Learning Success

Collaborative Inhibition

~ Karla Lassonde ~ Leave a comment

This post originally appeared as written on learningscientists.org

Things are going well for you as a college student. You like your classes, you’ve made new friends and, because you’re reading this blog, you realize you’re well-prepared for the workload of college. That is, until you find out you must do group work in most of your classes! I can hear the collective sighs and see faces of concern when I announce to my classes that they’re doing group work.

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Trusting group members with your learning can be difficult. Many students fear the possibility of social loafing, which is when one or two group members put in the most effort while others benefit and coast to success. Others prefer to work alone because they like to remain in control of the task. And still very practical issues like finding time outside of class to meet can prohibit successful group work. These barriers to group success are well known and often are experienced by college students.
Cognitive psychologists are aware of these and other barriers including collaborative inhibition. Collaborative inhibition occurs when a group recalls less information than its individual members would alone (Basden et al., 1997; Wright & Klumpp, 2004). This is counterintuitive as we might envision a study partner remembering something we did not. For example, if I asked you to remember the following words: plant, ham, pizza, scissors, robot, towel, surf, hamster, chip, and pliers in any order, based on what is known about working memory, most of us would remember between 4 and 6 of these words with ease. There are also several strategies a student could use to remember the words. Techniques like visualizing the words in a silly story or repeatedly recalling the list will aid in learning and lead to an even larger number of words recalled. So, if you and a partner are asked to remember the words, collectively, shouldn’t two heads be better than one?

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Lab research has pinpointed the retrieval problems that occur during group remembering. Retrieval inhibition occurs when one group member recalls information out loud and disrupts other group members from responding. Consider the word list again: plant, ham, pizza, scissors, robot, towel, surf, hamster, chip, and pliers. You and a partner study the list independently. After a study period, you come together and are asked to recall by taking turns, your partner goes, you go, and so on. Your partner responds first saying “hamster.” You follow by saying “surf.” This seems easy and you feel like you are benefiting from putting two heads together. Yes!
Until what happens next. Your partner says “pizza” but hey YOU were also going to say “pizza.” Your palms sweat, you twitch a little as your retrieval process, or your natural flow to recall the words, is disrupted. You sit and wait for another word to come to mind but, with this distraction, you come up short.
What happened? Turn-taking changed the “production” of recall items from how you would’ve remembered on your own. The result is collaborative inhibition and has been shown to become an even larger problem with groups of more than two (see Rajaram, & Pereira-Pasarin, 2010 for a review of retrieval disruptions).
Okay, now you say you really don’t ever want to work in groups! But, let’s apply collaborative inhibition to a more realistic group study session. You are meeting with a group to study for a psychology test on basic brain anatomy. Most of the to-be-learned material is terms and definitions (e.g., parietal lobe, amygdala, glial cell). Your group meets at the library at 7 pm and you have read the necessary chapters, completed note cards on important terms, and have tested yourself several times on these terms. A quick assessment, however, reveals only half of the group has prepared. Those unprepared claim they were waiting for this study session to prepare. Experienced in the science of learning, you suggest that you quiz each other on basic terms. The group agrees, however, when questions are put to the group, the same person quickly blurts out answers before others have a chance to respond. This continues throughout the entire study session.
Fast forward to what happens on exam day. There are several complications that may occur because of group remembering. First there is you. You realize that someone else remembering and reporting the information in a group does not guarantee YOU know the information. You come home from the group study session and spend additional time testing on the material by looking up and elaborating upon unknown terms. Making this important realization, you ace the test!
A second group member comes home from the study session and decides he is now familiar with all the information. Sure, he didn’t come up with answers on his own, but he thinks he learned most of what he needs to know from the group. Sadly, he is disappointed on test day when taking the test, he realizes he cannot recall any of the correct brain-based words on the fill-in-the-black section of the exam and does poorly overall. A third group member remembers quite a bit from the group session, however, finds that some of the group’s answers from the session were not correct. She has a hunch about correct answers but keeps getting confused by what was said in the group. She wishes she would have prepared better on her own.
It is likely that you or someone you know has experienced these learning outcomes. The story of working with others may not be all bad though. For example, group testing in classroom settings has shown to reduce test anxiety among individuals, provide social cuing of information, and has led to groups remembering more overall. Additional research blending laboratory remembering with class remembering is needed to reveal a clearer picture of the long-term benefits of group vs. individual remembering (LoGuidice, Pachai & Kim, 2015). Until then, it is important to add collaborative inhibition to the list of potential pitfalls of learning in groups.
References

Basden, B. H., Basden, D. R., Bryner, S. and Thomas, R. L. III (1997). A comparison of group and individual remembering: Does collaboration disrupt retrieval strategies? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 1176–1189.

