Exam Study Expert: ace your exams with the science of learning

[REWIND] Mastering Effective Study: Insights from John Dunlosky (Ep 154 replay)

• William Wadsworth

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First broadcast as Episode 154, we're revisiting this epic interview with giant of the "science of effective study" world, the great Professor John Dunlosky.

In today's must-listen episode, we discover:

  • Why learning should be challenging
  • A taxonomy for thinking about 10 popular study strategies - which work best, and for what?
  • How to master "successive re-learning"
  • Plus an expert's take on whether to use digital flashcards, dual coding, watching online video and more!

Featured today:

  • John's book "Study Like A Champ": https://geni.us/dunlosky
  • John's original paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1529100612453266
  • Episode 45 with Learning Scientists cofounder Jude Weinstein Jones https://examstudyexpert.com/yana-weinstein-jones/

Hosted by William Wadsworth, memory psychologist, independent researcher and study skills specialist. I help ambitious students to study smarter, not harder, so they can ace their exams with less work and less stress.

Get more from your host and the world of Exam Study Expert at:

  • Six Pillars of Exam Success Cheat Sheet: https://examstudyexpert.com/Pillars
  • [FOR SCHOOLS] retrieval practice lesson resource pack https://examstudyexpert.com/retrieval-lesson
  • [FOR SCHOOLS] Revision Census research https://examstudyexpert.com/Revision-Census
  • [FOR SCHOOLS] student workshops / staff CPD keynotes https://examstudyexpert.com/workshops

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* As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases on suggested books.

Podcast edited by Kerri Edinburgh.

Questions? Comments? Requests? Or just want to say "thanks" - send me a text message (I read them all!).

Speaker 1:

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Exam Study Experts podcast this summer, and today I've got a little replay episode for you. We're going to be revisiting one of my all-time favourite interviews, which first aired a little over a year ago a year sort of 18 months ago with the great John Dunlosky. This is a real jewel in our crown, in my view, and if you've already heard it, it's going to be well worth a revisit today. If you haven't caught it yet, then you're in for a treat else in the world. He's the kind of academic researcher who is the kind of original source, together with his team and his colleagues and collaborators kind of the original source of many of the core principles that are central to the exam study expert's way of doing things and learning more effectively, saving you time when preparing for your tests and exams.

Speaker 1:

Just before we dive in today, it's been a big season of results, for example, here in my home country, the UK, with with the big GCSE and A-level school results days this week just gone in the previous week. Many congratulations to many of the students I've been supporting this year. I've been hearing some wonderful things about how you've been all getting on and some fantastic sets of results. You should all be really, really proud. So really well done.

Speaker 1:

And to those of you who are looking ahead to things to come, I know many of you starting to, particularly in the us, for example, starting to get back into the new term or semester, and for some of my professionals that I work with, you've got your big exams looming in october, november, the board, specialist exams and so forth. Very best of of luck with getting into the sharp end of the prep. With that, my thoughts, with you all, whatever stage you're at with your academic journey. And what better time than, with that backdrop of new beginnings and for some of you coming towards the sharp end of things, to revisit some of the core principles that are going to help us prepare for exams in the most time efficient way how to apply the science of learning to score as highly as possible in our tests and exams with the least possible work and stress. Without further ado, then, let me welcome John Dunlosky back to the podcast. I really hope you enjoy this replay episode first broadcast in 2024. Enjoy, john. A very warm welcome to the Exam Study Expert podcast.

Speaker 2:

It's my pleasure to be here talking with you and all your listeners.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful to have you with us. I wondered if we could maybe start by just painting us a little bit of a vision or a rainbow of kind of you know why this stuff matters so much. So I guess, both from your kind of experience in helping students with study habits, and maybe a little bit from the kind of evidence as well, like what is the win for getting our study habits, our approach to learning good, what does it feel like when we can learn well? What does it mean in terms of our performance? Yeah, I wonder if we just sort of inspire people with the promise and the power of some of this stuff.

Speaker 2:

Well, there's a lot of power with this stuff and the win eventually is big. But to get to the win you kind of have to understand some of the inherent losses that occur on the way, right? So I think one of the biggest struggles that really holds students back is some of them get the notion that learning is easy or should be easy. And let me just disabuse all your listeners. Learning of any sort that's important is difficult. Whether it's developing a new knowledge base, learning how to solve problems, learning a new skill, it's just difficult. So anyone telling you it's easy and they have something to sell you that's going to make it easy you can pretty much ignore them, right? So those are the losses on the way to win.

