Make it stick (Cognitive Psychology) by Janet Amoako

MAIN POINTS

jamoako3 — 2023-09-18 14:15:28 UTC

* Cognitive psychology is the basic science of understanding how the mind works and conducting empirical research into how people perceive, remember, and think. This definition leads to the cognitive psychology behind learning as it requires the use of our memory.
* Learning is well-known for acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problem opportunities.
* Learning is an acquired skill so the better you are at learning you have an advantage. We never stop learning we keep on learning all the time and the more we learn new things the more our brain changes.
* There are many forms of learning and the most preferred strategies are rereading text and massed practice. This strategy being the most preferred is also among the least effective learning strategies because rereading and massed practice give rise to feelings of fluency and that is a waste of time. Most of the gains achieved during mass practice are transitory and melt away quickly meaning you lose it and forget whatever you just learned. Being fluent and familiar does not really mean you understand it very well.
* One of the most known effective strategies for learning is the retrieval practice and this is because retrieval strengthens the memory and interrupts forgetting. Taking a quiz after a reading is done is a good way of learning using retrieval rather than trying to reread over and over again.

APPLICATION

jamoako3 — 2023-09-18 14:16:08 UTC

I have always known that rereading is not always helpful but I never thought of finding other effective strategies of learning until I started college. I have used many different strategies for learning with which some worked others also didn't do much. But I recently started the retrieval method which I noticed takes more effort and time but it definitely yields to a better results.
I agree with a lot of things being said in this reading about how learning is misunderstood because starting from kindergaten we are taught to practice practice that there is this popular quote practice makes perfect. This means the more you practice the more better you become and this means doing it over and over again instead of finding a strategy on how to correct our mistakes. Correcting our mistakes from the reading helps builds the bridges to advanced learning.

SOURCE

jamoako3 — 2023-09-18 14:16:26 UTC

The assigned reading
Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

MAIN POINTS

jamoako3 — 2023-09-25 13:33:24 UTC

* Learning begins at an early stage from when we are born. As we all know there are many strategies or ways to use for learning. Some have proven to be effective by researchers and others are not effective but still used. Chapter one mentioned retrieval as one of the effective strategies but there is more to be discovered in this chapter. This retrieval tool's power is known among psychologists as the testing effect or the retrieval practice effect.
*Testing is popularly used to measure what learn and assign grades in school, students usually use retrieval practice which is repeatedly recalling that strengthens the memory. The repetition method helps the memory consolidate into a cohesive repetition in the brain and avoid a mindless recitation. To be effective, retrieval must be repeated over and over again in a spaced-out session. This is important because spacing repetition allows some forgetting to occur which leads to long-term retention than when it is massed.
*The generation effect was also found to be effective as it generated cued answers while studying the pairs' strengthened memory of the target word.
* Feedback is also known to have an effect on learning as studies have shown that giving feedback strengthens retention more than testing alone interestingly,
some evidence shows that delaying the feedback briefly produces better long-term learning than immediate feedback. Another idea holds that frequent interruptions for feedback make the learning sessions too variable, preventing the establishment of a stabilized pattern of performance.
* Cramming as we all know leads to higher scores on an immediate test but results in fast forgetting when retrieval on the other hand helps with the long term.

APPLICATIONS

jamoako3 — 2023-09-25 13:33:44 UTC

This New York Times study "conducted in In 2010 reported on a scientific study that showed that students who read a passage of text and then
took a test asking them to recall what they had read retained an astonishing 50 percent more information a week later than students who had not been tested. This would seem like good news, but here’s how it was greeted by many online comments:
“Once again, another author confuses learning with recalling information
“I personally would like to avoid as many tests as possible,
especially with my grade on the line. Trying to learn in a stressful environment is no way to help retain information.”

I find the results for this study very interesting because even though results proved that testing is effective people chose to ignore it and go with the idea that they do not like testing. I believe people reacted like this because testing means recalling and thus repetition practice comes into effect this method seems a lot compared to cramming. People would rather choose the easiest way out.

