217. Why Learning Fails (and What To Do) - with Alex Quigley

What if the fastest way to learn better is to understand why and where learning breaks down?

In this episode, I’m joined by leading UK educator and author Alex Quigley to unpack his eight predictable failure points that derail studying — and the practical, research-backed strategies that fix them.

Failure is normal. Success comes from recognising the signals early and responding with the right tools: retrieval practice, spaced learning, improved planning and evaluation, and metacognitive reflection of your studying. 

If you want to study less but learn more, this episode shows you how to close knowledge gaps, balance your confidence and find the motivation to turn struggles into steady progress.

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⭐About today’s guest, Alex Quigley: 

Alex Quigley is a well-known figure in UK education: author of several popular books & a monthly column for the Times Educational Supplement, he's a former teacher who now works at the Education Endowment Foundation. 

🌐Discover Alex’s blog and resources at: https://alexquigley.co.uk/

📖 Grab a copy of his book Why Learning Fails (And What To Do About It) right here: https://geni.us/alexquigley

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Also mentioned:

Graham Nuthall, The Hidden Lives of Learners: https://geni.us/hiddenlives

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🎓About Exam Study Expert: 

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

🎯 Book 1:1 COACHING to supercharge your exam success: https://examstudyexpert.com/workwithme/ 

📘Get Outsmart Your Exams, my award-winning exam technique book: https://geni.us/exams * 

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Podcast edited by Kerri Edinburgh.

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

Transcript

Welcome And Topic Setup

William Wadsworth 0:02

Hello and welcome to the Exam Study Experts Podcast, the show that's all about helping you study smarter and ace your exams with the science of productivity and the psychology of learning. Now, sometimes our learning doesn't quite go how we want. When we're doing our studying, we might hit roadblocks, we get confused, we realise what we're doing isn't quite working. Why? And crucially, how can you make progress past those blocks in your studying in your learning? That's the topic of today's conversation. Today we're here to help you with all of that, as we're going to be talking about why learning fails and what you can do about it, with the author of the recent book of the same name. That's Mr. Alex Quigley. Alex will need no introduction to anyone in the UK education community. He's very well known here through his popular books, his monthly column for the Times Education Supplement, his work with the Education Endowment Foundation and more. Today's episode is a really interesting conversation about the main themes he's identified in his work around kind of why learning fails, and crucially, of course, what we can do to get ourselves unstuck and move past those roadblocks. Hopefully, some useful ideas to help you today move forward. Here's Alex. Enjoy today's episode. Alex, a very warm welcome to the Exam Study Expert Podcast. Thank you for having me, William. Thank you. Would you just say a few words about who you are and what you do for anyone that hasn't come across you and your work before?

Alex Quigley 1:36

Sure. So in my career, I started as a teacher, taught for around 15 years, but during that time, I wasn't just marking lots of books and doing lots of teaching. I also ended up blogging, ended up becoming an author for teachers, and just became really curious about learning and particularly literacy, reading, writing, academic language. And so over time I left teaching. I joined the Education Endowment Foundation, which is a national charity that focuses on evidence use in schools, nurseries, and colleges and FE. So yeah, my role's changed over time, but I've been really lucky to stay focused on learning, focused on academics. My latest book, Why Learning Fails, is a bit of a distillation of some of those challenges, but also hopefully practical solutions for people too.

William Wadsworth 2:28

Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll get into the detail in a second. I'm always just curious to ask my guests. Take us all the way back, if you would, Alex, you might not have to think about this too much these days, but what do you remember of your own experience taking, I don't know, was it GCCs? Was it O levels? And then A levels beyond that. Yeah. How were you as a student? What were you like back in the day?

Alex’s Journey And Focus On Literacy

Alex Quigley 2:48

Yeah, it was GCCs, A levels, and then university. And I probably traveled a kind of a well-trodden road of early mistakes followed by late realizations and then um even later success. I think when I was at school, I went to an old boys' school in Liverpool and didn't have enough academic focus, would be my euphemism for the reality of it. But also I don't think I was very strategic and I had some misconceptions about how you learn. So I kind of felt it was just a natural thing. You either had this or you didn't, and I wasn't very strategic. And that played out. So in in subjects I really loved and spent a lot of time on, I did really well in subjects that I didn't spend time on because I didn't love them, but I didn't organize myself to get better at them. I didn't do very well. And that probably characterized my GCC's and A levels. You'd think I realized that a little bit earlier, but didn't quite. And I think it was when I got to university and did a degree in English, I kind of hit a realization because I'd had I'd had some close shaves with kind of just kind of getting the grades I needed. And there was a point where I again I wasn't wholly strategic or knew how I was doing it or why I was doing it, but I worked really hard and I found better ways to use my time, to summarize, to kind of retrieve and remember things. And I became pretty good at extended writing and exams. But I kind of did that in a way that I kind of fell into doing it and found my own kind of routine. If I look back now, I kind of can recognize the principles and I can recognize some of the kind of the cognitive science behind what I was doing, but I wish I'd have known that earlier by a number of years, frankly. Well, that's uh that's why we do what we do.

