How to Approach Learning: What teachers and students should know about succeeding in school: Study Skills

How to Approach Learning

What teachers and students should know about succeeding in school

By Dr Fiona McPherson

www.mempowered.com

Published 2015 by Wayz Press, Wellington, New Zealand.

Copyright © 2015 by Fiona McPherson.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Wayz Press, a subsidiary of Capital Research Limited.

ISBN 978-1-927166-28-4

About the author

Fiona McPherson has a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Otago (New Zealand). Her first book, The Memory Key, published in 1999, was written in response to what she saw as a lack of practical advice on how to improve memory and learning skills that was based on the latest cognitive research. Since that time, she has continued to provide such advice, through an extensive website (www.memory-key.com), and several books focused on specific memory and learning skills.

How to approach your teaching or learning

What you need for successful learning

Intelligence isn’t as important as you think

The role of motivation on academic performance

Motivation, study habits—not IQ—determine growth in math achievement

Those less motivated to achieve will excel on tasks seen as fun

Anxiety

Stereotype threat is a potential factor for gender, ethnicity, and age

Letters A and F affect test scores

The effect of stress on performance depends on individual and situational factors

Easy solution for test anxiety

Maybe persistence has nothing to do with self-control

Self-regulation

Regulating your study time and effort

Choosing your strategies

Metamemory

Using strategies effectively

Assessing strategy

Successful Transfer

Preventing interference between topics or skills

Context & the conditionalization of knowledge

About expert knowledge

Desirable difficulty for effective learning

Using hard to read fonts may help you remember more

Should learning facts by rote be central to education?

Strategies for successful study

Reading

Working memory, expertise & retrieval structures

Understanding scientific text

Novices' problems with scientific text

Identifying text structures

Why good readers might have reading comprehension difficulties and how to deal with them

Speed Reading

Effects of diagram orientation on comprehension

Note-taking

Notetaking examples

Outlines and Graphic organizers

Concept maps

Visual language

Students fail to connect without explicit instruction

Better learning through handwriting

Reaching Understanding

Elaborating the information for better remembering

Asking better questions

Metacognitive questioning and the use of worked examples

Final Remarks

Other books by Dr Fiona McPherson

How to Approach your Teaching or Learning

This book collects most of the articles and some of the research reports on study skills from my websites Mempowered (www.mempowered.com) and About Memory (www.memory-key.com). It doesn't aim to provide a complete or step-by-step account, but instead tries simply to introduce you to a number of concepts and strategies that may help you change your approach to teaching or studying.

The articles and reports have been arranged and edited for greater cohesiveness.

For greater detail on specific study strategies, such as note-taking, mnemonics, and revision, I point you to my ‘proper’ books (that is, those books designed and written as complete works).

Effective Notetaking

The most popular of Dr McPherson's study skills books; now in its 2nd edition. This workbook shows you how to format your notes, use headings and highlighting, write different types of text summaries and graphic ones, make the right connections, evaluate the text, and choose the strategies that are right for both you and the situation. Find out more about this book

Mnemonics for Study

While mnemonics don't help you understand your material, they do help you remember those many details you need to achieve expertise in a topic — details such as the names of things, technical words, lists of principles. Find out more about this book

How to Learn: The 10 principles of effective revision & practice

Strategies for improving understanding and memory can only take you so far, if you don’t know how to cement that information into your brain for the long term. This book tells you how to review your learning in the most optimal way, using examples from science, math, history, foreign languages, and skill learning. Find out more about this book

Successful Learning Simplified

This book is designed to present a wide range of effective learning strategies as simply as possible, omitting the detail given in Effective Notetaking, Mnemonics for Study, and How to Learn, and adding some additional material on active reading strategies. This book can be used either as a quick reference, or as a simplified guide to the most effective learning strategies, for those who want relatively simple examples and short explanations. Find out more about this book

What You Need for Successful Learning

Intelligence isn’t as important as you think

While differences in IQ explain some of the differences in academic success, personality factors such as conscientiousness, curiosity, and humility, account for a similar degree of academic differences.