SOURCE

jamoako3 — 2023-09-25 13:34:00 UTC

*The generation effect pg 11
Rosner, Z. A., Elman, J. A., & Shimamura, A. P. (2013). The generation effect: activating broad neural circuits during memory encoding. Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior, 49(7), 1901–1909. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2012.09.009

*Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University

MAIN POINTS

jamoako3 — 2023-10-10 13:39:31 UTC

* Practicing is important in learning because it burns a skill into our memory. Constant practicing as we have come to know is only effective when it's been broken into separate pieces of training that have been spaced out. When practice is spaced and inter-leavened more effort is being put into action as the results of this leads to longer retention and more versatility. Unlike mass practice where learning results are seen quickly, spaced-out practice is efficient but slower.
The main reason why spaced practice is more effective than massed practice is that embedding new learning in long-term memory requires consolidation in which memory traces are strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge.
* Interleaved practice can also be used to learn instead of mass practice. Interleaved refers to the practice of two or more subjects or skills. Learning from interleaved practice also feels slower than learning from massed practice, this makes interleaving unpopular and barely used.
*

APPLICATIONS

jamoako3 — 2023-10-10 13:39:48 UTC

* In a study conducted on interleaved practice two groups of college students were taught how to find the volumes of four obscure geometric solids (wedge, spheroid, spherical cone, and half cone). One group then worked on a set of practice problems that were clustered by problem type (practice four problems for computing the volume of a wedge, then four problems for a spheroid, etc.). The other group worked on the same practice problems, but the sequence was mixed (interleaved) rather than clustered
by type of problem. Given what we’ve already presented, the results may not surprise you. During practice, the students who worked the problems in clusters (that is, massed) averaged 89 percent correct, compared to only 60 percent for those who worked the problems in a mixed sequence.
* The beanbag study focused on mastery of motor skills, but much evidence has shown that the underlying principle applies to cognitive learning as well. The basic idea is that varied practice— like tossing your beanbags into baskets at mixed distances— improves your ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it successfully to another. You develop a broader understanding of the relationships between different
conditions and the movements required to succeed in them; you discern context better and develop a more flexible “movement vocabulary”— different movements for different situations. Whether the scope of variable training (e.g., the two four- and foot tosses) must encompass the particular task (the three-foot toss) is subject to further study.

SOURCES

jamoako3 — 2023-10-10 13:39:55 UTC

* Interleavened on pg 4
Schorn, J. M., & Knowlton, B. J. (2021). Interleaved practice benefits implicit sequence learning and transfer. Memory & Cognition, 49(7), 1436-1452. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01168-z
* Varied practice on pg 6
Kerr, R., & Booth, B. (1978). The specific and varied practice of motor skills. Perceptual and motor skills, 46(2), 395–401. https://doi.org/10.1177/003151257804600201
*The assigned reading
Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

SOURCES

jamoako3 — 2023-10-21 13:59:37 UTC

*(Interview Process)pg;

Kebbell, M. R., & Wagstaff, G. F. (1998). Hypnotic interviewing: the best way to interview eyewitnesses?. Behavioral sciences & the law, 16(1), 115–129. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1099-0798(199824)16:1<115::aid-bsl296>3.0.co;2-i

APPLICATIONS

jamoako3 — 2023-10-21 13:59:53 UTC

The hypnotic interview process is known to produce much erroneous information, and studies have shown that when they are tested later, under instructions only to tell exactly what they remember of the actual events, their guesses made while under hypnosis cloud their memories about what truly happened. The purpose of this interview is to encourage people to let their thoughts roam freely and produce everything that comes to mind, in hopes that they will retrieve information.
* In terms of fluency illusions students who
study by rereading their texts can mistake their fluency with a text, gained from rereading, for possession of accessible knowledge of the subject and consequently overestimate how well they will do on a test.

MAIN POINTS

jamoako3 — 2023-10-21 14:00:03 UTC

*Good judgment is an important skill one must acquire, not only for things around us but also for our own thinking and performances. To have competent good judgments we should be able to learn and recognize competency among others, become more accurate judges of what we know and don’t know, adopt learning strategies that get results, and find objective ways to track our progress. Learning when to trust your intuition and when to question it is a big part of how you improve your competence. The changeable nature of our memory cannot only skew our perceptions but is also essential to our ability to learn.
* Because we cannot remember every aspect of an event, we tend to remember those elements that have the greatest emotional significance on us, and we fill it
with details of our own that are consistent with our narrative and that is one of the many ways our memories become distorted. Asking questions based on something happening or not usually leads people to believe and then imagine the event has actually happened before. This is the imagination inflation effect and it is one way we distort our memories. Guessing about possible events causes people to provide their own misinformation, which, if left uncorrected, they may later come to retrieve as accurate or real memories. Interference from other events can distort memory because these other events are preventing or block the main information at hand and thus make one focus on the other event more. Our memories are also subject to social influence and tend to
align with the memories of the people around us this is known as memory conformity or the social contagion of memory.
*Confidence in a memory is not a reliable indication of its accuracy.