William Wadsworth 4:38

I'm curious. So so you you've recently written about why learning fails, which I thought was a really interesting perspective to take. What what kind of inspired, you know, many many, much work has been written about how learning works and how to do it? Um what sort of inspired that perspective about why it goes wrong sometimes?

Why Learning Fails As A Useful Lens

Alex Quigley 4:55

Yeah, I I think uh teaching thousands of students and then considering it for adults, thinking about it just across all sorts of domains of of expertise. There just was a real pattern, a real consistency about where things went wrong. If we can anticipate, almost like my lived experience, if we can anticipate earlier what those likely failures are going to be, then we can address them. And I think my book primarily is written for teachers, but not exclusively. But for teachers, I think it's a really busy job, and you're thinking about you know, different children in most cases learning different things at different rates. There's lots of ways it can go wrong. And there's no fail-safe here. I'm not promoting some silver bullet for all learning. I do think if you can anticipate more, you can adapt quicker as a as a teacher and actually start to focus on the kind of the knowledge gap. You know, this kind of there's predictable ways we forget things, there's predictable ways where gaps in our knowledge mean we learn differently or learn ineffectively. And then there's a doing gap. There's predictable ways that we don't plan very well, there's predictable ways that students don't become independent, and even as adults, we're not independent. So I try to capture those predictions and try and compile them. I found kind of eight common reasons why learning fails. And it sounds quite a negative notion, doesn't it? All these failures. But actually, I think it's quite liberating because if you think of any success, it is about dealing with failure. If you think about any scientific breakthrough, you had lots and lots of patents and failures and trials and and experiments that didn't quite work. And you know, you can look throughout human history, you know, there's all sorts of failures that led to success. And I think in in the case for learning, it's there are, again, predictable areas if we just anticipate them that bit quicker, both as a teacher, both as an individual, both as a student, then actually we can find the workarounds, we can find the effective strategies, and we don't have to land on those big failures. Um, and instead we can have those small, quite typical experiences of learning where you struggle, you fail, you but you you quickly learn from that and you get better. I think, you know, my school experience where I failed in some subjects. It was just there's no other way to describe it. But it didn't quite have to happen. And I think I could have been more strategic. I think my teachers could have supported me in more specific ways. And the more that that is less of a secret and more shared knowledge, the better for us all. Absolutely. Yeah.

William Wadsworth 7:38

If I've put a tray of baronies in the oven and it's come out wrong, you know, I want I want to I want to kind of diagnose that and figure out why so I can get it right next time. And okay, maybe I mixed the ingredients wrong or maybe the oven temperature is wrong. Oh no, no, that was fine, that was fine. Oh, but okay, it was this other thing over here. So, all right, now I understand. And I can uh I can do something and get it right next time. Uh I wanted to ask you a little bit about the the the Graham Nuttall work because you you to you talk about that as as a as a as a quite an inspiration. I think that's a really fascinating piece of research. Tell us a little bit about that.

Nuttall’s Hidden Lives Of Learners

Alex Quigley 8:07

Yeah, so um Graeme Nuttall was a New Zealand researcher. He worked in a team of education researchers. What he did, which was really innovative decades ago, was film thousands and thousands of hours of learning. And he encapsulated those insights in kind of a narrative kind of research piece. And he called his book The Hidden Lives of Learners. And I think it was a really clever title, but kind of recognizing that how you learn is quite subtle. It's often hidden from view, it's certainly hidden from view of teachers. And when you start to actually listen to those children learning and you start to hear what they're interpreting, actually, they don't learn in the predictable ways that you expect. Depending on what they already know, different students are listening to a different explanation because they're processing it differently. Some are recognizing keywords and concepts and piecing those together. Other students are unfamiliar with those. So this the reality of learning that he captures is it is unpredictable. It is fraught with failure. But that again, the more you anticipate that, the more you can find work around. So one of the heuristics or shortcuts Nutall describes is, you know, a simple one, but quite powerful one in terms of just he found that for a lot of the students, they needed a new concept or idea repeated at least three times before they started to correctly interpret that insight and understanding. And I think when you hear that back, it sounds really obvious. You know, you don't learn complex things straight away. You need repeated exposure. It fits really nicely with now some decades worth of research about retrieval practice. That if you come back and you come back with the right appropriate amount of forgetting, then that struggle you have to come back and to remember repetition is really, really helpful. And it's what makes learning stick in the long term. And I'm sure you know every listener's had that experience where you know you know you need good practice, you need to repeat that practice, whether it's French, you know, you're learning a language, whether it's mathematical principles and concepts, whether it's a period in history, you need that consolidation, that repetition, that you need to elaborate and talk about it and think about it repeatedly. But what Nutall does is just capture that through thousands of hours of really interesting video. And he does a great job of just synthesizing that. But again, I'm influencing the ways that I'm interested in, not just all the funny ways that people get things wrong, that can be interesting, but also what what are those shortcuts that we can learn from it so we don't repeat the failures. And we just we we recognize again, no silver bullets, but we can do this better and more effectively. And Nuttall explains that really well.

