Learning Hack #2: Make Learning Harder For Yourself

This post is part of a series about how to apply principles of cognitive science to teaching and learning. It’s grounded in a story about a student (here called Kyra) who inspired me to change my teaching. Read more about Kyra in My Three Biggest Teaching Mistakes. The other posts in this series can be found at Learning Hack #1: Learning is NOT data entry; it’s more like knot-tying and Learning Hack #3: Humans are terrible judges of their learning. (This means you). And if you’d like, you can also skip right to my suggestions for how to implement this principle.

It Can’t be Taught; It Has to be Caught

Ironically, one of the reasons that Kyra and I failed was that I made things too easy for her. In my efforts to help Kyra, I tried to make learning as simple and straightforward as I could. In doing so, I’d taken the active role. I was doing the explaining. I was asking the questions. I was directing the conversation. I was evaluating the answers as right or wrong. In my filing cabinet way of thinking, this made sense. After all, I was the one who had the files. Shouldn’t I be the one passing them on? But by doing this, I actually decreased her chances of learning.

Filing is a passive process for the filing cabinet. All you really need to do is drop a paper in the right place. But learning is more like making a net by hand, and that’s hard. You have to tie hundreds or thousands of knots.

There’s an old expression that’s been used for learning topics from jazz to science to animal tracking, “It can’t be taught, it has to be caught.” In other words, the person who is doing the mental work in a situation, is the one learning. If you’re sitting back and “taking it all in,” then that isn’t you. No one can tie things into your memory net for you. What this means is that you’re not really trying to “take in” ideas at all. You are trying to recreate them. To learn something, anything, you have to build it all over again in your own mind.

Desirable Difficulty in Learning

The world is full of empty promises that learning can be easy. “Learn German in a weekend.” “Science should be fun.” “With our podcast, just listen and learn.” But the difficult truth is that learning must be difficult. Tying knots in your memory net is work. And if you take the cognitive work out of learning, you might feel like you’re learning, but you probably aren’t. Learning scientists call this desirable difficulty—when we make learning more difficult, we increase our likelihood of remembering.

Unfortunately, most of us avoid this work because . . . well . . . it’s work. It turns out that the most common study strategies, the things that people do when they’re trying to learn, are among the least effective:  we reread, we highlight, we copy notes from the board, we listen to someone else explain something—especially if that explanation is entertaining and clear. All of these activities feel like learning, even though we may not be learning much at all.

So What Do We Do?

So what do we do—try to learn while playing distracting music? Make the font hard to read? Read in a language we don’t speak fluently? Certainly not all difficulties are useful. (Though there is evidence that even things like this do actually increase our likelihood to learn.) But we’re not just trying to do more work, we trying to work harder at making sense of the things we want to understand.

Here are five strategies to make your learning more active.

1. Test Yourself: Break out the flash cards. Struggling to remember is one of the surest ways to help you remember. Don’t save tests for the end of a unit or lesson. The real value of tests is not as an evaluation tool. Their real value is as a learning tool. Tests are how you learn it in the first place because they force you to recall things.
2. Summarize: Close the book. Sum up the key point of what you’ve read in a single sentence. Figure out exactly how many steps there are to your task and give each step a name. Capture the fundamental principle in haiku or rhyming couplets. The form doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are recreating the ideas in your own mind.  
3. Ask Questions: This is one of the fundamental differences between students who struggle to learn and those who find it easier. Students who seem to “pick things up quickly” are always asking themselves questions. Often it’s become such a habit for them, that they don’t realize they’re doing it. But even if you don’t already have this habit, you can train yourself to do it.
4. Teach Someone: Trying to explain something simply to someone else is one of the best ways to learn something yourself. Teach a younger sibling. This is especially good when the material is really complicated. Force yourself to explain Newton’s Third Law in terms that a fifth grader could understand. This will make you tie all kinds of knots in your memory net.  
5. Write the Caption/Illustrate the Text: Based on an idea in learning science called dual coding theory, this works well for learning things from a well-illustrated textbook. Pick a figure or illustration and, without looking at the captions or the text, write a few lines interpreting the picture. If your textbook isn’t well illustrated, try it the other way around and create your own illustrations of what the authors are trying to describe. Play videos on the topic you’d like to study with the sound off and pretend you’re the narrator.