Maths, Science and Language Academy

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3rd day of Mock Exam (3)
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Everyone get ready for your Mock Exam 3 :) :) :)
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Something worth reading ...

https://youtu.be/z_1Zv_ECy0g

Skills Every Child Will Need to Succeed in 21st century | Dr. Laura A. Jana | TEDxChandigarh Is the current education system sufficient to make kids succeed in 21st century? Dr. Laura believes otherwise. Her talk will ensure that you and your kids ar...

Study Less with greater intensity
In the era of social media, all of us are bombarded with multiple front of distraction all the time. One will be doing research on the Internet while he or she receives messages from friends. Therefore, people are more and more multitasking and think that it is more effective to be focusing on many different areas. However, so far, we have not known any effective multitasking technique.
Consider a person who has about 0.3 out of 1 in intensity of focus and studied for 3 hours, and another person has 1 in intensity of focus and studied for 1 hour. The second person, obviously, will achieve better result compared to the first person who was distracted and worked inefficiently.
Highly successful students have generally learned to avoid multitasking. Instead of spending a lot of time doing low-intensity work with multiple distraction, they work shorter time with higher intensity, without any distraction. This study method is much more effective and leads to greater achievement gains.
Many students use unproven learning techniques that are time consuming and give illusion of mastery. They will be familiar with ideas and information for a short term, especially for a test, but forget most of them in a week because their learning does not lead to long term memory and deep understanding.

Some of the ineffective learning techniques:
1) Studying for a long period of time without any break
2) Studying a single subject for a long period of time and repeating information over and over agin to memorise them.
3) Blocked practice: reviewing one topic repeatedly before moving onto another topic.
4) Highlighting and underlying without any active reading and studying the important points.

Researchers have found that the following techniques increase sustainable learning and retention. Those techniques are harder get started and require more effort initially. They may slow down learning initially compared to some ineffective practices. However, these techniques lead to long-term mastery.

1. Pre-testing
When student practice answering questions, even incorrectly, before learning the content, their future learning is enhanced. Richland, L.E., Kornell, N., & Kao, S.L. (2009) has shown that pre-testing improves post-test results more than spending the same amount of time studying.

2. Spaced practice
Spacing out study sessions - focusing on a topic for a short period on different days - has been seen shown to improve retention and recall more than massed practice. The book “How We Learn” Benedict Carey (2015) explains that spaced practice can feel difficult due to forgetting initially of knowledge — reacquiring that knowledge takes effort.
Students can use flash cards in spaced practice and self-quizzing help to recall knowledge. Students can create different piles of flash cards in reviewing the topics. The cards they are able to answer immediately should be placed in a pile to review three days later; those answered with some difficulty should be placed in a pile to review two days later; and those that they answered incorrectly should be reviewed on the next day.

3. Self-quizzing
Even though quizzes have negative connotation on some students, it is beneficial to have a form of active retrieval practice. We should encourage students to make test questions for themselves on the new content they are learning, thinking about the types of questions the teacher might ask on a quiz or test. They should incorporate these questions into their study sessions, answering every question.

4. Interleaving practice
Most students are used to rely on blocked practice — studying a set of similar problems — as a group until they feel mastery. But a more effective method is to work in a set of problems that are related but not all the same kind. The consecutive problems cannot solved with the same strategy and will require switching of techniques. An example is to give problems those require addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. This is more effective than doing one multiplication problem after another.

5. Paraphrasing and reflecting
Many of us realise, after we read a few paragraphs in a textbook, we couldn’t retain a single concept or important point presented in those paragraphs. To combat this ineffective reading, we can use intentional learning strategies. We can relate what is being read to prior learning, think about how to rephrase so that it can be understood by someone younger and reflecting on and asking questions about the content.

References
Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel (2014). Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Belknap Press
Richland, L.E., Kornell, N., & Kao, S.L. (2009). The pretesting effect: Do unsuccessful retrieval attempts enhance learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3), 243-257.

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