William Wadsworth 11:03

I was I was I was amused to note that about 10,000 hours of footage, I believe, in Nuttall's work. So uh by by happy coincidence, exactly what uh is recommended by the uh the Ericsson Pete model of uh how many hours you need to become an expert in something. I want about 5,000 hours of uh one-on-one interviews with students about their learning strategies. So I'm kind of halfway there. We'd love to hear the eight. Talk us through the the kind of the bird's eye view of these eight areas that you identified.

The Eight Reasons Learning Fails

Alex Quigley 11:31

Yeah, sure. So I think effectively the first issue is working memory. So that notion that whenever we're learning something new in particular, we've just got this narrow workbench. So if we're hearing new words and ideas, we're having to quickly process them. And like a workbench, there's limited space. Our working memory has limited space. So every time we're trying to learn, we're fighting against that struggle and that limitation. And it means that you read something or you listen to a podcast on Monday, and by Wednesday, you've forgotten a good portion of that because our memory is designed with forgetting in mind. So that's that's one key point. The second one is about gaps in prior knowledge, and again, these all seem really obvious, but the reality is that on a daily basis we kind of actively forget about them. So gaps in your prior knowledge impact what you learn next. So, you know, experts have a deep foundational breadth of knowledge from words and concepts. So it might be a historian. If they're learning about a new period of history, say it's the Korean War and the last century, they're drawing upon, you know, countless periods of history that they've already established, understanding the significance of events. They understand concepts of politics, concepts of power and government. So when they're learning that new topic, they're bringing that prior knowledge to the topic, and it means it's easier to piece the picture. The less prior knowledge you have, the limits of your language, what that means is that you're learning in a different way, and often you'll have failures because you don't have the foundations. And then link to that is misconceptions. Again, if you've got that faulty knowledge or gaps in your knowledge, what we do as humans is we create stereotypes and caricatures just to have a working way of you know getting from A to B, but that creates misconceptions. So it might be in geography. We have a simple notion of continents or countries, and we create these stereotypes, but also can be manageable and useful for us to have stereotypes, but it also creates misconceptions and sometimes quite damaging ones, even. Um, and then the the final and of these four, I think they're all related to knowledge and learning and remembering. The final one is overconfidence. And often we think confidence, that's a good thing, right? We want every student to be confident. But the reality is that what we find in lots of the research is that being overconfident is just as much of a problem as being underconfident. And you need this Goldilocks principle where you're constantly calibrating. Do I know this? Can I um am I going to remember this by the end of the week? You know, you need some underconfidence, but you also need enough confidence to get you through a difficult challenge, get you through a task. So there's like a calibration, but mainly students are overconfident. I read it the other day, I remember it. And things that are familiar, we think, oh, we know them really well. So, you know, I was learning about the Korean War on Monday. Oh, I remember a couple of the key concepts. I'm very confident about the Korean War. But then if you ask a couple of follow-up questions, it kind of reveals that your the gaps in your knowledge are more significant than you think. I'd encapsulate those as a knowledge gap and a kind of related failures. Then I'd go to the strategies around independent learning, which are described as the doing gap. Are you able to do this particularly independently without a teacher and to do it on your own? There are gaps with planning. Effectively, we all fall for the planning fallacy. We think we have more time than we have, we think we have more knowledge at our disposal. And unless we're really strategic about planning, we trip over and we get it wrong. It's why surgeons, early trained surgeons, highly trained fighter pilots use checklists because planning is something that we overestimate and we don't quite get right. I think our understanding of independent learning often isn't quite right. So if we want students to genuinely be independent, they often need some scaffolded approaches and different strategies. They need to practice picking from the strategies. And it's why having a teacher or a coach or a lecturer is so important to guide that process towards independence. We can sometimes assume just simply working on your own is good independent study, and it and it often isn't. And then my last two, which link closely. I think there's a mental effort challenge. You know, we are designed, a bit like our working memory limitations, we're designed to not take on too much cognitive challenge. We're designed to give up. There's lots of kind of ways that that's a helpful thing in our lives to not plow away at certain tasks. But that mental effort needs to be well calibrated. And we are cognitive misers. We don't want to think too hard and we don't want to think for too long because we want to preserve all that effort and thinking. But to overcome that mental effort takes quite a lot of work and it takes strategies again. So that's another reason, a lack of mental effort. And then lastly, motivation. You know, we kind of it's an obvious one, but in the face of failure, which if you're learning right at the peak of your capacity, you should be failing. If you're not failing, it's probably not hard enough. But at that point of challenging yourself, you can lose motivation. And we know if you lose motivation, then you give up on the necessary practice. You mentioned Ericsson's 10,000 hours and whether you know it's good quality 10,000 or 5,000, you've got to be motivated to put in that amount of work, haven't you? So motivation, independence, mental effort, and then the knowledge and the limits of some of your working memory, all of these things combine. And and you know, in the real world, our motivation, our mental energy, our ability to and be strategic is linked to what we know and what we believe. So, you know, we can get underneath this. And I think there are eight reasons people will find more, but if we can just isolate one or two of them and work strategically on them, I think we can make a positive difference. And that success nourishes motivation, builds knowledge. So, you know, it has all those benefits.

