Do you remember the last time you were BORED? If waiting for my zone to be called for a flight doesn’t count, then sadly, NO.

Like many adults, I have little down time. After spending several years in school, then working hard for tenure, and then having two kids, it is difficult to find time to just sit and THINK. Many of my best “what’s next” ideas happen when I am doing something non-academic, like walking the dog or cleaning the toilet.

My “too busy to think” pace of life made me curious about how students take time to think. In an article from the American Psychological Association on transferable skills, employers want job seekers to be able to THINK. Okay, not groundbreaking news? This seemingly silly request actually indicates a need for employees, typically college graduates, to be able to take what they have learned and synthesize and/or apply it to new learning.

It may be obvious that THINKING is needed for learning, but I believe we need to be more deliberate about giving away and taking the time to think. For example, countless studies have shown the positive impact of meta-cognition, or thinking about thinking on learning. More students are aware of being mindful about their thinking, however, I don’t think educators in the classroom may always give students the time to THINK. Pooja Agarwal, author of the incredible book on the science of learning Powerful Teaching  addressed a large audience in a recent keynote with the imperative, “STUDENTS NEED TO BE GIVEN TIME TO THINK.”

If you believe this advice is overly simplistic, take a realistic example of how thinking can be cut short in the classroom. Imagine I’m giving a brilliant lecture on types of memory! As I work my way around lively examples of episodic, personal/time-based memories and semantic memories, the general facts that make some people a jeopardy star, how do I know my students are thinking? Students may appear to be listening and could be dutifully taking notes, so are they thinking? Well perhaps not. If they are not asked to stop and reflect, write their own overall summary of the main concepts, and are simply asked “do you understand” or “do you have any questions” there is a high likelihood they have not been given time to think and LEARN (see Dr. Pooja Agarwal’s site, retrievalpractice.org for excellent materials to encourage thoughtful retrieval).

What can learners do to THINK more:

1. Find time to slow down and be bored. Force yourself to do nothing and see what new ideas or thoughts you have!
2. When learning, stop to reflect on information by summarizing it in your own words.
3. Attempt to connect new information with other knowledge.
4. Be aware of the learning trap of familiarity — feeling like you learned does not guarantee learning. Students often fall into this trap by gaining false confidence that they know material by reading, and re-reading notes.
5. Ask educators to build Think Time into class. Teachers this means getting comfortable throwing out content in exchange for time to ask students to retrieve what they have learned BEFORE they share it with anyone else. This ensures students can recall information on their own.

NEED MORE TIME TO THINK? Hit the pause button more often. Limit one thing you do each day that either overstimulates you or sucks away time. Take back this time and be alone with your thoughts. You might be surprised what you discover!

Learning, as difficult as it can be has a very simple definition — the persistence of knowledge overtime. However, the definition’s three pieces: persistence, knowledge, and overtime lead to muddied ideas of when and how learning occurs.

At the end of a school year, ask a teacher what learning is and how he knows it has occurred and you’re sure to get a different response than that of a child, a parent, or a state funding agency.

As students across the country begin soaking up the summer sun, a familiar concern is brought to light — what happens to student learning in the summer?

The answer is as varied as the definition of learning. There is a general consensus that by summer’s end students are behind 1 month in learning gains (typically measured by comparing test scores from the previous spring with the current fall in subjects like reading and math). Research has also revealed differences in learning loss and gain depending on characteristics like race, socioeconomic status, and age.

Minnesota Public Radio News recently dedicated an hour to the dip in summer learning, known as the summer slide (1). A panel of educators provided honest and informative content, however, the scope of their comments seemed to miss the psychological perspective of learning and memory.

I decided to take a look at current research in educational psychology. Here are some take-aways to develop learning in the summer and YEAR ROUND.

It is about of RESOURCES. Learning dips are often determined by socioeconomic status (SES). High SES students tend to avoid a summer slip and low SES students fall further behind. Consider what a typical summer might be like depending on resources.

Who goes to camp, museums, or possibly vacations to far-away places?

Who has access to day-time educational programs?

The same MPR program noted above found that high SES families spend about $5,000 on summer activities! These same students may miss out on additional opportunities during the school year because they are working after school or are not encouraged to join out-of-school activities.

It is about ACCESS. Researchers emphasize the need for access to knowledge rich resources over the summer (programs, technology, and books). The journal, Urban Education (2) uses the term “book deserts” to indicate living areas where children have limited to no access to books.

