Dear Oliver

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 forms new connections and, over time, those new connections make you smarter and smarter. Taking this information to heart is important because it implies that with hard work and persistence you can achieve great things. People with a growth mindset face challenges by recognizing that they can put in hard work and likely overcome the challenge. When they fail—and indeed, some degree of failure is inevitable throughout life—they face the failure as an opportunity to learn and grow and do better next time. In contrast, people with a fixed mindset face challenges with fear and trepidation because failure represents an indictment of their own intelligence, worth, and ability. In other words, a growth mindset propels you to try hard things and to get up and keep going when you don’t succeed. Those skills—that grit, resilience, perseverance, and confidence in your own ability to learn and grow—are what will ultimately support your success more than any other learning strategy you might employ. 

That said, armed with a growth mindset to back you up, some concrete tactics can help you learn, retain, and leverage information as best as possible. The key to all of these strategies is a concept called “desirable difficulties.” The idea is that the best learning requires effort, which is inherently difficult. But effortful learning will stick, while taking the easy route is not as effective. Here are some specific strategies to help boost your learning.

• Retrieval practice: When you want to learn information, you should test yourself rather than re-reading or reviewing the material more passively. The act of retrieving information, as you do when you test yourself, helps to encode the information more solidly in your memory. Testing yourself in this way also helps you to identify what you do and do not know, and thus can help you to direct your studying to focus on information that you do not (yet!) know as well. 

• Spacing: You should study on multiple occasions, with time in between, instead of studying all at once in one long cram-session. Spacing your practice helps to better encode and consolidate information in your mind and plants it there more securely for later access and use. 

• Interleaving: You should mix-up different topics (or different categories or types within a single subject) rather than doing all of one thing, then all of something else, etc. Mixing up your practice in this way helps you to distinguish between different categories or types, so that you understand the unique characteristics of each type better. 

• Elaboration: When you are learning new information, it’s always a good idea to think about that information and to connect it to your own life, experiences, interests, and existing knowledge. You can elaborate, for example, by thinking of visual images that you can relate to the new information or by explaining what you’ve learned to someone else. The more you can anchor new information to yourself, and then expand on that information in ways that are meaningful to you, the better your learning will be.  

• Reflection: You should always take time to reflect on your learning. Reflection means thinking back about the learning experience or the content and considering what went well, what could have gone better, how the content or the experience connects with other information or experiences that you’ve had, what you might want to do differently next time to improve on your learning or your experience, and so forth. This reflection process serves both as a way of retrieving information from before (thus further encoding the information in your brain) and elaborating on the information to build new connections with existing knowledge. 

I hope these strategies make sense and seem both reasonable and feasible to you! I know that you are a good student and a hard-worker. And regardless of your score on any one test or assignment, those characteristics will take you far. In fact, I want you not to worry so much about scores and grades—they do not define you. Instead, I hope that you’ll focus more on the learning itself—working hard, accepting challenges, moving forward from setbacks, and keeping your curiosity alive!

Love, 
Mommy