I like reading books. Fiction is always fun to read but nonfiction teaches me a lot. For example, I recently finished reading Make it stick written by a storyteller and two cognitive scientists who researched learning and memory. The book is all about principles and practical strategies for learning in a long-lasting, effective way. It made me re-think about obstacles I had to overcome and realize why I suffered through school (and why I succeeded learning some things while failing to learn some other stuff). While reading this book, I found myself thinking about how much I would benefit if learning how to learn was part of the curriculum.
I got my education in public schools in Turkey. Like most people, I am a first-gen － the first person in my family to attend a 4-year university. I had to score high for both high school and university admission exams. I was often labeled as a “good student” though I never felt that was true. Considering the fact that I am now a scientist, my life has been all about studying. Not a single educator raised awareness in the actual action of learning during the years that I was formally being taught stuff.
As a good student, I remember coming home after school and doing all I could to learn all the bulk knowledge I was supposed to learn: re-reading my lecture notes, trying to solve exercise questions, memorizing arbitrary English words, biology terms, or what year the Ottoman empire lost a few islands to Italy… I also learned a good deal of mathematics even throughout the university but none of those courses taught me the math in an applied manner － ugly functions and theorems that I never got to apply to something else.
I got much better at learning in time because I have been learning for a long time. All those years’ trials and errors taught me what works for me and what doesn’t. Had I read Make it stick when I was younger, I’d have suffered much less. Had I had a teacher who got some proper training on pedagogy and education research, I would have suffered much, much less.
So, the book definitely brings up a lot of anger and frustration from school years 😀 It started with a chapter on how learning is misunderstood. The authors emphasize the fact that we are poor judges when we learn something well and when we don’t. Things we consider as great strategies often fail. For example, just being exposed to something does not make us learn it (or apply what we learn to something new).They mentioned a study in which people in a university were asked where fire extinguishers were. Even those whose offices were next to the fire extinguisher could not remember where they were. So repetitive exposure to fire extinguishers doesn’t help you learn where to grab the closest one if something catches fire. Next, memorizing, rereading text and massed practice (= studying for something excessively for a short period of time) can make us feel like we learn a lot, easily giving us a false sense of mastery. Mastery doesn’t only require knowledge; it also requires conceptual understanding of how to use it (I believe the Turkish education system fails to develop such understanding. Well, to be honest, Canadian or American education systems are not doing a good job on this either…).
The book includes several practical strategies. Among them, one strategy is somewhat surprising: the authors suggest testing as a tool for learning. They cite education research studies showing that testing strengthens memory and that the more effort one spends on retrieving the knowledge, the stronger the benefit is. Think of a PowerPoint lecture versus flight simulator － which one teaches you more? Of course, one needs to learn (reading + lectures) a lot before taking such a test. But once the concepts are learned, it is crucial to teach your brain how to not forget information and different ways of retrieving it such as practicing retrieval, studying a subject by periodic practices, and studying multiple subjects in a spaced out and interleaved manner.
The book includes several examples from research on medical training. Fundamentally, they indicate how effortful and repeated retrieval, recall and practice are the way to go. When you try to remember things from memory from time to time, you force your brain to keep the information in your long term memory and every time you spend effort to retrieve that information, you teach your brain new pathways for accessing that bit of knowledge and connecting it to other things you know: you start interrelating ideas, concepts, a sequence of motor skills into a meaningful unit of knowledge. The more you repeat retrieval, elaboration and reflection, the more you establish cues for accessing specific meaningful units that you learned before.
Learning is an active process. I wish that education systems considered the active nature of learning so that the curriculum is redesigned to make students think, reflect, practice and actively learn. This letter turned into an essay rather than a letter. But I am really curious to hear about how your learning experience was, Özge, both as a student and as a scientist. Was there anything you discovered that helped you learn new things? Knowing how interdisciplinary computational biochemistry/biophysics is, I am sure you must have a lot to say 🙂
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