William Wadsworth 17:54

Once we start to kickstart that virtuous cycle and get uh some progress, success breeds that motivation, which leads to more, more, more effort, more progress uh to come, definitely. Thank you for for talking through that. That's a really interesting set of set of ideas. I think it's a great summary. And um you know, you can sort of think how, you know, whether from a teacher's perspective or possibly even from a learner's perspective, you know, you think, well, you know, okay, like my brownie, my husband was at the right temperature, you know, I was pretty well focused and my motivation was fine. So, okay, well, what was wrong? Like, did I you know maybe it was a prior learning thing, you know, but maybe I was okay, my working memory was a bit overtached, I didn't quite get it, I was a bit confused, I was a bit stuck. Great, okay, well, now I've figured out why it wasn't what I wanted. What can I do? What can I do about it? There's a couple I'd I'd love to dig into in a in a little bit more detail. So your final one of the first set, which were all about knowledge, those first four were kind of you said uh kind of broadly all about the the the knowledge gaps. Your your fourth one was was particularly interesting to me. So you talked about the curious case of overconfidence as as number four. Yeah. Uh I think this is really intriguing and something I I definitely recognize as well. And it's quite a subtle thing, it's quite difficult to recognise that you're overconfident because that's kind of part of the point, isn't it? So perhaps we could break down what are some of the different sort of subcomponents of overconfidence?

Overconfidence And How To Calibrate

Alex Quigley 19:11

Yeah, so it it links back to knowledge, you know, ultimately how much you know helps you calibrate your confidence level. So, you know, you're learning, say if you're a chef, well, you've got really deep knowledge of recipe design, of ingredients, of the chemistry of food, perhaps, of cooking times. And so you're less likely to f you're less likely to make mistakes because you're drawing upon lots of knowledge. But also, if you've got that reservoir, that foundation of knowledge, then you can quickly adapt when things aren't quite going your way. So, you know, you're you're working with a new oven and you recognize, oh, I don't quite have confidence about the oven and how fast it will cook because every oven's slightly different. So I will monitor it a bit more carefully. And, you know, all the the obvious oven checks. Um and I think the more we know, the more we calibrate our confidence. You know, if we look in the wider world, some very successful people are very confident, and and some very successful people are probably overconfident. I'm not going to name any political names, any kind of you know, leaders of the free world or billionaires who own who own um social media. But you can see their overconfidence. They've experienced success, but then they might not be so critical. And it comes back to being knowledgeable and being motivated to, you know, be knowledgeable and to learn makes you more curious. It actually helps you calibrate to get this Goldilocks principle of confidence. You're not too confident, but you're not underconfident, and you're constantly pursuing more knowledge, more learning, and you're really good at calibrating things. And one of the one of the areas where, in real practical terms, you can make for better independent study for better teaching is little quiz, you know, self-quizzing is a good example, you know, really, really popular and common. Self-testing, self-quizzing can sometimes puncture your confidence. I think I know what's on my flashcards, but actually, having got my parent to test me, I'm not so confident now. And that recalibration, I quite like, you know, what one of the really like popular tests is multiple choice questions. You pose a question, you've got you know, four choices, and and you've got those plausible distractors who could definitely be a potential answer. Now, I quite like those, but the one of the issues with multiple choice is they're guessing. And and sometimes you can be educators and make an educated guess, but just a small change, you can just add uh an option, a fifth option, which is indicating how confident you are about, you know, is it a guess or are you very supremely confident in your response? Just adding that little detail helps you calibrate your confidence level individually. But also, if a teacher's trying to infer from feedback and your responses, they also have a richer picture. So even just checking our own confidence levels as we're giving responses, you know, is a is a really helpful way of calibrating confidence. One other strategy I quite like, which is one that I used teaching, particularly A-level students and kind of older students, was exam wrappers. So, you know, an exam wrapper is rather than just giving the exam answers, you have a wrapper, a cover where you just indicate to your teacher or lecturer how many hours you studied for, what you what strategies you used, what you didn't use, and what you found difficult, et cetera. And just that self-regulation, that reflection about how you prepared didn't just inform your teacher or lecturer about how you prepared and how you did, but also it gets you reflecting yourself. And I think a big area, I've written guidance on this before for Mark for the Education Endowment Foundation on metacognition is this notion, I know it's been in past podcasts, where you're effectively metacognitive. You're planning, you're strategic, you plan, you monitor, you check, you evaluate. And the best learners are metacognitive. They've got an array of strategies that helps them plan, check how things are going, and then evaluate how it's gone. And they're constantly updating their knowledge and updating their confidence level, and they become really good at learning. And I think that's almost a secret underpinning a lot of these um failures is that being supported to be strategic, to think really actively, to not fall for faulty memory, not fall for misconceptions, and not fall for overconfidence. And instead, these kind of super learners are really good at calibrating and being metacognitive.

