Continuing the last post on how little students seem to learn from their time in college:
I’m often amazed during my classes at how few students take notes. Most of my students, in fact, I would guess, do not voluntarily take notes (I often insist they write certain things down!). This (lack of) practice seems unfathomable to me. How do they know what to study?
There’s a textbook, true, but during the class I highlight the most important material, as well as provide additional exercises and insight. And, believe it or not, not everything we talk about in class is covered in the textbook.
The lack of note-taking must have something to do with students not knowing how to take notes, but I think it goes deeper than that. I wonder if most students have a good understanding of how to use the notes they take or why they should even take notes in the first place. For example, after class one day, I spoke to a student who was in danger of failing the class. I asked if she was having similar difficulty in her other subjects. She replied, “Well, in high school I always got A’s, but now, in college, I get C’s. I guess I’m just a C student.” When I asked about her study habits, she said they were the same in college as they had been in high school. They consisted of what I like to call the “flung grapes” method. The information from the lecture was flung against the wall of her memory, and whatever stuck, stuck. In high school she had been able to remember all the important material, but now, in college, it wasn’t working as well. She blamed it on herself. She was “just a C student.”
It broke my heart to hear her story. Good study habits are something most people have to learn over the course of their educational career. But I suspect this student was not alone in lacking the awareness of needing to improve. I was reminded of this as I was reading a website today about better ways to construct course syllabi to improve learning outcomes:
Effective learning is often effortful. Whether in retrieving information from memory with minimal cues, learning material given variable conditions, or re-representing information, when more effort is put into learning, the generalization and retention of learning are generally enhanced. (Department of Psychology, Life Long Learning at Work and Home. The University of Memphis. July 10, 2008)
The article goes on to discuss strategies a professor can take to help the effective learning process, but another takeaway is that effective learning is “effortful.” It requires effort. As the New York Times reports, it requires practice in retrieving. It is not a passive experience, and it is not easy. Certainly, not at first. And it can’t all be worked on inside the classroom. I can help, but I can’t do it all.
Grapes must be pressed to make wine. And pressed again to make grappa. Sometimes the second yield is even better than the first. Or at least more potent!