Our society gives a lot of weight to intelligence. Academics may have been arguing for a hundred years over what, exactly, intelligence is, but ‘everyone knows’ what it means to be smart, and who is smart and who is not — right?

Of course, it’s not that simple, and the ins and outs of academic research have much to teach us about the nature of intelligence and its importance, even if they still haven’t got it all totally sorted yet. Today I want to talk about one particular aspect: how important intelligence is in academic success.

First of all, to simplify the discussion, let’s start by pretending that intelligence equals g and is measured by IQ testing.

What's g? It stands for general factor, and reflects the shared element between multiple cognitive tests. It's a product of a statistical technique known as factor analysis, which measures the inter-correlation between scores on various cognitive tasks. It's no surprise to any of us that cognitive tasks should be correlated — that people who do well on one cognitive task are likely to do well on others, while people who do poorly on one are likely to perform poorly on others. No surprise, either, that some cognitive tasks will be more highly correlated than others. But here’s the thing: the g factor, while it explains a lot of the individual differences in performance on an IQ test, accounts for performance on some of the component sub-tests better than others. In other words, g is more important for some cognitive tasks than others. Again, not terribly unexpected. Some tasks are going to require more ‘intelligence’ than others. One way of describing these tasks is to say that they are cognitively more complex. In the context of the IQ test, the sub-tests each have a different g-loading.

There is no doubting that IQ is a good predictor of academic performance, but what does that mean exactly? How good is ‘good’? Well, according to Flynn (IQ test guru and author of the Flynn Effect), IQ tests that are heavily-loaded on g reliably predict about 25% of the variance in academic achievement. Note that this is about variance, that is the differences between people; this is not the same as saying that IQ accounts for a quarter of academic performance. What it's saying is that around a quarter of the difference in grades between student A and student B is explainable by their different IQ scores. But this does vary significantly depending on age and population — for example, in a group of graduate students, the relative importance of other factors will be greater than it is in a cross-section of ten-year-olds. In the study I will discuss later, the figure cited is closer to 17%.

Regardless of whether it’s as much as 25% or as little as 17%, I imagine that these figures are much smaller than most people would have thought, given the weight that we give to intelligence.

So what are the other factors behind doing well at school (and, later, at work)?

The most obvious one is effort. One way to measure how hard people work is through the personality dimension of Conscientiousness.

One study involving 247 British university students compared the predictive power of the Big Five personality traits (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness) on later exam performance, and found that Conscientiousness had a significant effect, and was the only trait to have a significantly positive effect. The most important aspects of Conscientiousness were Dutifulness and Achievement striving. Together with a component of Extraversion called Activity (which had a negative effect), these three attributes accounted for 28% of the variance in overall exam grades (over the three years of their undergraduate degrees). Note that this is more than IQ accounted for.

However, it is important to note that these students were a highly selected bunch — undergraduates were (at this point in time) accepted to the University College London at an application: acceptance ratio of 12:1 — so IQ is going to be less important as a source of individual difference (because they're pretty much all going to be bright).

In another study by some of the same researchers, 80 sixth-formers (equivalent to grade 10) were given both personality and intelligence tests. Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience were found to account for 13% of unique variance in academic performance, and intelligence for 10%. Interestingly, there were subject differences. Intelligence was more important than personality for math and science subjects, while the reverse was true for English language (literature, language) subjects.

The so-called Big Five personality dimensions are well-established, but recently a new model has introduced a sixth dimension: Honesty-Humility. Unexpectedly, a recent study showed this dimension also has some implications for academic performance.

The first experiment in this study involved 226 undergraduate students from a School of Higher Education in the Netherlands. Both Conscientiousness and Honesty-Humility were significantly and positively correlated to grade point average (with Conscientiousness having the greater effect).

In the second experiment, a wider data-set was used, with 1262 students being given the Multicultural Personality Test—Big Six, which measures Emotional Stability,