LoGuidice, A.B., Pachai, A.A., & Kim, J.A. (2015). Testing together: When do students learn
more through collaborative tests? Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology, 1(4), 377-389.

Rajaram, S., & Pereira-Pasarin, L. P. (2010). Collaborative memory: Cognitive research andtheory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 5(6), 649-663.
Wright, D.B., & Klumpp, A. (2004). Collaborative inhibition is due to the product, not the
process, of recalling in groups. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 11(6), 1080=1083.

What are we learning?

~ Karla Lassonde ~ 1 Comment

After class a student told me, “I thought I had been taught how to learn in school but now you’ve ruined everything.” She asked me to look at her notes. “See?”, she said, “Don’t these notes look like the material on the powerpoint? And they are neatly written aren’t they?” I agreed, they indeed were.

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Then what was the problem, what had I ruined?

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That day my Cognitive Psychology class had just finished an activity and discussion on strategies for learning. Students selected THE most commonly used learning strategies by college students from the following list (adapted from: Dunlosky et al., 2013):

  1. Highlighting (text or information)
  2. Re-reading (to be learned material)
  3. Summarize
  4. Mnemonic (use key words to describe)
  5. Imagine (use mental images while learning)
  6. Elaborate (provide related details to to be learned information)
  7. Self-explain (write why in own words)
  8. Testing (practice by asking yourself questions about material)
  9. Distribute Testing (practice for an hour or so a day, for five days)
  10. Interleave Testing (practice for an hour or so a day, for five days, but switch content each half hour)

The items on the list were described by Dunlosky and colleagues (2013) as either of low, moderate, or high in how useful they are for learning. In the list, the lowest appear in red, moderate in blue, and high in green.

Students said their peers would consider method #1 Highlighting and #2 Re-reading as the most used strategies. I asked them who thought the average college student tests themselves on materials, on their own, BEFORE taking a test. Methods 8, 9, and 10 are all ways you can test yourself on material. NO ONE RAISED THEIR HAND.

Student preferred methods like re-reading and highlighting do take time, but have very low pay off for learning. Consider this, as a new college student I recall carefully laying

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out a fresh pack of colorful highlighters. I sat down with my book or class notes and meticulously color-coded information in a pattern I thought would be both meaningful and lead to successful remembering. I WAS WRONG. Not only did this take a lot of time, the time spent convinced me the effort would pay off.

Learners typically pick the least effortful method, but one that also takes a lot of TIME. Their time spent “studying” gives them an ILLUSION of knowing material. In a student’s words… “I spend my time and attention trying to write down everything the teacher says. Sometimes this is copying down, word-for-word, what is on presentation slides. When I go back to study these notes. I find they are just words without meaning.”

The student is sharing the illusion of learning that occurs when studying takes a lot of time. She felt like she knew the material but after reading it again she realized it wasn’t in her own words and there were no detailed examples she could connect the materials to. Her next step was to turn back to the text and powerpoint and read and re-read material, hoping information would sink in. Come test time, her knowledge of material was only surface-level. She knew the very basics but had trouble on the test because she could not explain the content on essay questions and had difficulty with multiple-choice questions that apply knowledge.

WHY AREN’T STUDENTS LEARNING HOW TO LEARN IN COLLEGE? 

For most students there is no course dedicated to the science of learning in their college curriculum.

  • One that lets them know how to successfully study for more than a 48-hour memory.
  • One that teaches them the science of how human memory works.
  • One that teaches them the skills they can use for college preparation as well as in their careers.

I am inspired to follow in the steps of Dr. Edward DeLosh at Colorado State University. Dr. DeLosh teaches a general education course called “The Science of Learning.” Here students are taught, “The science of learning and remembering with an emphasis on strategies and methods that students can use to enhance their learning and studying.”

FOR MY ANGRY STUDENT. She deserves to know how to study and learn BEFORE she has one semester left in college. She should be upset that what has been missing in her studies is the SCIENCE OF LEARNING. I am committed to help change this.

Continue reading →

Why you want to learn with Learning Styles but should use the LEARN method instead.

~ Karla Lassonde ~ 1 Comment

Personalized learning sounds great. The idea that you have one preferred way to learn best is appealing. But where you go wrong is assuming this preference should actually be applied to how you are taught, in all circumstances. Take this classroom scenario as an example of how people approach the idea of learning styles. You are in a class where the teacher always talks. The teacher does not provide any hand-on activities or visuals to go along with the lecture.

