Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

Author: Benedict Carey

Publication Name: The New York Times

Date of Publication: September, 2010

Summary:

Every year before school starts, parents try to turn their mushy brained video game playing children into book ready students. A variety of techniques are used to up their study habits such as, “Clear[ing] a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe."

Psychologists have found that many of the study habits that we depend on nowadays are wrong. Many people are lead to believe that by finding a nice, quiet, secluded corner in a library or study room will help them study better. However, research showed that it was just the opposite. In a 1978 experiment, psychologist found that college students that studied a list of forty vocabulary words in two different rooms did better on a test than another set of college students who studied the words twice in one room.

This happens is because the brain makes associations with the content a person is studying with the environment around them. By forcing the brain to associate the same material in a variety of environments, it gives the material more neural scaffolding.

It has also been shown that studying a many different subjects in one sitting, leaves a greater impression on the brain than studying one subject alone. “What we think is happening here is that, when the outside context is varied, the information is enriched, and this slows down forgetting,” said Dr. Bjork, one of the people that conducted the two room experiment.

There was also an experiment where a group of children were split into two groups, one group was given a repeated example of one problem and the other group was given mixed problem sets to study. The children with mixed problem sets did twice as well on a test than their counterparts.

Cognitive scientists do not deny though that good old cramming works. However, the brain does not retain the information and when a student is confronted with the information again. It is like seeing it for the first time again. Although we are confronted with a variety of study habits that we should adapt in the spirit of doing better an exam, adding variety to our study habits can certainly help us retain the information better.

Links to Study: N/A

Articles: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?ref=psychology_and_psychologists

Submitted by: Tina Nguyen