High-Impact On-Demand Learning Blog

The case for learning styles and how best students engage with and absorb classroom content has been debated, considered, and in general, part of learning conversations around me for as long as I can remember - which really means, elemetary school in the early 80s. What's amazing, despite the evidence, is how pervasive it remains. "Oh, I'm not doing well in class becuase I'm a visual learner and the lectures don't really sink in with me," says one classmate. "I have to take notes. Lots and lots of notes or I won't learn. I can't just sit there and listen," says another.  Visual. Auditory. Reading/Writing. Kinesthetic. Learning styles. My peers and even my own students can not only easily describe and reference their learning styles, but can point to the ability to activate these styles in classes as their keys to success. For some, whether or not teachers/instructors build in and accommodate such styles, dictates their interest and enrollment...

Come on. You can tell me. What's your tried and true favorite or best strategy for learning? I know, I know. You wait until the last minute, head to the library and cram. Late night cram sessions in the library. Am I right? Or maybe you have a study partner, and you go over your notes with one another right before the test. How about highlighting and underlining? Do you, like me, swear by this method? But which one? I used to highlight. Now I only underline. Reviewing what I underline helps me study. I swear it works. Or does it? As far as I can tell, since my earliest school days, I've been a good learner. You know the type, pays attentionn in class, turns in the work on time, gets mostly As and Bs. That success has somehow endured. So what I've picked up (and subsequently what you've picked up along the way) - from teachers, my parents, other students - about how to "do" learning must work. Except, they really don't. How most of us believe we learn best ...

  Hello, my name is Michelle…and I’m a blocker! It’s really been for my whole life.  I’m not really sure how it all started, it’s just the way that I think I have always studied.  Yes, I participate in massed and blocked practice.  One of the recent turning points for me was listening to Dr. Robert Bjork’s lecture, How we learn versus how we think we learn .  In his speech, Dr. Bjork stated, “conditions that produce forgetting, rather than undoing learning, create opportunities for additional learning”.  How crazy is that!  I thought that the whole point of studying and learning was to remember, not to forget.   However, through our course readings and videos, it has become clear that there are many empirical studies to back up what Dr. Bjork is saying.  For example, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014) describe how learning, remembering, and forgetting work together to create durable learning.   “First, as we recode and consol...

In Dr. Robert Bjork’s video, How We Learn Versus How We Think We Learn, he used the example of the pre-flight safety briefing flight attendants give when he discussed testing as pedagogy rather than assessment. I paused the video after this example because I wanted to see if I could also remember how to put the life vest on if needed in an emergency. Coincidentally, I went out of town this past weekend and tried this during the safety briefing. I tried to remember the steps before the flight attendant to see how much I could remember. The steps came to me easily from memorization from the several times I have traveled in my lifetime, but then I thought to myself, could I or would I actually remember these steps if I had to perform them? With the added layer of possible panic, what would this look like? How do I know I can even put the vest on correctly, if I have never actually done it before? If an emergency arises, how effective would this briefing be, no matter how many times we hav...

         “I know grades don’t matter in grad school, but it’s so validating to get a 4.0!” I sent this message to a few friends at the end of FA20. I was happy to know I received a 4.0 GPA after taking 2 PhD classes while working full time (something I hadn’t done in 2 years). If I believe “grades don’t matter in grad school,” why did I get so excited about this assessment of my performance? Why did I finally get A+ grades? I have been in school for over 20 years now…Am I smarter this many years later? Or am I studying better? Is it both? Robert Bjork would probably tell me it is both. On one hand, I am “performing better” because I have deeper foundational knowledge and am able to successfully generate connections/engage processes (Brown et.al., 2014, p.76). On the other hand, graduate school forced me to do my readings before the lecture. As it turns out, learning is optimal for ESL students if they read the content before a lecture (Uni...

  The dreaded word: Test. For students these synonyms strike the same amount of fear and trepidation: exam, quiz, midterm and final. It is a word that creates anxiety, stress and apprehension. Students even get accommodations for testing anxiety. So, when we want to talk about testing as a positive way to create long term learning it is no surprise that people suddenly cannot hear anything about testing without the knee jerk, emotional response. In their article "Making Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning," authors Byork and Byork state that "testing is typically viewed as a vehicle of assessment, not a vehicle of learning." I think most students would agree.  However, the Byorks' and others' research shows that testing actually facilitates learning better than most commonly practiced methods, but it is difficult to convince students of that fact; mainly because of their lifelong experiences of test...

Spaced Out! Using Science to Develop a Writing Practice. As graduate students, writing is a large part of our studies. Often, we’re engaging in discussion posts in Canvas as well as writing short reflection papers and/or hefty final term papers, not to mention independent or collaborative research projects that have publication goals. When I began graduate school, I didn’t exactly know I would become a writer – but here I am, spending a lot of time and precious brain power trying to assess my writing habits, break poor habits, and form new, more productive and sustainable writing practices. Assessing My Historic Writing Habits  Spoiler alert - they’re not great! Looking back at my undergraduate days, I actually didn’t have many classes that required writing. As a visual art major, I was more often in the studio than   in the library or computer lab. However, a quick mental survey of the few courses that included writing assignments quickly revealed a troubling trend. That fi...