Speaker 2:

And really what got me excited about learning strategies was early experiences with students. They'd come to my office kind of down in the mouth because they did poorly on the first exam. And when I was a young assistant professor, when they would tell me I really struggled, I worked really hard but yet I did poorly, my first thought was inappropriate. And that's what? Well, you really didn't work hard. And my thought was totally inaccurate because these students really did work hard. That's why they're so frustrated, and what I came to realize over the years is that, yeah, they're working hard, but they're doing the wrong things, so they're making something difficult even more difficult and frustrating by not using effective strategies.

Speaker 2:

Note and this is very important the effective strategies don't necessarily make learning easier, but they make your learning successful. So you're going to have struggles on the way. If you're not struggling, I'd say there's probably something going wrong. There's going to be struggles on the way, but the effective strategies will finally get you to that successful learning point that we're all searching for, and that itself is the own intrinsic reward. But just too many students are going about studying in the wrong ways, which are going to lead to again making learning more difficult and, quite frankly, a lot more frustrating, giving students a sense that they can't do it. They can't get it done, when I know that's incorrect. Any student can excel. If they use the right strategies and they approach learning with the right attitude, it can be a lot of fun actually.

Speaker 1:

Really interesting that point about it should feel a little bit challenging or stretching. It shouldn't feel like a complete walk in the park, and I think people have a really good intuition about this. When it comes to training the body, if you're going out on a run or hitting the gym and lifting some weights, you wouldn't expect it to be as easy as possible. You would expect it to be a bit challenging and to stretch yourself, and that's sort of why it works, and I just don't think we have the same intuitions, naturally, about training the mind, and so we need to teach ourselves that that's what we're aiming for.

Speaker 2:

Agreed with you 100%, absolutely, because if it's easy, that means probably you can already do it, you already know it, you're already there, which is wonderful. Now it's time to take on a new challenge. You know, add a little extra weights to that, barbell.

Speaker 1:

And when we can do that then. So I guess maybe some of the students you've taught over the years what are some of the things they say or that you kind of hear from them when it does start to fall into place you know, maybe they hadn't been studying particularly effectively before Like what does it feel like for them when they start to get competent with these tools?

Speaker 2:

I love that. So, with respect to feeling getting comfortable and competent with these tools and some of them that I really talk a lot about because they're kind of all-purpose general tools to help students out, you know, when students embrace the tools something we can talk about success of relearning and retrieval practice first they'll notice that they're struggling more. They're using a tool that kind of they already know about flashcards. But using this tool for more difficult content basically produces some struggles and barriers, right. What I get from students who finally embrace this are feedback like I can't believe I can learn so well, I can't believe how much I can retain, I wish someone had told me about these strategies earlier, so on and so forth. So you get these students who are excited beyond just the class that I'm discussing these strategies in, but they start then to use it in other classes.

Speaker 2:

But I think really what's required to get this epiphany is, again, students trying this stuff out on their own and doing it correctly.

Speaker 2:

So occasionally I will hear from a student well, I'm doing exactly what you're telling me to, but it's not working.

Speaker 2:

And then we sit down and we talk about well, let me hear what you're doing, and inevitably the students are doing kind of a half-baked version of the strategy, so they're not using it as it was intended to be and hence it's going to fail on them, so it's even more frustrating. So the idea is that the strategies that we really are suggesting students should be using. These all-purpose strategies work for everyone if you use them right. So the thing is trying to get students to embrace them for the first time, to use them with fidelity over a couple months so they can get that excitement and that, potentially for one of the first times in their lives, like wow, I overcame a learning obstacle that I didn't think I could, and look at me, I've mastered it. I've not only overcome it, but now I've mastered this content that I thought was really difficult and that for me as an instructor and as someone who really cares about student learning, it is so good to see and it's so exciting to see students really have that epiphany and start embracing their studies.

Speaker 2:

Yeah it's a pretty cool moment.