William Wadsworth 23:55

Yeah, yeah. I think your your organization, the WEF, produces the teaching and learning toolkit uh research, which has been very influential. And I think I'm right in saying, in fact, I know I'm right in saying that the um metacognition tool, if you like, is is the only one to have the plus seven utility ratings, the highest utility rating, in terms of uh the impact uh on on student progress of every tool in the in the toolkit. And I think it used to be plus six, so it's only going up.

Alex Quigley 24:21

Yeah, so there's a few things the the sequence now has changed a little bit, but effectively it's really high. It's really high, and it sits there alongside feedback. And one of the interesting things is about how metacognition and feedback, incel feedback, um, seem to coalesce around what makes effective learning. It's not just you know being able to like read a textbook about the Korean War, as valuable as that is in knowledge building. It's understanding how much you're learning from that textbook. It's what strategies to make high-quality notes from that textbook. And then how do you use those notes to elaborate and to build your own ideas? And then how do you test yourself on that? So I think I think there's an interesting kind of underlying kind of source of success you see in the toolkit and you see for metacognition or feedback.

William Wadsworth 25:11

Yeah, no, I think it's a really interesting thing to explore. I I think you know, the idea of the exam wrapper, I think that's a really nice tool that teachers can think about. You know, I think that's a really nice tool that that students can think about as well. So you know, I don't talk to many students that don't recognise the importance of doing practice questions and past papers, particularly preparing for doing exams. But in addition to just like going through it and checking how you did and getting the feedback, really important to do, of course, get the feedback. You know, if you've got the mark scheme available, use it. You know, if there's someone that can help you get that feedback, use them. Um but also that metacognition bit of how did I prepare, what went well, what did I struggle with, what did I find difficult. And yeah, there was quite a nice little light touch implementation of this. I I came across, I was talking to a student um actually down under uh from Australia yesterday, uh very bright lad, and and he um had a big uh big spreadsheet of all the past papers he'd attempted, and and he was putting in not only the the scores, but he had a column for vibe, which I quite like. His general vibe for the paper, you know.

Metacognition, Feedback, And Self‑Testing

Alex Quigley 26:09

I thought that's quite a nice way of you know just encouraging some basically metacognitive reflection uh on how and and just to add to that, so so my daughter, she's now doing her A levels this year, she starts in year 12, but she's just done her GCCs. And you know, having taught thousands, literally thousands of teenagers, it's still quite different doing it with you when you you've got your own children. And she's she's actually really independent. She she won't have dad talking to her about religion or any of any of that stuff, as you'd imagine. But what she did do, unprompted by myself, I'm sure like scaffolded, but she knew all the websites for past papers, she sourced them, she did catalogue how she'd done. And it it isn't enough just to have run through the papers. You have got to identify where the weak points were the patterns. And you know, I was I was delighted that she did that. And then I was a bit rueful that I never did that at school. And we probably, you know, there wasn't the open access, there was just this notion of cataloguing, of monitoring as you're going. You know, I'm of a generation that wouldn't talk about vibes, but my daughter might be. But but the principle, I think, of that monitoring, of that's genuine independence, isn't it? But also takes another level then to look at the criteria, to look at different sources of feedback, and then try and calibrate where you are and what you need to do next. And I think one of the hardest things, and I definitely uh you remember at the start of the podcast, I talked about I did really well at the things I liked and I did badly at the things I didn't. Motivation for everybody kicks in. Some some students find it a bit easier where they just feel like all rounders and they feel quite confident about the whole span of the curriculum. But for most of us, we like we really like some things and we don't like other things. And I think overcoming those that emotional reality and trying to make it almost scientific in terms of monitoring and cataloguing and and focusing on the things you struggle with, even if you don't quite like them. I think that's one of the, you know, you see about people who do really good deliberate practice, whether it's thousands of hours, they seem to be able to get over that hump of just doing the things they like. Um and I think that again is another one of those indicators of students who are less likely to fail, more likely to succeed. So, so kind of yeah, walk into that difficulty and try and tackle the things you don't like. Maybe do them first when you've got a little bit more mental energy. You know, there's kind of some practical ways of navigating that.