SOURCES

jamoako3 — 2023-10-22 02:58:25 UTC

(Page 13)

*Contextual interference effects with skilled baseball players
https://www.krigolsonteaching.com › 1994-hall
(page 14)

APPLICATIONS

jamoako3 — 2023-10-22 02:58:34 UTC

*In Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator grieves over his inability to recall the days of his adolescence in the French village of his aunt and uncle, until one day the taste of a cake dipped in lime blossom tea brings it all rushing back, all the people and events he thought had long since been lost to time.
*In the Cal Poly batting practice experiment, the act of overcoming the difficulties posed by random types of pitches built a broader “vocabulary” of mental processes for discerning the nature of the challenge (e.g., what the pitcher is throwing) and selecting among possible responses than did the narrower mental processes sufficient for excelling during massed, nonvaried experience.

MAIN POINTS

jamoako3 — 2023-10-22 02:58:41 UTC

*Mentioned earlier in the previous chapter on how to elicit putting more effort and that slowing down learning, spacing, interleaving, mixing up practice, and others will more than compensate for their inconvenience by making the learning stronger, more precise, and more enduring. Short-term impediments that make for stronger learning have come to be called desirable difficulties by psychologists. Learning occurs in a process beginning with encoding which refers to when the brain converts your perceptions into chemical and electrical changes that form a mental representation of the patterns one observes. The new experiences and learning that we want to salt away for the future must be made stronger and more durable so we do not forget easily. Consolidation mentioned here is the strengthening of mental representations for the long term memory. So much happens during the consolidation process; the brain reorganizes and stabilizes the memory traces. This may occur over several hours or longer and involves deep processing of the new material, during which scientists believe that the brain replays or rehearses the learning, giving it meaning, filling in blank spots, and making
connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long- term memory. Reconsolidation helps retrieval practice modifies and strengthens learning. Having effective retrieval cues is an
aspect of learning that often goes overlooked. The task is
more than committing knowledge to memory. Being able to retrieve it when we need it is important. How readily you can recall knowledge from your internal archives is determined by context and the more effort required to retrieve something, the better you learn it so relearning helps a lot.
*Sometimes our judgments of what learning strategies work best for us are often mistaken, colored by illusions
of mastery. Spaced and interleaved exposure characterizes most of humans’ normal experience especially the concept of difference. Also certain kinds of interference can produce learning benefits, and the positive effects are sometimes surprising because the change from normal presentation introduces a difficulty disruption of fluency that makes the learner work harder to construct an interpretation that makes sense. The added effort increases comprehension and learning.

MAIN POINTS

jamoako3 — 2023-11-25 19:24:40 UTC

*When it comes to learning, receiving instructions or being taught in a manner that does not favor the learning style of the one being taught puts them at a disadvantage. Individuals who feel concerned in situations like this usually try to figure things out and help themselves. Rule learning and structure building are what psychologists claim many people use to help themselves. But also not everyone can figure their learning problem out especially when there is an internal factor like a learning disability or even dyslexia.

* The VARK approach advocated by Neil Fleming differentiates people whether they prefer learning through experiences that are primarily visual, auditory, reading, or kinesthetic. VARK only focuses on one aspect which has many dimensions like light, food intake, and more. Another theory is one that focuses on six aspects which are emotional, sociological, perceptual, physiological, and environmental. There are also the Honey and Mumford learning styles and questionnaires for learning theory.

* There is this idea that we learn better when the mode of presentation matches the particular style in which an individual is best able to learn. This is why it is important to figure out what style works great even tho there is no evidence to support it.