Speaker 1:

So I'd love to dive into sort of talking about some of the strategies that you teach and research in a moment. I'd just love to maybe do a little bit of history first, because I'm sitting across the virtual table, so to speak, with the lead author on one of the, if not the seminal papers in this field the 2013 paper you authored with a fairly starry team of fellow co-authors called Improving Students' Learning with Effective Learning Techniques Promising Directions from Cognitive and Educational Psychology, which, for those that aren't familiar with it, was essentially a review of I believe it's sort of over 400 individual scientific studies, and you were trying to figure out well, okay, from all this evidence we've got now, what are the strategies that are going to serve us best when we're preparing for our tests and exams? I looked on Google Scholar earlier today and it's been cited 4,108 times to date, so that easily places it among the most influential papers in this field. Those that don't know how academia works when you write a new paper, you often reference previous work that's been done, that you're building on in your new paper, and that's what we mean by a citation. There's over 4,000 other papers that have cited this as some of the origins of their own ideas for what they're doing, their next bit of research on, so incredibly influential, to that title of the paper.

Speaker 1:

I think we've probably gone well beyond the promising directions a strapline you gave it back then and this stuff's kind of now at least from what I can see increasingly mainstream, as it should be, in terms of at least being sort of talked about, if not always perfectly practiced. But we can talk about that. I guess my question was yeah, looking back over the last decade, did you know at the time this was going to have its impact? What's your feeling on the impact and where we've come over the last decade with this?

Speaker 2:

Well, of course, I feel really great that all the effort that was put into that monograph by not only myself but my wonderful group of co-authors has had such a positive impact and, my goodness, I wish I could capture that in a bottle and like deal it out again, right, so we can keep having such an impact. You know, I'm really not sure exactly why this particular paper resonated with folks in the education land, except for maybe that our message, I hope, was relatively clear about what strategies we think work best and which strategies don't work best. And I think part of the eye-opener maybe that was a head-turning is that many of the strategies that we evaluated were the strategies that we know students use, right, the strategies that I use. Quite frankly, things like I have my favorite highlighters that I highlight textbooks up with. I go back and reread content a great deal, two strategies that students say they rely on quite a bit. And when we started perusing the literature on all of the various strategies that students appear to use or strategies that some cognitive psychologists said were relatively effective, what really impressed us was that some of the strategies that students used really weren't that effective. But let me make a very important caveat here, and I'll do it with just one example because I think it'll make most sense Take your favorite highlighters. So almost everybody highlights. It's a very natural thing to do. I think it helps my attention when I'm reading and it turns out research done on highlighting. One relatively straightforward example would be you have some students highlight while they're reading okay, and you just have other students read the content and then you test them on the material. It turns out that highlighting that material the students who highlighted, tend not to do that much better or any better on that upcoming test than students who didn't highlight. So hence it really doesn't add a lot of benefit to just reading.

Speaker 2:

Now here's the critical aspects of this research. First, highlighting or just reading don't really improve learning that much anyway. So everyone's performing relatively poorly on these exams, right? The bottom line here is, yeah, highlighting doesn't improve your learning that much, but I would never take a highlighter away from a student.

Speaker 2:

So you think about a highlighter as a very specific technique and it's meant for the beginning of the learning journey, when you're just identifying what you need to go back to learn really well. And then the idea you use this highlighter, which really doesn't add much bang to your buck with respect to that first study session and then you go back and engage in the material that you highlighted in a way that is really effective. That's not only going to boost your learning a little bit but that's going to actually get you to those levels of retention, memory comprehension right. That's going to help you excel on an exam and help you retain that material for a long period of time. It just turns out that some kind of techniques like just going back and rereading that highlighted material over and over again really doesn't have a lot of cachet. It's not going to boost your memory that much. You need to use more effective, more engaging strategies when you go.

Speaker 2:

So I think some of the outcomes of our review of the literature weren't so surprising to us. I didn't think highlighting would actually benefit memory that much because it's not that engaging. Nevertheless, I think it was surprising to folks who aren't cognitive psychologists right, who don't have their head in the game and in particular, what does work well. I think many cognitive psychologists knew about this, but many educators didn't right. Or they understood that some techniques were good but they didn't understand why they were good and I think the monograph kind of helped highlight why some of these strategies are good and when you should use them. So I think that was kind of a long-winded answer to your question, but I hope I touched on it.