It is about MOTIVATION. Students need to be filled with curiosity and drive YEAR ROUND so that they can pursue resources. Consider a small child who loves searching for bugs or a youth who can tell you encyclopedic-quality baseball statistics. Students’ curiosity is silenced because of their environment. Love of learning can also be squashed during the school year by an academic focus on “test scores are best.”

It is about SHARING. Funding for community programs is limited and cannot address the needs of all students. If you are a student, reach out to a friend who may benefit from an invite to play and learn at a museum for a day. Parents and informed adults, help spread the word of camps and enrichment programs that could benefit an acquaintance. When you enroll your child, find out if you can make a donation to fund another student.

There is a need to go beyond attention-getting changes in learning trends and focus on what is being learned during the SCHOOL YEAR.

It is about SKILLS. We should broaden our definition of learning and learning focus from a score gap to a skill gap.

Educators and administrators need to rethink learning. How do we prepare students for future success? Yes, assessments of fundamentals in reading are important. No less so are skills like:

Curiosity, motivation, empathy, kindness, critical thinking, communication, wellness, life skills, and study skills (3).  How are these being learned? Don’t they often get kicked aside as soft skills because they are difficult to measure?

Teams of educators must focus on equal access to education in the scope of what LEARNING should look like. After all, when many of our historically academic skills are automatized, we may never replace distinctly human abilities to create, relate, and be empathetic (4).

1. Angela Davis (Host). (2019). How to help your students avoid the ‘summer slide’ [Radio series episode]. With Karen Zamora (Executive producer), MPR News with Angela Davis. St. Paul, MN: MPR.org.
2. Neuman, S. B. & Moland, N. (2019). Book Deserts: The Consequences of Income Segregation on Children’s Access to Print. Urban Education, 54(1), 126-147
3. https://successfulstudent.org/20-life-skills-not-taught-in-school/
4. https://www.businessinsider.com/things-humans-can-do-better-than-machines-2015-10

My airplane conversation typically goes from my seat mate being relaxed that as an experimental psychologist I cannot analyze them, to feeling concerned when I tell them I study memory, because “THEY HAVE A TERRIBLE MEMORY.”

“I do too”, I say. “We all do.” Memory, like swimming or practicing piano, must be worked on to be improved. Ideas that a “good memory” is fueled by a special memory genius or photographic memory are incorrect misconceptions of how memory works.

My college students have learned they need to work on their memory too. When I teach a course in Human Memory to juniors and seniors, they are disturbed, even outraged, that no one has taught them about best practices in learning and memory. They see these skills, developed and practiced, in a memory course, as powerful change-agents for their learning.

As I teach them that humans have a historical need to create images that are rich, sometimes silly, to remember information like a family tradition or knowledge about a late great-grandparent, they seem to begin to get it. Remembering is fundamentally human. We are the sum of our memories. Part of our human experience is to share information, stories, and knowledge.

Though, have we lost the need to remember? Currently we rely on external devices like smart phones and computers to remember dates, names, numbers, and even our most treasured memories. This is a relatively new shift in how we remember. Research has highlighted how the computer has replaced our own thinking in a phenomenon called The Google Effect (1). For example, when questions come up with friends like, “what current actor is playing Spiderman?” or “what decade did the Challenger explode?” people are highly likely to Google answers rather than rely on memory. Like a smug friend who knows the answers to trivia questions, researchers found that using the internet to answer questions develops false confidence among users who then claim to know the answer all along (2).

Despite our reflex for using for technology, we are quite interested in having a good memory. With a longer life expectancy, people value measures that ensure a productive, high quality life. Concerns of a life disrupted by memory loss through dementia have led to a public interest and demand for memory improvement techniques.

Major for-profit training programs have seized on the fear of memory loss spearheading a billion-dollar industry. These training programs boast benefits to memory, attention, and problem-solving by having people engage in short games developed by a collection of neuroscientists, market-researchers, and game designers. Perhaps the biggest player in the market, is Lumosity (Lumos Labs, Inc., San Francisco). Their website points to research supporting their training program like a 2015 study (3) that found participants who used 49 Lumosity-style training games were better on neurological tasks than a control group who did crossword puzzles. Other research (4) conflicts by demonstrating that brain-training games improves participants game-playing skills like other video games; a zero-sum gain on memory and cognition.

Going back to my students who say their learning has been enhanced after completing course in cognition and memory, why not teach how memory and learning works to students? I had a strong hunch that foundational knowledge, on its own could, lead to improved memory.

