To use a strategy effectively, you need to understand why it works, how it works, when it works and when it doesn’t.
For example, all students take notes — not everyone knows how to do it well. Research into the effectiveness of note-taking has found — surprise, surprise —…
To use note-taking effectively, you need to understand that its primary value is not in the record you produce, it is in the process itself. The process of taking notes guides the memory codes you make. Note-taking is a strategy for making information meaningful. It is therefore only effective…
When we are presented with new information, we try and connect it to information we already hold. This is automatic. Sometimes the information fits in easily; other times the fit is more difficult — perhaps because some of our old information is wrong, or perhaps because we lack some of the…
Elaborative interrogation is a strategy to help you remember meaningful information. The idea behind the strategy is that relevant prior knowledge is not always readily activated when you are trying to learn new information, and sometimes help is needed to make the right connections. The…
In a 1987 experiment (1), readers were presented with a text that included one or other of these sentences:
After doing a few warm-up exercises, John put on his sweatshirt and began jogging.
or
After doing a few warm-up exercises, John took off his sweatshirt and began…
To choose a strategy, you must assess the situation. In this case, this may mean an evaluation of a written text. Let's look at how you might evaluate text.
We can classify text at one of three different levels, according to its structure and density1:
Michael Gove is reported as saying that ‘Learning facts by rote should be a central part of the school experience’, a philosophy which apparently underpins his shakeup of school exams. Arguing that "memorisation is a necessary precondition of understanding", he believes that exams that require…
Consider our facts about blood:
We could, as is often advised, simply turn…
A brief round-up of a few of the latest findings reinforcing the fact that academic achievement is not all about academic ability or skills.Most of these relate to the importance of social factors.
Improving social belonging improves GPA, well-being & health, in African-American…
In general, the weight of the research evidence suggests that college students tend to have a poor sense of how prepared they are for testing, and having been tested, they have a poor sense of how well they did! (This, of course, is even more true of younger students).
Does it matter?…