How Students Learn
After reading the mini-case on the reverse side of the page, jot down answers to the questions. Then discuss your ideas with people at your table. I will interrupt the discussion and ask volunteers to offer their explanations:
- Make predictions about the performance of the three groups of students. How well—relative to one another—do you think the groups performed on the test of understanding?
- Explain the reasons for your predictions.
How Students Learn
The experiment below took place in a sophomore level psychology class during a unit on human memory theories and research. Students were assigned to one of three conditions in which they studied specially prepared course material in class and a week later took a test to determine their understanding of the subject matter. Students did all the work individually in class (i.e., they did not work in groups). The three groups did the following:
Group 1: Read + Summarize + Lecture.
- In class, students read a specially prepared chapter on memory and wrote a summary of the material.
- Next class period they heard a lecture that integrated and explained the material from the text.
Note: The experience of Group 1 is a common instructional sequence—students prepare for class by reading and writing about the material, and then listen to a lecture about the subject matter in class.
Group 2: Analyze + Lecture.
- Students analyzed several “data sets” fromseveral memory studies. Each data was based on an actual memory study and reported how research subjects performed. The data sets described what material the research subjects were given to remember and what they actually remembered. The data sets contained no descriptive or explanatory information about the studies or memory theories.
- Students did NOT read the chapter on memory.
- Next class period students heard the same lecture as Group 1.
Group 3: Analyze + Analyze.
- In class, students were given twice the amount of time to analyze the same data sets as Group 2.
- Students did NOT read the chapter on memory.
- They did NOT listen to the lecture.
Testing students’ understanding. On the test students read about a memory experiment they had not seen previously and were asked to predict the results of the study—that is, predict how people would perform on the memory task. The researchers reasoned that if students had gained a deep understanding of the memory concepts, then they should make relevant predictions given a new problem.
How Did the Groups Do?
Group 2 (Analyze + Lecture) did significantly better than Group 1 (Read + Summarize + Lecture) and Group 3 (Analyze + Analyze). Group 2 had a much better grasp of the concepts, and Groups 1 and 3 were equally poor at making predictions.
Additional Findings.
- Researchers used a true/false test to determine whether students recalled the basic facts of the memory theories and studies. On this test, students who studied by Read + Summary + Lecture remembered just as much as those who had studied by Analyze + Lecture.
- The researchers analyzed students’ summaries in Group 1 and found that key concepts from the studies appeared in their summaries. In other words, both groups had the facts, but the Analyze + Lecture group was better able to make predictions.
Talking Points: What Does This Example Illustrate About How Students Learn?
Analysis of Data Sets + Lecture was a potent combination that enabled students to make three times more predictions than the other learning methods. Reading + Summarizing + Lecture did not foster understanding of the material. In fact, it was no better than the Double Analysis method in which the students neither read the material nor heard the lecture!
So, what’s going on here? What accounts for the superior performance of Analysis + Lecture? Why was Analysis + Lecture more effective than both the Read + Summarize + Lecture and the Double Analysis methods?
Summarizing. The act of summarizing is a way to make sense of new material. In creating a good summary, a person makes decisions about important vs. unimportant ideas, condenses information and translates it into his or her own words. One would expect the students in this condition to be able to recall in some detail what they had read. Students’ summaries contained the same factual information as that contained in the chapter, indicating that the students had picked up on key ideas. But the summarizing did not prepare students to take advantage of the explanatory lecture.
Analysis of Data Sets entails a different mental process than summarizing. First, consider that the cases depicted raw data that had no meaning to the students. By analyzing these sets, students found distinctive features and patterns in the data even though they did not know the significance or “meaning” of the patterns. Students became aware of similarities and differences in the data. The researchers refer to this as “differentiated knowledge,” and is quite different from the more global connections made by the students who summarized the reading material.
The Lecture. The lecture provided an explanatory framework for the material. Instructors typically assume that a good explanation in itself is sufficient to produce student understanding; that in some sense we can transfuse our understanding into the minds of our students. But students who read and summarized the material and then heard a lecture did not develop a grasp of the concepts. The “read + summarize + lecture” group could recall the material. However, they could not “think with” the concepts to apply them to a new problem. Students who developed differentiated knowledge of the material by analyzing data were ready to make sense of the explanation. They had discerned distinctive features of the material by analyzing the data sets and then with the aid of the lecture were able to render the patterns meaningful. It is important to recognize that the lecture did not transmit meaning into the minds of students. Rather students’ differentiated knowledge of the data sets enabled them to construct meaningful understanding of the lecture material.
General Points
Recall versus Understanding. If you only measure students’ learning in terms of their recall of the facts, then both groups appear to have learned the same amount. If you measure students’ learning in terms of their understanding one group developed much better understanding of the concepts.
Students use prior knowledge (what they already know) to make sense of new information. But not all prior knowledge is equal. Understanding requires both differentiated knowledge (as developed when discerning the patterns in the data sets) and explanatory knowledge (as developed through the lecture).
How Students Learn handout
UW-L Conference on Teaching & Learning August 29, 2006
Bill Cerbin