The ABCs of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, and When to Use Them

PRECISE AND RELEVANT
Relevant and precise elaborations create better retrieval paths. For instance, in one study people read sentences in one four conditions (Stein & Bransford, 1979):
(a)The tall man purchased the crackers. (no elaboration)
(b)The tall man purchased the crackers. (come up with own elaboration)
(c)The tall man purchased the crackers that were on sale. (irrelevant elaboration)
(d)The tall man purchased the crackers that were on the top shelf. (relevant elaboration)
People read 10 sentences like these. Afterward, they took a memory test in which they had to provide the missing adjective for each sentence: The _____ man purchased the crackers.
The percentages of correctly remembered words were as follows:
(a)42 percent (No Elaboration condition)
(b)58 percent (Self-Elaboration condition)
(c)22 percent (Irrelevant Elaboration condition)
(d)74 percent (Relevant Elaboration condition)
The relevant elaboration provided a precise connection that marked the relevance of the man’s height for reaching the crackers. On average, receiving a relevant elaboration was even more effective than generating a self-elaboration. This is likely a result of some people making ineffective elaborations: when people in the self-elaboration condition did generate their own precise and relevant elaborations, their probability of recall was 91 percent (Stein & Bransford, 1979).

It is a poor idea to try improving at archery without ever seeing where your arrows land. Nevertheless, many learning systems may not build in feedback. For instance, more experienced clinical psychologists do not produce better client outcomes than less experienced clinicians. This is because the structure of the professional system does not deliver reliable, objective feedback about patient outcomes. It is hard for the clinicians to learn what works. They are left to make their own judgments, which may be biased toward seeing success rather than places to improve (Saptya, Riemer, & Bickman, 2005).

is a poor idea to try improving at archery without ever seeing where your arrows land. Nevertheless, many learning systems may not build in feedback. For instance, more experienced clinical psychologists do not produce better client outcomes than less experienced clinicians. This is because the structure of the professional system does not deliver reliable, objective feedback about patient outcomes. It is hard for the clinicians to learn what works. They are left to make their own judgments, which may be biased toward seeing success rather than places to improve (Saptya, Riemer, & Bickman, 2005).

Elaboration is useful for memorizing meaningful material, including new vocabulary words, sentences, people’s names, directions, or even phone numbers. Ironically, elaboration does not need to be very elaborate to make a difference. In one study, participants had to memorize one hundred words (Tresselt & Mayzner, 1960). There were three conditions: cross out the vowels, copy the words, and judge the degree to which each word was an instance of the concept “economic” (e.g., poem would be low, and credit would be high). When asked to remember the words, participants in the judge condition did twice as well as the copy condition and four times as well as the cross-out-vowels condition.

There is a natural gravity to rest on one’s successes, because taking on unfamiliar challenges moves one out of a comfort zone and can lead to suboptimal performance, at least in the short run. One solution is to help people develop adaptive expertise (see Chapter K).

The second way to use analogies is to provide students with two (or more) examples and ask them to induce the underlying structure. This turns out to be extremely powerful for learning. In fact, having students find the analogous structure is much better than giving them one example and explaining the structure! Pay attention to this point, because giving a single example with an explanation is the standard approach in most U.S. classrooms, and we can do better (Richland, Zur, & Holyoak, 2007). I