Daniel Willingham: “Study Skills” Ought to Include an Understanding of Memory

[The author is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, where he's taught since 1992. Until about 2000, his research focused solely on the brain basis of learning and memory. Today his research concerns the application of cognitive psychology to K-12 education. He writes the “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” column for American Educator magazine and is the author of Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. His website is www.danielwillingham.com.]

Schooling in the United States—especially beginning around the sixth grade—requires that students do a certain amount of memorization. Sometimes the demands on memory are overt and narrow, as when students are given a spelling list to learn, and other times the memory demands are implicit and broader, as when students are asked to compare a poem they are reading in class to one that they read a week ago.

I teach at the University of Virginia, so you would expect that committing things to memory would be old stuff for my students. After all, they have been meeting this demand for years, and their admission to a competitive school means that they have been successful students by ordinary metrics.

It turns out that they don’t know much about committing things to memory. For the past few years I’ve been asking my Introduction to Cognitive Psychology class (about 300 students) whether they have ever been taught how memory works. Typically, no hands go up. Then I ask whether they have been taught to study. About 10% say that they have. My experience is not unique. Bob Bjork and post-doctoral fellow Nate Kornell have reported similar data from students at UCLA.

I’m not blaming teachers for this omission. As far as I can tell (from reading educational psychology textbooks aimed at future teachers like Woolfolk’s popular text) teachers are not taught much about the practical workings of memory. Textbooks provide a theoretical overview of memory, including a dutiful chapter on behaviorist theory, the heyday of which was fifty years ago, and which is not viewed as an adequate description of human learning by any psychologist today.

Education bloggers are interested in how memory works, as evidenced by these posts at Kitchen Table Math, D-Ed Reckonining, and Teach Effectively. But I have not encountered a textbook for teachers that succinctly describes the basics of memory, with the idea that teachers might want to impart this information to older students (say, junior high and beyond).

I’ve tried to fill this need with a brief article. Learning and memory are vast topics about which much is known. I’ve focused on three critical functions: (1) how to think about things when you first encounter them to maximize the odds that you’ll remember them later; (2) how to minimize forgetting; (3) how to know that something has been committed to memory. Here’s a summary. The complete article (which appears in the Winter issue of American Educator) elaborates on these conclusions, and includes classroom demonstrations for teachers who want to teach them to their students.

• How are memories formed? Memories are the residue of thought
  • If you want to remember what things mean, you must select a mental task that will ensure that you think about meaning
  • If what you want to remember has little meaning, use a mnemonic
• Why do we forget? Memories are lost mostly due to missing or ambiguous cues
  • Make your memories distinctive
  • Distribute your studying over time
  • Plan for forgetting by continuing to study even after you know the material
• How do you know that you know something? Individuals’ assessments of their own knowledge are fallible.
  • Don’t use an internal feeling to gauge whether you have studied enough. Test yourself, and do so using the same type of test you’ll take in class.