3 Terrible Learning Habits You Probably Picked Up In School

JUN. 19, 2014, 2:26 PM

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If you don't know how to learn well, you're basically screwed.

So say Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, authors of "Make It
Stick: The Science Of Successful Learning."
"We need to keep learning and remembering all our lives," they write. "Getting
ahead at work takes mastery of job skills and difficult colleagues ... If you're good
at learning, you have an advantage in life."
Roediger and McDaniel, both of whom are psychologists at the University of
Washington in St. Louis, argue that we misunderstand at a cultural level how
learning works.

"How we teach and study is largely a mix of theory, lore, and intuition," the
authors write.
Only recently has learning been submitted to the empirical rigor of cognitive
psychology which has turned up lots of the bad habits that many of us picked
up in school.
Here are a few examples of terrible ways to learn new concepts:
Rereading the material
Recall your time in school. When you wanted to prep for an exam, your
"studying" probably consisted of poring over the same texts for hours.
More than 80% of college students say that rereading is their main study
strategy. The authors cite three reasons for why it doesn't work:
Rereading takes forever. You could be learning better, in a shorter amount of
time, with other strategies.
Studies show that multiple readings of a text provide no benefit to recall.
It deceives you. Mastering a text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind
it. Rereading a text gives you an "illusion of knowing." You're getting super
familiar with what a text says, but only superficially.
Rather than rereading, quiz yourself. It's better for cultivating long-term recall.
Cramming
Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel repeatedly slam "massed practice," which you
and I know as cramming the rapid, intense study of a text or technique for a
short duration of time.
Synthesizing several decades of research, the authors note:
"Massed practice gives us the warm sensation of mastery because we're looping
information through short-term memory without having to reconstruct the
learning from long-term memory ... [T]he fluency gained through massed practice
is transitory, and our sense of mastery is illusory."
Real mastery of material, the authors emphasize, comes through reconstructing
knowledge. That means forcing yourself to recall your understanding of a subject
from memory, which you can hack with techniques like retrieval, elaboration, and
generation.
Catering to your "learning style"
You've probably said that you're a visual or auditory learner.
You may be mistaken.

"The idea that individuals have distinct learning styles has been around long
enough to become part of the folklore of education practice and an integral part
of how many people perceive themselves," the authors write.
"The underlying premise says that people receive and process new information
differently," they continue. What's more, the theory holds that folks who don't get
info in their preferred learning style written, heard, etc. are getting the
pedagogical shaft.
This sentiment, the authors insist, is toxic, since saying that you have one
learning style and not another gives you a "corrosive, misguided sense of
diminished potential."
If you identify as someone with a "low kinesthetic" learning ability, then you'll
likely stray away from athletics, rock-climbing, dancing, yoga, or any of the
various ways to take advantage of having a body. If you identify as a "lowauditory" learner, then you'll turn yourself away from listening to music, lectures,
and the like. Taking yourself to have one speciality and many weaknesses is
impoverishing.
Instead, Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel encourage you to adopt an idea of
"successful intelligence": an attitude of bringing all your tools to the learning
table. Yes, you do have different kinds of intelligence Cornell University
psychologist Robert Sternberg's model says it's analytical, creative, and
practical but that doesn't mean you have a certain "type" of learning.
Instead, when you're trying to master an idea, approach it with the full breadth of
your intelligences. Rather than having your "learning style" limit your ability, use
every way to learn you have available to you.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/bad-learning-habits-20146#ixzz36Ph9zmoK