You put up a big fuss because you have taken an learning styles inventory and KNOW that you learn BEST when you see something written down. You NEED the teacher to yield to your preference or you will shut down and become incapable of doing well in the class.

write-things-down

Okay, so maybe you are not that irrational. Still, stop and consider two questions that address this way of thinking:

1.) Is your teacher using best practices for teaching and learning? Well, maybe not. It is problematic to simply talk at students. Students need a variety of teaching methods. If the teacher doesn’t ask questions or engage students in any way OTHER than “just talking” then I fully agree — this is probably not a class where students are learning. But maybe the teacher is an excellent story teller, engaging in narration full of vivid imagery and clever anecdotes relating the material to every day life. In this case, students only hearing a lecture may come away with a lot of knowledge.

2.) Should material be presented only the way you like? Maybe you do learn better with pictures. But that isn’t the end of the story. Everyone learns better when they have many ways to remember. If I’m teaching you about types of apples, I’ll have much better luck showing you pictures of the apples I’m describing than only telling you about them. You would have an even better chance learning about these applies if you could taste them. Better still, just like my son’s kindergarten class pictured below, you will learn SO MUCH about apples if we go out to an apple orchard to pick, gather, wash, talk about and eat apples. HE WON’T STOP TALKING ABOUT APPLES!

Calin Apple Orchard

Seriously though, don’t you wish you could feel that way about the Physics class you took in high school or while learning Statistics in college?

Preferences will only get you so far. There is a dual relationship in teaching and learning. I am fully on board with being the most effective teacher I can be BUT I also want to equip students with best practices to learn in any circumstance. You can do that with what I am calling the LEARN Method.

Learn google

Girl listening with her hand on an earL: LISTEN. Before you can learn anything you have to be tuned in. Forget doing two things at once. Make sure if you are reading, you can actually pay attention to the book. If you are watching a documentary, don’t also browse the internet. If you are in the classroom, really BE IN THE CLASSROOM. Turn off all distractions unless they are required for your learning. Learning does not occur through absorption — you really have to be paying 100% attention to learn!

elaborateE: ELABORATE. Explain and describe what you are learning using many details. Back to the apple orchard. The children learned so much about apples because their knowledge was elaborated on with pictures, tastes, smells, sounds, and stories. Whether it be chemical elements in high school or types of animals in biology class, you need to make multiple connections with new information. Think of your mother who might ask you a lot of questions about a date with a significant other: where did you go? what did you do? what did you wear? what happened? All kidding aside, when we describe and explain with a lot of APPROPRIATE details, we are more likely to learn.

AssociateA: ASSOCIATE. Connect new information with things you already know. The best teachers know this well. They make information relevant to learner experiences. If a teacher makes learning about numbers related to performance on a fantasy football team, people may be more likely to pay attention and learn complicated statistical formulas…if they are interested in sports. Analogies and associations take very complex or obscure information and tie it into what a person already knows. We are motivated by what is familiar and what we like. 

Pet BirdR: RE-TELL: Teach someone the new information you have learned. The best way to reinforce your learning is to be held accountable to teaching it to someone else. When you learn something new, have a debate about it with a roommate or spouse. Try to teach them by way of simplification. This will also work with children — although they may not be great listeners. I’ve found that having children has made me a better teacher. Explaining almost anything to a small child requires not only simplifying it but using language appropriate for them. Re-telling also requires processing thoughts outside your mind. Many learners develop a false sense of knowing because they have never had to explain a concept to someone else. 

NightN: NIGHT. Make night time and achieving a full-night’s sleep sacred. Okay, I’m a work in progress with this one. In our culture we sometimes see people getting a full 8 hours sleep as lazy or week. We place a high value on productivity. Sleep is required for information to become well-learned though. Neuroscientists have found that something called consolidation occurs when we sleep. Consolidation happens as neurons and memory systems of the brain re-work with newly learned information to stabilize it. When your father encouraged you to get a good night sleep before a big test, he wasn’t kidding. Much of the consolidation process happens when we sleep. Less sleep, impaired or low-quality sleep and we are less likely to cement new memories so they can be remembered long after.

Never mind Learning Styles, remember the LEARN METHOD: LISTEN, ELABORATE, ASSOCIATE, RE-TELL, NIGHT and you’ll have more success learning.

 

 

What DOES Google Know?