William Wadsworth 28:36

Great advice, great advice, very practical. Um, I think there's one kind of one other thought, uh, just picking up on an example that you you write about where I think you you you introduced the big piece about overconfidence with uh an example of a student that knows their stuff really well for an upcoming test. They know all the facts in a lot of detail, um, but they're still quite disappointed with their results. And I was kind of reflecting that that it's possible to kind of have that you're touching on this a moment ago, but it's perfectly possible to have this kind of misplaced confidence in how your learning has gone. Yeah. Possibly based on at least two things, like one being I know the stuff really well and I can get all my flashcards right, but I've been practicing them all all evening. And you know, I'm it's very fresh in memory because I've been doing it all night. And then I get into the test, which might be you know tomorrow afternoon or maybe even the day after, and suddenly, you know, even just that 24 hours, 48 hours later, you you know, the forgetting started to kick in and it's less fresh, and and and we're not able to respond as well. You know, I remember this when I was learning lines for a play I was in back at school, you know, the my my co-star in the play where we were the we had two quite prominent parts, and she was struggling with the line learning, and she said, you know, saying to the drama teacher, you know, I could get it all right at home, you know, I can I knew them all, but I can't do them now. And I think in hindsight, she was just practicing them and you know, rehearsing them a lot, and then there was no time interval, and she could do it with no time interval, but time interval a day later, it was it was too much, and she'd forgotten. And then the other point, which uh you know is is kind of prominent in the example you talk about, where you do know everything, but then you struggle in the exam in the test, you know, you might know all the detail, but you aren't kind of able to, you know, maybe access some of that that kind of higher tier stuff, the the synthesizing, the analysis, the critical thinking, you know, whatever it needs for that particular paper. So I guess maybe there's two lessons here. One is make sure you can do it after some time's past, and two, make sure you can do it with the actual, you know, exam questions and the test questions, yeah, and talk about your knowledge in the way that will actually be be assessed on the day.

Alex Quigley 30:33

Yeah, and I I think there's a knowing and doing there. Again, so like the the knowledge of you know things that are familiar to you, uh you're going to be more confident about them. So you need to create windows where they're less familiar. And that's where you know, trying your flashcards on Monday, say your exam's Friday, not Tuesday, which is often the truth. Um, you know, trying them Monday, coming back to them Wednesday, and then the cramming the day before. Cramming can work the day before if you've put those other spells of practice in. And it's that it's that you know forgetting gap that just strengthens deeper knowledge of of whatever is being learned. And then I think the doing problem here is you can oft you can often do a really good job of remembering things, but you can't then knit them together effectively. And I think one of the common um ways we see that in schools now, but also in universities as well, is things like quotes and facts. It's easier to set you know, set of flashcards, you know, digital flashcards, whatever it is for a sequence of facts and for a sequence of quotations to memorize. But often it's what's not on the flashcard, which is what you need to get credit for and which is the understanding. And I think, you know, my son, he's in the year 10 now, Noah, and he's been, you know, asked to do some learning about poetry, he's been um studying, you know, and learn three quotes. And that that's very solid advice. There's nothing wrong with that advice. But if we're not careful, Noah can remember every word of the three quotes and not remember why those three quotes are salient. He might not be able to talk about how they connect as three quotations, or how those three quotations link to another poem. And and actually, you can see how you know well-meaning strategies, learn three quotes, you know, learn, you know, five key facts, summarizing, which is you know, all valid stuff, doesn't go the whole way. And in the book example's true, but I see it all the time where let's not just get them to remember the quotation. What other three things they can say about that quotation they're remembering? And then what's the connection between the two? And and you know, you described it, you know, is it critical thinking? Is it understanding? It it's it's often labeled different things, and there's a nuanced criteria for it, but effectively, it's being able to elaborate and make rich connections. Again, experts have lots of knowledge, they make more connections, but they're also strategic about making those connections. They're also strategic about gaps where they're not making connections. And I think we're often, you know, kind of just missing out that final mile of the marathon, which is not just remembering the salient facts, but connecting them together in effective sequences. And that's again something where, in a practical strategy, you can have your flashcard and you can remember your quotation, and then can you talk for just a minute about that quotation? Because if you can, if you can elaborate in that way, you've just created a learning experience that's quite powerful, but also you're starting to make those connections. And if you can speak for just a minute about three quotations, well, what you found is you've actually got an essay ready to go, and now you just need to apply it to the page in effective ways. So, you know, these are small, often small failures of teaching and of learning, and just with little nudges, we can be far more effective. And, you know, I don't I don't offer again, there's no silver bullet. This isn't, you know, everyone gets top grade. That's not how it works, but everyone can get better, everyone can experience more success, and we can mitigate those big failures. The students who leave courses, the you know, the the poor grades that we didn't expect, and and we can get more success just with small improvements and small changes, the more we anticipate them. That's great advice. That's great advice.