My study published in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology (5) aimed to take an educational approach to understanding memory improvement by investigating the effects of classroom memory skills training and the cognitive training program Lumosity on college students’ memory.

Students in two separate sections of a Human Memory course either had either only course instruction (“no Lumosity group”) or course instruction AND twelve weeks of training on Lumosity (“Lumosity group”). Students in both sections were asked to complete three memory assessments: one at the beginning of the course, a second at the mid-term, and a third during the final week of the course.

Students in EACH section showed improved performance on the assessment tasks in areas of working memory performance and recall and recognition performance. For example, in the word formation task, participants were given the prompt, “come up with as many words as you can in one minute that start with the letter P”.  Quickly listing several words required focused attention on the task and retrieving words from long-term memory. The word recall task, on the other hand, required participants to store up to fifteen words in memory and then report as many as possible. This task utilizes aspects of working memory, which allows one to hold and manipulate information, and long-term memory.

However, Lumosity-trained participants performed worse than the other section on a face-name recall task. During the course both groups performed a classroom activity creating a picture mnemonic for their last name. For example, my last name “Lassonde” can be imagined as a woman roping a lasso around a pond. Similarly, each student created their own name mnemonic. Then they shared their name image with the class. Having this activity at the beginning of the course really helps me and my students learn names.

Lumosity also has a specific memory task to improve name recall. Game players are introduced to many customers and asked to take a food order. When completing the order, the player is required to type in the name of the customer. Difficulty increases as multiple customers give orders and there are time delays between fulfilling orders. This training task didn’t translate to a face-name recall task given on the memory assessment. Like other studies of cognitive training, the computer game simulation for learning names didn’t reveal additional learning gains in a real-world scenario.

Did students “THINK” their memory had improved after taking the course? The Everyday Memory Questionnaire (6) with questions about memory, like how often do you, “completely forget to do things you said you would do” revealed students thought forgetting behaviors decreased after taking the course.”

While it is impossible to assert that Lumosity had no impact, there are at least three indicators that course instruction would be a more promising way to improve memory.

• First, more students in the No-Lumosity group saw memory improvement in their everyday lives.
• Second, only eight percent of Lumosity group students believed Lumosity training would lead to long-lasting benefits to memory; this is an idea consistent with research questioning the efficacy and transfer of Lumosity tasks.
• Third, over ninety percent of students in both sections thought that course techniques and course theory would lead to long-term benefits on memory.

Nearly ninety percent of students in the Lumosity group, said they enjoyed playing the games and 75 percent would recommend them to their friends and family. Maybe the act of putting time toward Lumosity led toward positive feelings about the games. Students probably enjoyed these games because they were a novel component of the classroom.

Lumosity has yet to be applied to students in this type of college classroom setting. This study is among the first of hopefully many implementing cognitive training into a classroom atmosphere.

The field of cognitive and educational psychology is on the right track. Sites like retrievalpractice.org and http://www.learningscientists.org/ are leaders in promoting college student learning strategies. But colleges can do better. Listen up Psychology Departments it is time to share knowledge on learning. Join me in creating courses designed to improve learning and memory!

References

1. Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 476-478.
2. Ward, A. F., & Wegner, D. M. (2013). Mind-blanking: When the mind goes away. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 15.
3. Hardy, J. L., Nelson, R. A., Thomason, M.E., Sternberg, D.A., Katovich, K., Farzin, F. & Scanlon M. (2015). Enhancing Cognitive Abilities with Comprehensive Training: A Large, Online, Randomized, Active-Controlled Trial. PLoS One, 10 (9).
4. Kable, J. W., Caulfield, M. K., Flacone, M., McConnell, M., Bernardo, L., Parthasarathi, T., Cooper, N., Ashare, R., Audrain-McGovern, J., Hornik, R., Diefenbach, P., Lee, F. J., & Lerman, C. (2017). No Effect of Commercial Cognitive Training on Brain Activity, Choice Behavior, or Cognitive Performance. Journal of Neuroscience, 37 (31) 7390-7402.
5. Lassonde, K. A., Osborn, R. M. (in press). Lumosity does not best classroom memory improvement strategies. Scholarship in Teaching and Learning of Psychology. Dec. 13 2018.
6. Royle, J., & Lincoln, N. B. (2008). The everyday memory questionnaire-revised: Development of a 13-item scale. Disability and Rehabilitation: An International, Multidisciplinary Journal, 30(2), 114-121.