…teaching students how to learn is as important as teaching them content, because acquiring both the right learning strategies and background knowledge is important- if not essential – for promoting lifelong learning.

– Strengthening the Student Toolbox, Study Strategies to Boost Learning

The purpose of perception is to allow patterns to form and then to use them.

– Edward De Bono’s Thinking Course

There are certain practices which conscientious students are often observed doing in classes and during revision. These include highlighting or underlining what they believe are keywords in a sentence or question, copying corrections, doing several worksheets on the same component and to a lesser extent in the case of the primary school English classroom, taking down notes.

These are effortful or at least time consuming and they do foster a sense of security – I am being a responsible student; one who does what is necessary even if it is dull and repetitive. Do these practices translate to richer learning or higher scores?

In an article for the American Educator, John Dunlosky, a Professor of Psychology who has been described as “one of the foremost pioneers of cognitive science” at the World Education Summit, discusses ten learning strategies, their efficacy and efficiency.

He suggests that while students know what to learn, they may not know how to go about learning it and that more time can be devoted to study strategies in schools. Strategies are in essence ways to achieve objectives. Different subjects and different papers within subjects would require different strategies.

For example, a content heavy subject like Science would require content mastery and students may need strategies for remembering and applying concepts to different scenarios presented to them.

The English Language curriculum in essence aims to develop students to become better speakers, writers, listeners and readers. Speaking, writing, listening and reading are skills. Skill acquisition requires strategies different from content acquisition strategies.

It may be useful to discuss some of the strategies reviewed by Professor Dunlosky and his colleagues in the context of skill acquisition for the purposes of the English exam. Before we proceed, it is important to note that there are unlikely to be strategies which are always very effective for all students for all requirements. Self-awareness and awareness of requirements will be important in strategy selection.

The ten strategies are

• Practice testing
• Distributed practice
• Interleaved practice
• Elaborative interrogation
• Self-explanation
• Re-reading
• Highlighting and Underlining
• Summarization
• Keyword Mnemonic
• Imagery for Text

According to Professor Dunlosky, Practice Testing and Distributed Practice are “the most effective” because they “can enhance learning of a variety of materials, and most important boost student achievement”.  Interleaved Practice, Elaborative interrogation, self-explanation and re-reading have been described as strategies with “much promise” because the researchers “wanted to see additional research on how broadly they improve student learning”. The remaining four strategies have been described as less useful strategies “which students use a lot”.

We will now relate these strategies to student practices in the English classroom and English learning.

Students do highlight or underline keywords and phrases. Professor Dunlosky calls this practice a “security blanket” and points to evidence that “highlighting has been shown to have failed to help students of all sorts, including Air Force trainees, children and undergraduate students”. This may be true if the student highlights when revising content.

While highlighting may be distracting, underlining has been a recommended practice in the language classroom particularly in relation to novel vocabulary in texts. While the usefulness of underlining key words in MCQs is unclear, there is good reason to underline novel vocabulary. This helps students first recognise and accept that they do not know the meaning of a word which would add to or determine the overall meaning of a sentence. Secondly it serves as a marker of words which need to be decoded before questions are attempted.

Students are often seen to be copying corrections. This in itself may not yield the most benefit when it comes to learning from mistakes. The most important thing to do is not corrections but to ask why the given answer has been marked wrong. It is as important for students to ask why they got it wrong and how they can get that or questions like that right the next time. All of these things which yield the most benefit are also very time consuming because they require deep reflection. Arguably, the purpose of copying corrections is so that students can get on with the current lesson. Corrections are copied on the assumption that they would return to it for reflection.

Professor Dunlosky contrasts distributed practice with mass practice. If a student practises five close passages consecutively in a short duration of time, be it within one day or over several days, it is mass practice. Distributed practice is to practise on one day and then return to the same component after some time has passed. In between practices, other components can be attempted.

When it comes to skill acquisition, the practice, immediate feedback and adjusted practice loop is crucial. This would require several rounds of intense practice. Mass practice is therefore necessary for skill acquisition. Once the skills have been acquired, the student can then switch to distributed practice which ensures learning is retained for a longer period of time.

Interleaved practice refers to practising several components in the same study session. This would be useful when the student has already acquired the necessary component specific strategies.

The other strategies which have been described as having much promise – re-reading, self-explanation and elaborative interrogation are in fact very crucial for English comprehension exercises.

Re-reading is self-explanatory though students need to know when to re-read. Self-explanation is what is known as re-telling in the English classroom and as the Rubber Duck method elsewhere. Elaborative interrogation in the context of English comprehension exercises in any format, is when students ask themselves questions about the text, to make sense of it. During annotation, students are actually engaged in elaborative interrogation.

Though imagery for text has been described as not very useful, it is in fact very useful when it comes to comprehension of words, phrases, sentences and passages. In fact, there are discussions on whether we comprehend language in written and spoken forms only after processing them into images in our mind.

Professor Dunlosky rounds up his informative article by reminding readers that “Even the best strategies will only be effective if students are motivated to use them correctly” and it goes without saying, if they are used at all.

The beginning of stronger performance is wanting to learn or do better. This must come with the belief that with the right type of effort, performance can indeed be better. The student must acknowledge the need for effort. The student then needs an awareness of gaps between targets and current performance and the specific strategies which must be employed in a disciplined way, consistently.

Strategies are planned routes to the summit and not Open Sesames uttered before caves.

The climb must be highlighted.

The Brain Dojo