Speaker 1:

That's great and certainly what I sort of see here in the UK, particularly in the last well, really, the sort of 10 years since that came out, you know, there's just been an explosion of at least awareness and we can maybe get on to implementation, you know, certainly among teachers, and then that sort of filters down to students in turn. And when I was at school in the early 2000s there was very little, if at all, being talked about. You know, I attended university in 2008. We had a lecture and it was touching on some of these new ideas about kind of cognitive psychology, of learning and retrieval practice. I was very excited by the ideas back then but they were still kind of just, you know, in the lab or in the literature and they hadn't yet filtered out into the world. And it's really exciting to see the extent to which that has now filtered out into the world.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. When I was an undergrad. Actually, I was sat in a one-day course before I started and they told us two techniques to use to study for classes. I had no idea how to prepare for classes. I was just a normal high school student. I knew I was woefully underprepared to be a college student. Both of the techniques they told us to use I used religiously for the first year of my college experience. I had really good grades using them and I thought well, I'll just continue to use these.

Speaker 2:

It turns out one of the strategies that I was using I wasn't even aware of at the time, but I was doing investigations on that strategy with my mentor as an undergrad, professor Harry Baric, and then, after I left undergrad to go on to grad school, I totally forgot about these strategies until 20 years later when I wrote the monograph and realized one of the strategies that we were evaluating was what I used as an undergrad. And then the light bulbs really went off for me. It's like, oh my goodness, why didn't I just base my career initially on these strategies instead of forgetting about them for 20 years and coming back? So at least when I started doing this review, at least with my own reflection I realized, wow, some of these strategies must work well, because they worked well for me as an undergrad. But then when I started looking at the evidence, it's like, wow, they do work well and thank you. Whoever told me to use these strategies? Thank you, thank you. Thank you because they helped me a great deal, to give me kind of confidence that I could pass any class as an undergrad, believe it or not.

Speaker 2:

It was how to take notes, in a way to allow me to use retrieval practice to memorize the notes. So after I was finished you know my several study sessions for each group of notes I knew them cold, could walk into any exam and just easy, breezy, pass it, because you know as challenging as learning is, passing college courses is not as challenging as one might expect. So it's you use the right strategies, you stay diligent, you keep at it and you will succeed. Right, some of the content that students want to learn. They don't want to learn it just to get a good grade in class. They want to learn it, to master it, so they can use it subsequently. And these strategies are critical for long-term retention and use. So, not to be totally flip about this, but these strategies are really great well beyond college when you're just preparing for all the circumstances that occur in the work life and in preparing for your job. So these are all purpose strategies that just work well.

Speaker 1:

I mean, many of our listeners are professionals and they're taking exams as part of their careers in finance and medicine. Yeah, I mean, people have this idea that we finish college and then we're done with exams and sort of no, no, no, no, no For many career paths, you're only just getting started.

Speaker 2:

Well, yeah, not only many career paths but many hobby paths. I mean, we'll pick up new hobbies and say, well, I can't do this, I'm not capable of this. Well, sure you are. It's just something you need to learn how to do and embrace and realize that life is long and there's plenty of time to master anything, if you just take your time and use the right strategies to excel.

Speaker 1:

So we've been teasing a few of the sort of strategies along the way, but I wonder if we could just take a moment to sort of step back and give a bit of a bird's eye view of the 10 big ones you talked about in the original 2013 paper and perhaps I noted in your new book, study Like a Champ, you grouped them effectively into four categories.

Speaker 1:

So you've got a whole chapter dedicated to spacing, a whole chapter dedicated to retrieval practice. You've got another chapter which is a kind of group of problem-based strategies so interleaving, self-explanation works, examples and then the fourth chapter on the strategies is the other ones that might not work so well but could have a role, as you were describing earlier, for highlighting. So that's highlighting, as you've said, rereading, summarising and imagery. So I wonder if, without going into loads of detail on each one, maybe just talk us through those four main chapters effectively and why you decided to group them that way, and if anyone listening to this is new to the idea of sort of what works, what doesn't, maybe just give us a little bit of a flavor for the kind of headline findings Perfect.

Speaker 2:

Well, I've kind of already foreshadowed some of this with my discussion of highlighting, and one misconstrual which is probably my fault from the monograph is that some of these strategies that we reviewed don't work. They all work for something okay, but they're just not all general purpose tools. So let's take another one imagery. Imagery is when you have content that is concrete, that is something that you could imagine like, come up with a visual representation in your mind, and it turns out coming up with visual representations can be really good for memory okay, and long-term retention, so in a way, it is an effective strategy. In that monograph, though and I want to make this very clear what we were doing was evaluating strategies on not only are they effective, but are they generally effective, that is, are they going to be good for any kind of student, are they going to be good for any kind of content, and really that's where the dividing line happens. So let's go back to imagery. Imagery can be pretty effective. However, it won't work for anyone who's incapable of developing mental images, and there are people who claim and report appropriately they cannot develop mental images. So it's not going to help everybody, and mental imagery is only going to help students for content that you can actually come up with visual representations for. So it can be a very effective strategy in the very specific times it's useful. So things like imagery, highlighting, rereading, which play a role in learning, are a little bit more constrained. They can't help you with everything. So those were kind of the last end of the chapters like use these specialty strategies just at the right moment when they're most effective, like if you're someone who can image and enjoys imaging for content that can be approached by using visual images. There were these general though strategies that appeared to be useful for any kind of content that worked for any students, and these turn out to be all purpose strategies spacing, retrieval practice, a special combination of the both called successive relearning, which we really think is an important strategy to use. So these strategies are all purpose because, again, they can work for any kind of content and for any student. So let me just, if you don't mind, let me go dig deep very briefly into one of these, which is the combination of space practice and retrieval practice. Space practice is simply studying something on one day, so you read content that you want to learn on one day and come back to the same content on another day. That is your space and your learning. Retrieval practice is just when you try to retrieve content from memory without looking. Both of these strategies we've known for 100 years are really really good, and when you combine them both, it's called successive relearning, as long as when you're using retrieval practice, you continue to use it until you get it right.

Speaker 2:

So the best way to explain the strategy is just through the use of flashcards. You're going through it. Everyone knows how to use flashcards, right, except imagine now you're using this with very difficult content, like difficult definitions. You're recalling the definitions from the memory, but you're failing Well on that first session. You keep going, fail to recall something. Study it again, try again later until you can recall the meaning of all those definitions correctly, okay. Then you come back on another day with the same definitions and you do the same thing, that is, you successively relearn them across trials. This success of relearning provides a major boost in students' memory comprehension content right, because you're combining these effective strategies.

Speaker 2:

Despite its power, it also requires one other skill that many students don't work on a lot, which is time management, because in order to successfully relearn or to use space practice, you need to come back to the same content multiple times across time, right before you're eventually tested on this. So students have to kind of be ready to use this right from day one, because they need to manage their time and develop study sessions across time so they can keep coming back to the content over and over again. In our book Study Like a Champ, we provide examples on how to manage your time to do this well, but the idea is, what we're begging students not to do is to simply just cram for exams for those classes that you really want to excel at. So am I telling students never to cram? No, everybody crams probably reduces anxiety. I don't want students spending the entire night before an exam studying because you should get a good night's sleep before that exam. And I'm not telling you not to study the night before, but really, for effective learners begin several weeks before the exam so they can space their practice in an effective way.

Speaker 2:

In fact, students, non-students everybody has something they do really well typically, and almost every student can tell me something they do well, like whether it's playing first-person action, shooter games, playing an instrument, doing blah, blah, blah, and you start asking people well, how did you get good at that? And what they'll explain to you is success of relearning. So what people use naturally to master things outside of education, they just need to bring into education and know they can use it here. It does take time, so this strategy is time-consuming. So I recommend to students only to use it on those classes they really want to excel in or to material that they need to retain for a long period of time, unless, of course, the students pretty much have all day to study, in which case they can use it on every class.

Speaker 2:

Right, it just depends how much time they're using on extracurricular activities like having fun, having a job and all that kind of stuff. So there was kind of a rambly babbly version of those strategies some that are general purpose that we really highly recommend people use, like spacing, retrieval practice, and some that are kind of very specific strategies that you only use at times and they're really necessary. I rarely use those specific strategies when I study. I just stick to the biggies. Successive relearning for me all the way.

Speaker 1:

I'm with you. I'm with you. I mean, regular listeners to the show will probably recognize successive relearning as what we more commonly call spaced retrieval practice just combining the two terms itself. But I think we're talking about the same principle, aren't we? It's the idea of taking the retrieval practice, doing the testing, trying to remember what you know.

Speaker 2:

Flashcards is one good way to do that and then spacing out that practice, repeating it at time intervals. You know it is almost identical, except for one big difference, and that's for a successive relearning. On that retrieval practice session you need to keep coming back until you get it right, because the real juice in this learning is eventually retrieving that content from memory. So you keep going until you get it, which during the first session it could take a while right? You just don't practice retrieval fail and then stop you practice retrieval, realize oh I don't have it, I need to come back to this one again. Right, and I totally think that flashcards are a great way to implement success of relearning.

