Per RetrievalPractice.org:
Download ALL our free guides, research, and resources!
We’re here to make your life easier. In order to unleash the science of learning, we strive to make it easy to access and quick to implement.
That’s why we really want you to download everything from our library, including free practice guides, book club resources, research, and more.
From retrievalpractice.org regarding the “Make it Stick” book, this link includes:
Recommended books from RetrievalPractice.org
Check out our recommended books and reports that describe research on the science of learning and provide practical tips for classroom teaching.
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…plus several others
From DSC:
Through the years, my mom was an incredible person — in a variety of ways. She was a wonderful mother to us, as well as a spouse to my dad. But she was also a wonderful daughter, aunt, grandma, friend, teacher, counselor, investor, and more. She was a philosophical, deep thinker and a person of action — often doing several things at a time (from the moment that she woke up until the time that she finally called it quits at the end of a long day). Amongst other things, she was an incredible musician. After graduating from college, my mom taught classical piano (to kindergarten through 12th graders) decade after decade…well into her 70’s.
But then, like her mom, she developed Alzheimer’s Disease and as things go with Alzheimer’s, things got progressively worse. Fast forward to today, and her short-term memory is now completely gone and the person who she once was continues to increasingly leave us. She lives with my dad in a memory care unit. (My dad has also experienced physical and cognitive decline…though not nearly as much as my mom.) My mom will ask you the same question many times over, as she can’t remember asking you the question before and she can’t recall your answer (for but a moment). She still recognizes us — though for how much longer that will be the case, we’re not sure. She doesn’t use our names nearly as much as she used to.
Below is a picture of my mom at her memory care unit…and, by the way, she didn’t recall that the piano that she was playing on was actually the exact same piano that she used for years to teach kids how to play classical piano.
All that said — and as you can tell from watching the video below — she can STILL:
Wow!
The human mind is absolutely incredible to me! Scary and tragic when it stops working as it once did — but incredible nevertheless.
Glory to GOD in the highest!
Also see:
The Lesson You Never Got Taught in School: How to Learn! — from bigthink.com by Simon Oxenham (from 2/15/13)
Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluated ten techniques for improving learning, ranging from mnemonics to highlighting and came to some surprising conclusions.
Excerpts:
Practice Testing (Rating = High)
This is where things get interesting; testing is often seen as a necessary evil of education. Traditionally, testing consists of rare but massively important ‘high stakes’ assessments. There is however, an extensive literature demonstrating the benefits of testing for learning – but importantly, it does not seem necessary that testing is in the format of ‘high stakes’ assessments. All testing including ‘low stakes’ practice testing seems to result in benefits. Unlike many of the other techniques mentioned, the benefits of practice testing are not modest – studies have found that a practice test can double free recall!
Distributed Practice (Rating = High)
Have you ever wondered whether it is best to do your studying in large chunks or divide your studying over a period of time? Research has found that the optimal level of distribution of sessions for learning is 10-20% of the length of time that something needs to be remembered. So if you want to remember something for a year you should study at least every month, if you want to remember something for five years you should space your learning every six to twelve months. If you want to remember something for a week you should space your learning 12-24 hours apart. It does seem however that the distributed-practice effect may work best when processing information deeply – so for best results you might want to try a distributed practice and self-testing combo.
Also see:
Per Willingham (emphasis DSC):
Three Takeaways from Becoming An Effective Learner:
Cumulative exams aren’t the same as spacing and interleaving. Here’s why. — from retrievalpractice.org
Excerpts (emphasis DSC):
Our recommendations to make cumulative exams more powerful with small tweaks for you and your students:
Bottom line: Just because an exam is cumulative does not mean it automatically involves spacing or interleaving. Be mindful of relationships across exam content, as well as whether students are spacing their study throughout the semester or simply cramming before an exam – cumulative or otherwise.
From DSC:
We, like The Learning Scientists encourages us to do and even provides their own posters, should have posters with these tips on them throughout every single school and library in the country. The posters each have a different practice such as:
That said, I could see how all of that information could/would be overwhelming to some students and/or the more technical terms could bore them or fly over their heads. So perhaps we could boil down the information to feature excerpts from the top sections only that put the concepts into easier to digest words such as:
Humans are hardwired to forget. But research shows that strategies like peer-to-peer explanations, regular review, and interleaving can boost retention. pic.twitter.com/0IVVz2M3FJ
— edutopia (@edutopia) December 6, 2018
From DSC:
This is where the quizzing features/tools within a Learning Management System such as Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard Learn, etc. are so valuable. They provide students with opportunities for low-stakes (or no-stakes) practice in retrieving information and to see if they are understanding things or not. Doing such formative assessments along the way can point out areas where they need further practice, as well as areas where the students are understanding things well (and only need an occasional question or two on that item in order to reduce the effects of the forgetting curve).
