a better study plan, I can space out study sessions over the course of the semester and interleave my practice. This approach allows me to forget and re-study, which makes the learning stick to my long-term memory. In the exam dates, I can work on my exam papers with a high level of confidence, concentratio...

       Come one! Come all! Step right up! Gather around and attempt to suspend your skepticism and disbelief! I have great mysteries of the world to reveal to you! You won't want to believe it, it goes against everything you know! Who is brave enough to step through beyond your own knowledge and embrace the new?     Dear First-Year Students,      You may have been trained in ways of studying such as reading, highlighting, rereading, note taking and organizing notes, writing notes by hand versus typing them into your computer. I am here to introduce you to new, mysterious methods that may seem strange and unfamiliar, yet have been shown through empirical research to be more effective than the methods you know. Are you interested?      You are brave. Here are some new things to try (although not so new, they've been around for ages but for some reason have remained locked away in a secret vault accessible only to PhDs) Quizzing:...