Listen Closely to my Symphony I need to remind myself more often,  no one can hear the symphony in my mind.   Listening to Bjork’s talk on “How We Learn Vs How We Think We learn” made me realize that, as learners, we are pretty poor judges of what or even if we have learned something. I can hop on board with this idea. However, at the end of the talk, I felt personally attacked. Bjork highlighted the fact that sometimes when I teach I assume the information I am transmitting through my long PowerPoint supported soliloquies are in fact not the confluence and transference of beautifully structured knowledge poured directly into my students’ minds. Bjork thinks that my symphony is only in my mind. As evidence of this, Bjork performs a little experiment where he drums the beat to Jingle Bells on a table—to the audience it sounds like an intentional tapping, rhythmic but devoid of pitch and tone and meaning; yet, to the drummer the unforgettable Jingle Bells tune frolics with eve...

A quote from Albert Einstein.     A quote that spoke to me as I believe it summarized well the concept of Illusions of Comprehension presented by Dr. Robert Bjork.     Illusions of comprehension is the idea that we confuse performance with learning.     Performance is described as that which we can observe – learning as that which we must infer.     I looked up the word infer to make sure I had the exact definition.     To infer is to deduce or conclude from evidence and reasoning.     It is that step beyond memorization where you actually apply the knowledge gained.     What do our intuitions tell us about learning?     Messages we get going through school tell us that learning means doing well on that test or getting a good grade.     I got an ‘A’!     I must have learned the content!     The structure of school contributes to this sense that learning happens and is assessed w...

As a teacher, I often remind myself about the distinction between performance and learning. In my class, I constantly measure students’ new learning throughout a semester (10 minutes after learning, one week later, at the end of the month and at the end of the semester) to make sure that students have retained information in their long-term memory and be able to apply learned knowledge and skills in different contexts. My intuitive sense is that performance and learning are always positively related . However, I find it interesting when research has shown that short-term performance is not an indicator of long-term learning. Several assigned articles in this course and Dr. Bjork’s lecture have provided empirical evidence for this negative correlation. I used to believe taking a step-by-step blocked approach is a good way to course design as it shows high performance gains and this is a pervasive approach that I experienced as a student. This course challenged my belief through all o...

"The merit of all things lies in their difficulties”—Alexandre Dumas  Contrary to popular belief, it is the tasks that are tedious and effortful that produce the most powerful learning. It is easy to equate ablest, leisurely recall to retention because it feels so natural, almost innate. Despite the intuitive nature of the learning ideology that is repetition, the result is simply an illusion of mastery. We become familiar with the way the information is presented, gain a sense of comfort with the syntax, and become confident in recognizing the stimulus  (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014).  Learning doesn’t rely merely on exposure but on intent and effort. Many learning strategies we have accepted are not durable because they simply do not require dedication. This same philosophy can be applied across disciplines, including fashion design pedagogy. The critique method has been widely critiqued in the design sphere as being largely subjective and offering non-con...

We seem to be overconfident in our own learning, or at least have too much confidence in blocked or massed practice. I wonder if we use massed or blocked practice because of conditioning. Just like gambling, we have had some success with massed or blocked practice, as in classical conditioning evening if there is no reward with the ringing of the bell or the pull of the slot machine handle, we have had some success with passing an exam due to cramming for it the night before. We internalize that is how we are successful, through massed or blocked practice. One advantage of being a non-traditional learner is that over time I have learned that cramming does not work for me. During my master’s experience, I took some classes that were out of my comfort zone, accounting, statistics, financial analysis. These were by far more challenging than anything I had in my undergraduate degree, and even though I did not know then about interleaving or spaced retrieval, I would ‘practice’ studying, me...

  (Creative Commons, 2021) To be honest, I am struggling writing this blog post because although Dr. Bjork has obviously spent his career proving his work around “desirable difficulties” (Bjork, 1994), I find myself frustrated at his hubris on a few key arguments he made during his lecture (not to mention the multiple grammatical errors on his slides and him reading directly off his slides during his ‘Lecturer of the Year’ lecture). Because I am so triggered by some of his statements, I feel a need to use this blog post to do exactly what Seth Godin says a blog should be used for: “respond out loud” and show the “metacognition of thinking about what” I have been struggling with since watching the lecture earlier this week. Obviously, I need to answer the prompt, but I might get there in a nonconventional way. And, in not answering the prompt directly, I am changing a behavior of my own.   Dr. Bjork has proven that varying the conditions of learning allows the learner/learner...

Thoughts on combining the best of neurological and sociocultural components of the learning sciences When it comes to learning, our intuitions are all wrong.  We tend to think that learning is better when it is easy and progresses smoothly. Focusing on one topic at a time, digging in for lots of learning all at once, and reviewing or rereading material are all strategies that give us a sense of fluency. Moreover, when the learning process feels “easy” and we are not stumbling or making mistakes, we inherently feel successful. But the research makes clear that this fluency—to the extent we have achieved it at all—is fleeting.  We need to embrace evidence-based practices  to help us remember information longer, connect it more securely to previous knowledge, and improve our ability to transfer knowledge to new settings. Specifically, research from psychology and cognitive science suggests that we should engage in “effortful learning” that is ripe with “desirable difficultie...

What is it about learning--something that I do every day of my life--that is so darn tricky to get a handle on? Even worse, how is it that I can read the literature regarding the unintuitive aspects of learning so commonly misunderstood, yet when I am in the situation where I have to choose whether to engage in an empirically validated learning strategy or my intuition, I still have to fight against my instinct telling me that I will remember the information so tangible in the moment?  Dr. Robert Bjork would likely offer a number of possible reasons: the fluency of an activated memory trace offers the uncertain promise of easy retrieval in the future, the growing familiarity with a new massed skill provides a confidence that future recall will match its present state, or the seemingly logical belief that difficulty in learning implies less effective learning. I find myself fighting with each of these memory traps, but what stands out to me as the most insidious of the mind's misdir...