~ Karla Lassonde ~ 3 Comments

I have been teaching for seven years at a mid-sized university in the Midwest. The first few years of my teaching I didn’t feel that GOOGLE was yet the master. When it happened, it was sudden, shocking even, and a game-changer.

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Students love when a lecture goes off topic. It is a chance to break free of monotony, to get the jitters out and most teachers will tell you that it can be a welcome distraction. So when a question comes up like, what is the capital of South Dakota? who was the second man on the moon? what exactly is goulash? there is a chance for laughter and idle chatter….unless there is GOOGLE.

One day about eight weeks into a fall semester course on Human Memory we got off track and started to discuss common comfort foods. I fondly described one of my favorites. “We’ve all had it” I said, a mixed up concoction of the following: meat, tomatoes/tomato sauce, noodles and whatever spare vegetables you would like.goulash

Based on my previous five years in New England in graduate school I fondly remember this combination as American Chop Suey. My students understood the homemade comfort food mashup I described but said I was calling it by the WRONG name. Suddenly, a voice from the back of the room said, I just Googled it and “we” call this Goulash. A great resonance fell over the rest of the class. From then on two things were understood. One, my students were committed to names of their foods and two, GOOGLE knows.

Is there anything GOOGLE could not add to any class. Forgot what the capitol of South Dakota is? Just Google it! Can’t decide who the second man to walk on the moon was? Oh, don’t think for even ONE minute about that. Just Google it too!

Just to be clear, Google is not inherently the problem. However, I didn’t have to think hard for examples of the many, many times I relied on Google for the answer. I could sense the subtle change the knowledge capabilities of Google was having on my own thinking. Can’t remember the name of a song but can remember some of the lyrics:

Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see…..
Why bother when Google will do it for you. 

The next semester in Human Memory my students read a paper by researchers Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner in 2011. Their work, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips” See Abstract explains that people no longer put effort into thinking hard about answers to difficult questions. Rather, they are primed to think about computers and where they might access knowledge (e.g., the internet) on a specific webpage, file, or blog.

Does this so-called “Google Effect” influence your memory in any way? This was the question I posed to my students. There responses were not terribly surprising. Most of them suggested that relying on technology for the answers was “just what we do.” It is easy, effortless, and frees us from remembering all of the details we might face in a day. Besides, they agreed, it had been like this for the majority of the twenty year-old students’ young lives. When you don’t immediately know the answer, it is second-nature to ask the internet, they asserted.

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I reasoned with my students that the problem is when you Google something you are short-cutting the retrieval process. Memory retrieval occurs when information is activated from long-term memory (information you currently are not thinking about) into short-term memory (memory that becomes part of your conscious experience). Stepping on retrieval with an urge to Google the answer prevents you from thoughtfully considering an idea. Sure, some might argue that retrieval should be automatic; that is, fast enough that if an answer doesn’t immediately come to you then why bother? While this can be true, it is very possible to use other, related, information that you MAY KNOW QUICKLY as cues. Consider a Trivial Pursuit question asking for the name of the second person to walk on the moon. If you really want to remember that person it is best to think of relevant cues. Perhaps you can remember the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong. Just thinking of Mr. Armstrong could lead to our “target” astronaut’s name. But, maybe you already thought of Neil and need something more. As a teacher I’ve learned that when cues are both relevant (highly related) and distinct (somewhat unusual), they can often trigger a target memory. If I told my class that this astronaut’s first name was the sound of a tiny insect best known for making honey….well then…most people would suddenly retrieve, Buzz! Yes, Buzz Aldrin was the second man on the moon.

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So should you, me, or any of my students REALLY care about the Google Effect? Based on what I have learned about memory, I say, YES! Googling “it” can lead to self-handicapping. If we short-cut the retrieval process and reach for their nearest device too often then we are no longer “practicing memory.” We all need more practice with our memories. Sure it is fun to have data at our fingertips but if we heavily rely on the internet for immediate knowledge, we are less likely to stay the course when our memories are all we can rely on. Obviously, we don’t let students take their smart phones to a test. Your competitors at Thursday-night trivia expect your team to put the phones away. It is important to take the time and effort, on occasion, to rely on our own memory and retrieval process.

You owe it to yourselves to think about how to think! Remember, improving everyday memory requires two key components: 1.) Effort and a willingness to practice 2.) Paying attention.

What do you think….do YOU RELY TOO MUCH ON GOOGLE?

P.S. If you haven’t Googled it already, the capital of South Dakota is Pierre.

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