From Facts To Understanding And Connection

William Wadsworth 34:33

Um, and 100% agree. I think the the other big area I was I was curious to talk a little bit about was faulty planning. And it definitely links into some of the themes we've been exploring already, which is great. So maybe I don't know if you'd be be willing to kind of give us a little bit of colour on the sorts of ways you see faulty planning causing issues for students.

Alex Quigley 34:52

Yeah, so I think the main thing is that for particularly for young people and adolescents, quite literally, your brain is not yet developed enough and to think ahead, have that foresight and to look at long-term goals and to work backwards and break those goals down into smaller steps. And, you know, whether, you know, you don't have to get into a lesson on the brain, but you know, the prefrontal cortex, the front of your brain where your planning gets done, that's not quite developed. So it's totally understandable that adolescents and young people in particular struggle to plan with any sort of independence. But we do see lots of students from a young age start to develop strategies and then elaborate on them and become quite independent with them. And then hopefully, most of us, as we become young adults, start to use those strategies really well and we sustain them often throughout our lives. We we use the strategies we learnt at school to good effect. But, and there's always a but because this is a book about where learning fails, it's not easy to make those planning strategies stick. And we often attribute the person and their innate abilities to their ability to plan. We mistake the fact that actually you can be taught planning strategies, you need to be over taught, over-learn those strategies. And one thing I don't see a lot, you need to actually independently pick a strategy and trial it and compare it. So, you know, go back to you know, writing about poetry, you know, you're writing essays. Well, you know, we probably everyone, you know, listening has a recall of an essay plan for school or or college or university, and we have familiar ways, you know, essay plan, paragraph plans, etc. I think what we know is that some students who are really knowledgeable about the topic find it easier to plan, again, more knowledge. And some seem to just quickly pick up that strategy and run with it independently. But when we really get underneath it and this we learn from the students who don't do this very well, but what the really effective planners seem to do is they pick strategies. They pick strategies that suit themselves, they check the strategies efficient, they uh they're selecting. So take preparing for an essay. You could just do a set of keywords for an essay plan, you could do a very detailed paragraph plan, you could mind map, you could do a recording of your ideas for an essay plan. There's lots of strategies, but what effective students do is they work on and try all those strategies and then they evaluate which is most effective for them. And they'll often combine a strategy or two. So they might do some recording, some quick notes, a mind map, and then do a paragraph. They might do keywords and then do a recording. And there is no best way to plan in lots of cases of learning. The thing is your ability to evaluate and pick the right planning strategy for you, and then to do it, and then to experience some success. And I think whether we're young or old, we fall for planning fallacies, we think we've got too much time, we think we know a little bit more than we do, we think we don't quite need a plan, it'll all be fine. Um, you know, all of these things are really routine, we've all lived and experienced them. But then even when we do use a plan, we've got to evaluate whether it was effective. We've got to trade it off with other options and other plans. And I think when teachers and when we do this ourselves as independent learners, we're picking different planning strategies and we're monitoring how effective they are. That's when we become really effective learners. And too often, too many students fall into this kind of opportunity. In my personal experience, I learned how to do it at university, but the strategies I fell into using at university could have been applied five years earlier with confidence. And yes, I was slightly less mature and my brain was slightly less developed, but actually I could have done a much better job. So, really predictable issues with planning, but actually predictable solutions with planning. No one's born a good planner. And women aren't better plan at planning than men, and and and men aren't better executive thinking than women. It's all a nonsense. Actually, we're strategic and we're we're working at specific tasks and we need help to plan and navigate around those tasks.

William Wadsworth 39:19

I think you've been very generous with how good adults are at planning, Alex. I don't know if I'm quite flawless as you described. Maybe it's just me. It's not. No, it's not.

Alex Quigley 39:27

And and actually, we you know, all the all the issues we learn when we're younger, we often don't train ourselves out of them, and we're not taught how to, you know, learn and to use strategies independently. So alas, most adults make the same mistakes they were making at school before you know they were developed enough to be able to plan. So that is true, but I'm being nice because all of our listeners are adults in the main. So I don't want to offend our audience.

William Wadsworth 39:55

There's a nice idea about the idea of kind of a monitoring minute, which I which I quite liked, as a sort of almost like a forcing mechanism to force yourself to stop and think, you know, am I on track here? Am I planning well?

Alex Quigley 40:07

So I'm uh I have a big focus on academic writing. I mean my background's an English teacher, but I got interested in writing in science, writing, you know, maths problems as as much as writing essays.

William Wadsworth 40:20

Well, at university level, even you know, science or medicine courses have essay-based final exams.