Speaker 2:

But the major concern then is many students only use flashcards for the most mundane, simplest material, when in fact success of relearning can be used for any kind of content very complicated, very long, lengthy. With that kind of content lengthy content, long content, difficult you probably don't want to spend all the time making flashcards. You want to use proxy cards, stuff that can act like flashcards, but you don't spend all that extra time making them right, you just kind of fabricate them out of other things. And again we have examples in Study Like a Champ, how to do that too, like turning your textbook into a flashcard program. It's pretty easy to do with some sticky notes and creativity pretty easy to do with some sticky notes and creativity.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love that picture. I was going to mention that as an example putting sticky notes on your textbook, and so it acts almost like a lift the flap. Oh, can I remember about what's underneath this bit? That was a really nice trick. Another shortcut that often comes up is I'll ask you about digital tools in a second, but just in terms of using, I guess, ready-made flashcards. You can get ready-made sets of cards on a lot of digital tools Quizlet, brainscape, anki. You can get the paper equivalents in a lot of stationers. So for a big standardized test or big public exam, you go into your local bookstore or stationers and you can buy ready-made stacks of cards for that exam.

Speaker 2:

I love it. Yeah, I highly recommend those.

Speaker 1:

Or you mentioned an example of collaborating with friends. So if ready-made cards aren't available for your course, then divide and conquer between friends. This is a question I hear quite a bit. Is it okay to use ready-made cards or should I be making my own?

Speaker 2:

I can see the value in making one's own. If you really like to do that things, I would recommend ready-made cards. If they're not available, get together with a study group, make them for each other, so you kind of spread the work around. The only one caveat I would have, though some of not all of, but some of the online flashcard programs which did a review of a while ago. They're not all set up well to allow students to evaluate how well they're learning, that is, some of them can produce an illusion of knowing right To give a student a sense oh God, I have this down really well. In fact, they kind of force you into thinking you know it well when you haven't learned it well yet. And I don't want to call out any particular program at this point because I don't want to accidentally mess them up in my memory. But a really nice paper with Abby O'Brien, graduate student at Kent State, where we just review, I think, about 13 of the available flashcard programs and we consider the degree to which they can be used to implement success of relearning, and at least at that time this is done.

Speaker 2:

Three or four years ago. We talk about how much they cost. Are they freeware? We are very positive about reducing the time it takes to learn content. We care a lot about efficiency, so one thing we reviewed is to what degree can you share FlashGuard programs with each other, with friends, through these? So if you're interested in using the online services, go check out our paper and we review some. There are others available now that we've learned about that are really good. So absolutely you don't have to invent all of this stuff on your own. There are a lot of great resources out there just ready to be used. You just have to use them in the right way.

Speaker 1:

Even flash cards can be used in the wrong way, for sure, for sure one of your earlier comments was yeah, everyone knows how to make flash cards, but, um, I think it's not always the case. I mean, everyone thinks they know how to make flash cards but, you know, I think you put your finger on it when you say we have good intuitions about how to make them basic terminology or definitions or vocab or formulas but when it comes to more in the weeds of concepts and figuring out how to turn this into flashcards, I think that is a little bit of an art and that is something you can practice and get better at. That's how I learned all my vast amount of factual knowledge I needed to know for my undergraduate exams at Cambridge. Yeah, it was flashcards all the way, and it certainly wasn't all just like what is the definition of? You know, some of the concepts were quite much more nuanced and sophisticated.

Speaker 2:

You know absolutely and you can get what is the definition of, and struggle recalling the meaning of a definition because you don't understand it, and that's when you need a different tool or more help. So using flashcards in a mindless way isn't useful either. Yet you're struggling to learn some more difficult content. That's the time to talk to a friend to make sure you understand it. That's the time to actually use a resource called your instructor to go talk to them about, like why you don't understand the concept or that you're struggling to learn it, Because sometimes memory can't do everything.

Speaker 2:

Comprehension processes need to be turned on and at times, that's why we have mentors and instructors. When we struggle and really aren't learning something well, we need a little help, a little boost, and the boost we get from friends that already understand the content, or instructors or many of the resources that are available online, right. So none of the strategies that we discuss, including success of relearning, are a panacea for all learning right? It's not like you'll take this one strategy and now be able to become an expert or excel in anything. It requires a variety of different strategies and resources to really excel, especially when the content is difficult. I mean, if anyone could sit down and learn physics on their own, we'd all be physicists. It takes instructors, mentors, people who were there before us to help us along. However, anybody can become a physicist if you work at it right and have the right mentorship. So if you're out there wanting to do something and you're concerned that you may not be able to do it, have efficacy, find the right people. You can master anything.