*According to psychologists there are at least two types of intelligence, the fluid and crystalized. While Gardner helpfully expands our notion of intelligence, the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg helpfully distills it again. Rather than eight intelligences, Sternberg’s model proposes three: analytical, creative, and practical. Further, unlike Gardner’s theory, Sternberg’s is supported by empirical research. g. In Sternberg’s view, we’re all in a state of developing expertise, and any test that mea sures only what we know at any given moment is a static mea sure that tells us nothing about our potential in the realm the test measures.

APPLICATIONS

jamoako3 — 2023-11-25 19:25:06 UTC

*In 2008 the cognitive psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Bob Bjork were commissioned to conduct a review to determine whether this critical claim is supported by scientific evidence. The team set out to answer two questions. First, what forms of evidence are needed for institutions to justify basing their instructional styles on assessments of students’ or employees’ learning styles? The second question the team asked was whether this kind of evidence existed. The answer was no. They found very few studies designed to be capable of testing the validity of learning styles theory in education, and of those, they found that virtually none validate it and several flatly contradict it.

*One of Sternberg’s studies of particular interest to the question of how we measure intelligence was carried out in rural Kenya, where he and his associates looked at children’s informal knowledge of herbal medicines. Regular use of these medicines is an important part of Kenyans’ daily lives. This knowledge is not taught in schools or assessed by tests. The children who performed best on tests of this indigenous informal knowledge did worst relative to their peers on tests of the formal academic subjects taught in school and, in Sternberg’s words, appeared to be “stupid” by the metric of the formal tests.

SOURCES

jamoako3 — 2023-11-25 19:25:28 UTC

*(Page 15)

Pashler, H., McDaniel, M., Rohrer, D., & Bjork, R. (2008). Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 9(3), 105-119. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x

*(Page 18)

Nokes, Catherine & Geissler, Paul & Prince, Ruth & Okatcha, Frederick & Bundy, Donald & Grigorenko, Elena. (2001). The Relationship between Academic and Practical Intelligence: A Case Study in Kenya. Intelligence. 29. 401-418. 10.1016/S0160-2896(01)00065-4.

*(Page 14)

https://vark-learn.com/introduction-to-vark/the-vark-modalities/

MAIN POINTS

jamoako3 — 2023-11-25 21:43:44 UTC

*When we engage in extended training and repetition of some kinds of learning, notably motor skills and sequential tasks, our learning is thought to be recorded in this deeper region, the same area that controls subconscious actions such as eye movements. The brain is thought to chunk motor and cognitive action sequences together so that they can be performed as a single unit, that is, without requiring a series of conscious decisions, which would substantially slow our responses. These sequences become reflexive as they may start as actions we teach ourselves to take in pursuit of a goal, but they become automatic responses to stimuli.

* The hippocampus, where we consolidate learning and memory, is able to generate new neurons throughout life. The phenomenon of neurogenesis is thought to play a central role in the brain’s ability to recover from physical injury and in humans’ lifelong ability to learn. The relationship of neurogenesis to learning and memory is a new field of inquiry, but scientists have shown that the activity of associative learning stimulates an increase in the creation of new neurons in the hippocampus.

*Retrieval practice, spacing, rehearsal, rule learning, and the construction of mental models improve learning and memory is evidence of neuroplasticity and is consistent with scientists’ understanding of memory consolidation as an agent for increasing and strengthening the neural pathways by which one is later able to retrieve and apply to learn

APPLICATIONS

jamoako3 — 2023-11-25 21:43:59 UTC

*One study, at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared the synaptic architecture of identical twins, whose genes are alike, and fraternal twins, who share only some genes. This study showed what others have suggested, that the speed of our mental abilities is determined by the robustness of our neural connections; that this robustness, at the initial stages, is largely determined by our genes, but that our neural circuitry does not mature as early as our physical development and instead continues to change and grow through our forties, fifties, and sixties.

SOURCES

jamoako3 — 2023-11-25 21:44:14 UTC

Chou, Y., Leporé, N., Chiang, C., Avedissian, C., Barysheva, M., McMahon, K. L., Meredith, M., Wright, M. J., Toga, A. W., & Thompson, P. M. (2009). Mapping genetic influences on ventricular structure in twins. NeuroImage, 44(4), 1312. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2008.10.036