Faulty Planning And Better Study Routines

Alex Quigley 40:25

Yeah. It's mediated by reading and writing, no matter how we break it down. It's just different disciplines have different modes of reading and writing. But whenever I talk about writing, well, what I find is, well, they do a plan, they start the essay, they start the exam response, but they don't stop and check because under pressure, you know, your working memory is overloaded already, you just try and get to the end and get done. And then you have a few minutes left if you're lucky and you try and quickly check things through. But what I advocate, and I think there's good evidence for it, are editing stops. You know, every seven or eight minutes, just deliberately make yourself stop. You know, I'm sure you know it's come up in previous podcasts about the Pomodoro method where you know you put your timer on for 25 minutes, then you stop and break, and you know, all with working of memory in mind, or with motivation in mind, but actually, we can really maximize that if we do seven minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes of study of learning, and then monitor, and then do an edit, and then do a check. That's the stuff that the most efficient, effective, successful learners do. And it doesn't matter if they're chess masters or or they're surgeons or the university lecturers. That's the strategies that you hear when they think aloud and they explain how they learn, they monitor more consistently, they check, they evaluate. And you I like that idea of a forcing mechanism. Do an editing stop, do a monitoring minute. You know, make this part of your routine. And the biggest, I think, issue that we find from even the hardest working students, they put all those hours in. You know, I examples are in the book, but you know, we've all done it where you spend hours and hours, and actually you've not used that time efficiently or effectively. And the big cell I often try and promote with teachers of teenagers is that I'm firmly of the belief, GCCs, A levels, all the way university and beyond, that in most cases people could study for half the time and be more effective. And and that feels really counterintuitive and almost against all of our notions of effort and practice. But I think our practice is often so poor as that we could do half of it, but include more monitoring, more evaluation, more checking, more self-testing, and be more effective. So my sales pitch for teenagers is do you want to work less hard and still be more successful? And it seems to be a pretty pretty decent pitch.

William Wadsworth 42:53

Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, Alex. It's been so, so great to chat uh and so many really great, great gems uh for us to reflect on. So, so thank you. I wonder as we bring this towards a close, are there maybe one or two big ideas? You know, we we hinted at this right back at the open, but uh you know, are there maybe one or two big ideas that you think would have been especially helpful for you to have uh cotton onto a little bit earlier in your own academic journey?

Alex Quigley 43:16

Yeah, I I think I'd probably narrow it down to two. I'd narrow it down to like breaking the naturalness myth. You're naturally good at planning or naturally you're an independent learner. I think so much of the research, of experience, of being a teacher, of being a student myself is that it's not natural. It's a set of learned strategies. And those strategies can be modeled, those strategies can be scaffolded, and actually, your best students, they might have had a good start, they might be strong readers, they might have had more knowledge than their peers. But you know, in the in the long run, the most effective students, they it's not naturalness, they are really strategic. They're hardworking, of course, but they use their time really efficiently, and they're able to manage low motivation. They're able to put mental effort into things they don't quite know there's a goal. They're able to plan that more efficiently to take their working memory limitations into so I'd like to bust that naturalness myth. And you know, there's countless stories of geniuses, and and we often have the genius myth writ large in society. You know, Mozart was born with this gift. Even before Mozart was a childhood prodigy, his dad was an expert teacher, and he practiced thousands of hours before the age of seven. So even you know, your notions of natural geniuses is still something we should challenge. But but for the rest of us normal people, actually, the the naturalness of being a good learner, I think we should challenge. And I think the second point, which is inextricably linked, is there are a set of strategies that we need to choose from, that we need to support, you know, support ourselves from. And when it comes to puncturing overconfidence, overcoming working memory, planning a bit more efficiently, exerting mental effort even when we don't quite want to, there's a handful of strategies for each of those likely failures that can mitigate it, and that can lead to greater success. So, you know, let's not fall for the naturalness myth. Even if we we struggle with a topic, struggle with a subject, there are ways and means to learn it more efficiently, more effectively. And great if your teacher helps. You don't need a teacher either. I think there's just a more effective way to study and learn and to be a study expert. Amazing.

William Wadsworth 45:44

Well, thank you so much. Fully uh support all of that, of course. Alex, where do people go to find out more about the subject? Tell us about your published works, of course. Where do we go for for more information, further reading?

Alex Quigley 45:55

Yeah. All my books are published with Routledge, so you can find them on all good bookshops Routledge, Amazon, or the usual. And I write pretty much weekly. I'm a bit addicted to writing about different things in learning. So I write at alexquigley.co.uk. Lots of free resources there, lots of links. You don't have to buy anything. Um, I've written about most of the topics I've talked about here, and then some. So yeah, you can find all my all my kind of published scribblings there.

William Wadsworth 46:23

Well, Alex, thank you once again. And uh yeah, let's go make some uh effective studying happen. Well, thanks again, Alex. I hope you enjoyed that installment of the Exam Study Expert Podcast. As always, all relevant links in the show notes. Thank you for joining us today. I will look forward to seeing you next week on the podcast. For now, wishing you every success in your studies.

Speaker 3 46:48

Well, that was good, wasn't it? I found myself taking notes. If you need a reminder of anything from today, head to the website for a write up of this episode as well as lots more top notch advice and resources. That's uh examstudyexpert.com. See you next time.