Speaker 1:

I think that's great advice and I wish it's advice I'd known when I was in my first year taking a physics class that I was struggling with a lot.

Speaker 2:

Well, it's more like pep talk than advice. Good pep talk then.

Speaker 1:

But no, it's a bright kid. I'd done well at school and here I was sort of floundering around in first year physics and I just kind of got a few things in my head about, you know, the importance of asking for help, maybe persevering a bit longer, being a bit more patient in that phase of being stuck. I've had a very different experience of that, I think.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, a little bit. That concerns me about this with some students and this is just unfortunate. You'll have those struggles and decide you know, I just don't like this or I can't do this, and then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, because you put in less effort, do you think?

Speaker 1:

what's the point?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and I'm telling all my students that I've worked with. It's like please don't say someone else is talented because that someone else just worked hard for it, and don't say you can't do something because you can Simply say you don't want to do something. Make a decision, but when you decide you want something, you go after it. Find the tools that are required to excel and persevere until you get there. And it's going to be a struggle, because things that are worth working for often are a struggle, but using the right tools to get there are critical too.

Speaker 1:

And when it comes to physics, see chapter six of Study Like a Champ.

Speaker 2:

There you go and see your instructor too, right?

Speaker 1:

Yes. So this is great. We got a little bit of mindset sort of attitude, pep talk as well thrown in, which is wonderful. I think that's great, great advice. There are a few potentially quite quick fire little things I wanted to put to you, john. So these are things that I hear students asking, I see students using. Some of them might have a slight more of a kind of a UK bent than a US bent, so they may be a little bit less familiar, but you know, they're things that I hear people talking about all the time and they're not in your list of 10. So I wanted to sort of put them to you and just get a kind of quick reaction on something we should be doing, something we need to be a bit careful of, where it kind of falls or jurors still out. Yet that could be an option too. So the first one on the list is watching videos. Youtube's hugely popular. Is it something we should be doing as part of our learning strategy?

Speaker 2:

Why not? Why not? Okay, the difficulty with that? It's almost like reading Sure, you should read, but reading or watching a video doesn't mean learning the content of the video. So if you're watching something just to initially get intrigued, engaged, excited, and then you're going to go off and do more, awesome Right.

Speaker 2:

But if it's that video has the content that a student needs to learn, then the concern is that they watch a video because it was engaging, feel like, well, I know that content and then never come back to it, right. So if the content really is in that video, then really watching a video is just like watching a lecture. You need to take appropriate notes, go back to those notes and study them Again. The one caveat there when we interview lots of students, college students about how they interact with online videos, they tend to say they don't take notes and they don't go back to watch them again. So, absolutely, let's use videos anything that can help you bolster your comprehension, your understanding, your excitement, but don't do that exclusively. If that's what you need to learn, you still have to take notes and go back and really master the content.

Speaker 1:

Test yourself on those notes and make sure you can remember the key points, yeah, great.

Speaker 1:

So my last one was going to be dual coding. And just to give a little bit of a context to this, I don't know if you've come across the the learning scientists project, the podcast and the blog, and certainly here in the uk that's. That's been quite influential in schools and they present six evidence-based learning strategies. That was sort of their original thing, the six strategies. And to be fair to them, you know they'd be the first to say, well, it's not like there's sort of six strategies and like they're all born equal. They'd probably say quite a similar thing to yourself in that, you know, if you're going to start somewhere, start with retrieval practice and spacing. They're not six equally important, equally good study strategies. There are two that form sort of the main backbone. Those are space practice and retrieval practice. Ah, I knew it. That was Jude Weinstein-Jones there, one of the co-founders of the Learning Scientist Projects, in a clip from when she was on the podcast back in episode 45, if you're interested in catching up with the rest of that interview with her, forgive me sliding that little interjection in. I just thought it added a really nice bit of relevant colour to what we were just saying there.

