Thanks very much for clarifying these issues, Claudia.
MIguel ----- Original Message ----- From: "Claudia Stanny" <[email protected]> To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 6, 2010 11:04:16 PM Subject: Re: [tips] Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Claudia Stanny" <[email protected]> To: "Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, September 6, 2010 11:04:16 PM Subject: Re: [tips] Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com Encoding specificity doesn't really refer to the effect of environmental context cues, although the phenomena are related. Cues from context (like studying in the same room) are weak relative to associations developed between meaning of cues and information to be retrieved. So studying in the same physical environment is good for short-term retrieval of weakly-learned material. When other associations work for the retrieval and these are strong, the effects of these stronger retrieval cues overshadow contextual cues. Contextual effects fade as the strength of overall learning increases. Encoding specificity (a la Tulving and Thompson) is related to the specificity of retrieval cues learned at the time of study and those available at the time of test. These could be context cues, but Tulving and Thompson focused on cues related to the material learned and the specificity refers to the encoding of these associations. Tulving and Thompson had students learn words in the context of weak associates as study cues (e.g., HEAD - LIGHT). When HEAD is presented as the cue during test, retrieval was usually successful. If a different weak associate was presented as the cue (e.g., NIGHT), the cue was ineffective. They got this effect when either weak associate was used as the studied cue (half studied with HEAD, half with NIGHT). When a strong associate is presented as a free association cue (e.g., DARK), students produce LIGHT as a free associate response, but frequently fail to recognize this as a to-be-remembered word connected to one of the weak associates. (A weird example of a recognition test producing worse performance than a retrieval task.) This phenomenon supports the advice that students should anticipate the types of questions (and types of retrieval cues) they will get during testing and explicitly encode the material with those retrieval cues when they study. A related phenomenon to this discussion is the fan effect (many studies by John Anderson). The fan effect describes the way in which excitation for retrieval is distributed among the many associations to a retrieval cue. The larger the fan (the more items associated with the cue), the slower the speed of activation and the weaker the activation of any one item. The more items associated with a single cue, the less effective that cue will be in retrieving any one item. However, in a semantic network in which items are widely interconnected, this effect is minimized. That is, if an item serves as a retrieval cue for many items, the negative effect of the fan effect is offset by the fact that to-be-retrieved items are associated with many potential retrieval cues. Thus, any learning that increases the number of potential retrieval cues that might successfully activate the to-be-remembered item will lead to more successful recall. This is why experts retrieve knowledge in their domain of expertise quickly and successfully rather than get mired in fan effects: Their semantic networks are highly structured and interconnected, enabling retrieval through a variety of routes and using various retrieval cues. This highly redundant and interconnected associative network can emerge from distributed study times, study in a variety of contexts, connecting new learning to other known material, etc. All good study strategies, but effortful. The problem for education is that we frequently test students only after short retention intervals. In many cases, strategies that produce good long-term retention don't look as good as the short-term strategies in an immediate test - the benefits of these "better" strategies only appear in experiments in which students are tested after a delay (e.g., two weeks after the study session). Given the way we test, students who use strategies that enhance short-term retention at the cost of long-term retention (cramming, relying on cues in a single environmental context) get reinforced for using these strategies instead of strategies that produce deeper, long-term retention but take more effort and might not produce results as good as cramming in a short term test. Claudia J. Stanny, Ph.D. Director Center for University Teaching, Learning, and Assessment Associate Professor School of Psychological and Behavioral Sciences University of West Florida 11000 University Parkway Pensacola, FL 32514 – 5751 Phone: (850) 857-6355 or 473-7435 [email protected] CUTLA Web Site: http://uwf.edu/cutla/ Personal Web Pages: http://uwf.edu/cstanny/website/index.htm On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 6:53 PM, < [email protected] > wrote: I don't see problem. Yes, encoding specificity works, but will not lead to very strong retention. Varying the situation and type of rehearsal can, perhaps, promote geater chance of encoding cues promoting retention in diverse retrieval situations....and maybe even exams employing diverse types of questions. Just a thought. Gary GPeterson SVSU Gary's iPad On Sep 6, 2010, at 7:40 PM, Annette Taylor < [email protected] > wrote: Does anyone know what is the 1978 studied referred to in this article that suggests that it is better to change study locations. I have forever seen evidence that it IS indeed better to study in one place and have one place set aside for studying. My students have replicated, endlessly, the Tulving and Thomson studies on encoding specificity with students who study and test in the same place outperforming those who study and in different places; and those who study in one place and imagine themselves in that place while testing in a different place. So, this seems to beg for a new study: students who study in multiple places and then test in a new place versus those who study in only place and imagine themselves in that place when taking the test in a new place. Annette Annette Kujawski Taylor, Ph. D. Professor, Psychological Sciences University of San Diego 5998 Alcala Park San Diego, CA 92110 [email protected] From: Christopher D. Green [ [email protected] ] Sent: Monday, September 06, 2010 2:26 PM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Subject: [tips] Mind - Research Upends Traditional Thinking on Study Habits - NYTimes.com The New York Times looks at strategies for effective studying (and takes down "learning styles" along the way). http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/health/views/07mind.html?hp Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected] . 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