During the last live session and throughout readings and assignments, we discussed and think a lot about how testing and retrieval practices may improve our long term learning. But we did not put a lot of thought (yet!) into why we are so bad at evaluating the meaningfulness of our own learning.
While it was not the central idea of their study, it has been shown in the experiments by Karpicke and Blunt (2011) that students still think repeated study will provide more learning than the other modalities discussed. That idea was also underlined in Make it Stick, by Brown and colleagues (2014). Based on what we have discussed up to now, I think it can be explained by a mix of illusion of our mind and, mostly, because of our habits.
When I say that, in my opinion, one explanation that underlies our quasi-systematic misinterpretation of the meaningfulness or our own learning is because of an illusion of our mind, I mean that repeated reading or studying is highly convincing that we are working hard on learning stuff. Hard work is still largely seen, in med school, as cramming, memorizing lists, knowing criteria by heart. There is a certain value associated with the one who reads articles or textbooks compulsively or the one who listen closely to the very didactic, PowerPoint oriented lesson (I did it, and still doing it, to be honest). In the meantime, we are discussing right now in Teaching 100 that active learning is a more adapted way to create meaningful learning. Moreover, we consolidated that retrieval techniques and testing may be more powerful to build long term retention, compared to repeated studying.
That said, I think that there is also deeply anchored habits in university students and scholars. Indeed, it is anxiety-provoking to change personal learning technique after 5, 10, 15 years of university training. In that matter, Brown and colleagues in Make it Stick do not bring the topic a lot in their book, but while making great suggestions to improve meaningful learning, how can we develop powerful ways to break these deeply rooted working habits? I think that among other solutions, universities, and namely medical schools, should teach basic notions of education and science of learning at the beginning of the training. Students could use these tools to improve their learning skills before forging bad habits that will stick forever.
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