Speaker 1:

Okay, back to my question for John. So there's quite a lot of overlap between their six and and your 10, particularly the better half of the 10. But one thing I noticed kind of it isn't there and I've always been a little bit unsure myself on my own views on this one is is the idea of dual coding? So for for listeners, you know, this is the idea that when you see a picture or graphical representation and see a description in words at the same time, that helps you learn. That's the duality that dual coding is referring to words and some kind of pictorial graphical representation. What's your view on where dual coding fits into the world?

Speaker 2:

well, dual quoting definitely can have a positive impact. I mean, it's similar to anytime you have multiple representations of something you're trying to learn. Now you have internally multiple representations that you can then use to reconstruct your understanding of something. So if you have a pictorial representation, a verbal representation stored in memory, then you have two routes to success, so to speak. So, that said, as you know, getting that dual coding is the difficult part, right? So if you're someone, for instance, as we mentioned earlier, that doesn't generate internal images, that well, it's going to right. There's only one code for you. There's not a dual code, so to speak. And sometimes it's not clear what kinds of mental representations to develop. Right, that is exactly what I should be generating when I'm doing this.

Speaker 2:

Note also that textbooks that students interact with occasionally have that pictorial representation is not meant to help their understanding, but is meant to help them be interested in the topic. It's called a seductive detail. It's not really for the content. Those can be distracting. It gives you a sense of a dual coding, because I have a visual representation and I have some verbal, but in this case the verbal representation could actually undermine students' understanding. So that dual coding, they kind of need. None of these strategies are foolproof. Not one strategy will always lead to success. So it's kind of a combination of all of them that students will need to rely on as they're working themselves toward getting the grades they want in school and to learn the content they care. And no, not getting straight A's the grades they want, because I really want students to be motivated to achieve their own goals that they develop right, that they're managing their time to obtain. That's how we develop a really motivated and good student.

Speaker 1:

I love how, for so many of our questions, you answer the question and go on. Then there's some other wonderful point to make, and it's all great.

Speaker 2:

Do you mean I just go on babbling? William, I mean great.

Speaker 1:

No, no, no, not at all. I get a two for one every question I ask. There's another great piece of advice that I hadn't even asked for, which is wonderful. I love it. I love it, john, thank you so much. You've been incredibly generous and I'm so grateful for you sharing a generous taste of your immense wisdom and expertise on this topic. Tell us where do we go to find out more? So, if we want to go and read the book or learn more about sort of your work, where would you point people to?

Speaker 2:

Well, first, thanks for having me on board today. This has just been a blast, Quite frankly. I think really this for students out there, either students in college, high school students, folks who are lifelong learners, I like to say it. But I'd pick up the book that I co-authored with Regan Garung called Study Like a Champ. It's really inexpensive. It gets right to the point. We talk right to students. Each chapter is about to do one thing. We don't hit you with a hundred different strategies, we just talk about a couple things that really work well. So I'd pick that up, peruse it and, you know, go from there.

Speaker 1:

Great book and we'll drop the link to that in the show notes. John, thank you so much once again for coming on. This has been so much fun and wishing you all the best. Glad I was here. Well, thanks again, john. We're really glad you were here too.

Speaker 1:

If you've enjoyed today's episode, please share it with your friends, colleagues or your own students, if you are an educator yourself. Just before I sign off, here are a couple of ways you can get more from the world of Exam Study Expert to help you study smarter. Firstly, if you yourself have got exams coming up, you can download my little cheat sheet with some of my favourite ideas for learning smarter the six pillars of exam success. You'll find that at examstudyexpertcom forward slash pillars. That's a great starting point or checklist of top ideas to help you get ready for the exam. That's at examstudyexpertscom forward slash pillars.

Speaker 1:

Alternatively, if you are a teacher or educator listening today and want to help get your students studying smarter, there's a couple of things I can offer for you too. Firstly, you can download a free lesson resource pack to teach your students all about retrieval practice and how to use it well. That's at examstudyexpertscom forward slash retrieval hyphen lesson. Secondly, if you'd like to measure the effectiveness of study strategy at your school, you can head to examstudyexpertscom forward slash, revision, hyphen, census and to learn more about how to take part in our research project that surveyed over 50,000 students on their study strategy. You get some nice insights and recommendations, and it's even free to participate in For now. Thank you so much for listening today. It's been such a pleasure to have your company for such a great episode today too. I just want to wish you every success, as always, in your exams.

Speaker 3:

Wasn't that wonderful. If you're feeling inspired, why not leave us a rating and a review in your podcast app? It would make our day. Thanks again for listening and see you soon.