ACTIVITIES AND ASSESSMENTS

PRE-ASSESSMENTS

At the beginning of Attention Matters!, students completed two pre-assessments. These served a dual purpose, first to encourage students to reflect on what they believe to be true about retention, as well as how they handle multitasking in classes, work situations, and social settings. Second, they allowed for assessment of impacts and data gathering related to the project. These two assessments, each involving twenty closed-ended questions, are described in more detail elsewhere (Miller, Doherty, Butler, & Coull, 2017). The first, which we call the Counterproductive Beliefs Survey, probed to what extent students accepted ideas such as the belief that they could learn by osmosis, or that they personally had an exceptional ability to multitask. The second, the which we call the Multitasking Behaviors Inventory, was a self-report survey probing how often participants engage in behaviors such

as doing non-class related emails during classes, texting while at work, or gaming non-socially in a social setting.

DISCUSSIONS

Each unit culminated in a discussion forum in which students were asked to comment and reflect on the activities in the unit, with particular attention to whether they were surprised by their performance. For the third unit, students were asked to discuss actions they would take to help themselves resist distractions during classes and study sessions, or other related goals such as avoiding texting while driving. Our intent was to take advantage of the

hypocrisy effect (Festinger, 1957; Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow, & Fried, 1994), encouraging students to commit in a public way to what they would do to better manage attention in the future. The discussions were also intended to encourage students to share ideas with peers and offer encouragement for putting plans into practice. Lastly, we specifically invited students to consider the case in which they were being distracted by other people (e.g., classmates who are watching videos on easily visible laptop screens), with the goal of uncovering ideas about how they might navigate such a potentially awkward social situation.

QUIZZES

Each unit also included a brief, ten-question multiple-choice quiz. Scores were displayed immediately after the quiz, with feedback about wrong answers.

CLOSING REFLECTION

At the end of Attention Matters!, students completed a brief open-ended self reflection about how they would apply the material going forward.

Our smartphones, smart watches, and other mobile devices provide us with a growing number of convenient distractions that can interfere with our productivity and learning. In this episode, Dr. Michelle Miller joins us to discuss one approach to help students better understand how to focus their attention.

Given the problems inherent in using personal experience to discover optimal learning strategies and given the lack of systematic training of effective strategies in the educational system, it is not surprising that students at all levels often develop and use ineffective learning strategies. At first blush, it might seem that training students to use more effective learning strategies is a simple matter of exposing them to the strategies and how to use them (i.e., the knowledge component). Extensive research in the education and psychology literatures, however, suggests that a multidimensional approach may be needed to maximize the likelihood that students embrace the trained strategies and apply them to their learning challenges. Our KBCP framework proposes four components, knowledge, belief, commitment, and planning, that we believe are important for changing behavior and getting students to use new and powerful strategies in a self-regulated manner.

Students may base their assessments of their learning and comprehension on fluency even though their current processing fluency with the text right in front of them, is not diagnostic of their future retention. Our survey results show that the illusions students experience during learning may have important consequences and implications for the decisions they make and the strategies they choose when studying on their own.

Students generally exhibit little awareness of the fact that practising retrieval enhances learning. A clear practical implication is that instructors should inform students about the benefits of self-testing and explain why testing enhances learning. When students rely purely on their subjective experience while they study (e.g., their fluency of processing during rereading) they may fall prey to illusions of competence and believe they know the material better than they actually do. A challenge for instructional practice is to encourage students to base their study strategies on theories about why a particular strategy—like practising repeated retrieval—promotes learning and long-term retention.

Our results revealed that, relative to the business-as-usual instruction about learning that occurred in other sections of Introduction to Psychology, the intervention increased students’ understanding of and beliefs about the effectiveness of various learning strategies reasonably broadly. However, the intervention only broadly shifted their behaviors for ineffective strategies (i.e., there was a significant reduction in the use of ineffective learning strategies), not for effective strategies (i.e., there was not a significant increase in the use of effective learning strategies). While the pattern observed for the ineffective learning strategies is certainly a positive outcome, the pattern seen for the effective learning strategies (i.e., shifts in knowledge, but not in behaviors) is less so. This latter pattern is consistent with many previous studies which have shown that students’ knowledge and actions often conflict (Dembo & Seli, 2004; Foerst et al., 2017) and that shifting learning behaviors is a difficult endeavor (Ariel & Karpicke, 2018; Brown-Kramer, 2021, 2022; DeWinstanley & Bjork, 2004; Gurung & Burns, 2019; Koriat & Bjork, 2006).

One explanation as to why there was not a change in behaviors surrounding effective learning strategies, despite an increase in knowledge about those strategies, comes from metacognitive theories of desirable difficulties (Bjork, 1994). Research examining how students monitor their learning has shown that students typically prefer less effortful learning strategies (Koriat & Bjork, 2006) rather than utilizing more effortful learning strategies that would produce long-lasting learning improvement (i.e., they’d prefer to not do the more “difficult” type of learning even if it is “desirable” for learning). It is thus possible that participants felt that shifting their behaviors to align with more effective strategies was simply more effort than they were willing to put in (and more effort than reducing their use of ineffective strategies). Indeed, there are many cases in the behavioral sciences where individuals are taught best practices in behavior but then do not go on to utilize those practices going forward (e.g., with respect to healthy eating, regular exercise) (e.g., Thomson & Ravia, 2011 see for review Hillsdon, 2005; Norman, 2007; Williams, & French, 2011). For example, people may know that they need to start working out, but they may not follow through due to the effort and discomfort associated with it. This isparticularly common in cases where the best practice behaviors feel effortful or difficult, which can be true of many of the most effective studying practices.

A second possible reason why students did not increase their use of effective learning strategies is that they did not fully understand how these strategies were impacting their performance through their experience. McDaniel et al. (2021) proposed that students should not only understand the effectiveness of learning strategies but should also be committed implementing strategies into their learning, which involves recognizing the value of these strategies in improving their academic performance. However, even if effective learning strategies were integrated into the students’ regular coursework, there was no way to provide the students with a “counterfactual” example. That is, students did not know how their learning would have progressed in the absence of the intervention. Second, the impact of the learning strategies was (necessarily) significantly temporally delayed (i.e., the evidence of better learning came well after the effort was put in). It is therefore possible that the students may not have understood how the effective learning strategies impacted their progress. Students may have understood that such strategies are globally “good,” but may not have seen enough evidence with respect to themselves to motivate a switch in behavior.

A third possible explanation for why we failed to see an overall increase in the use of effective strategies might be the content of the various sections. There were clear gradations with respect to how the intervention section covered what we considered here to be “effective strategies.” Therefore, while there may be explanations for change in global behaviors, we recognize the need to address the specific factors that influence the adoption of individual strategies. For instance, the intervention section heavily covered the value of active learning (e.g., practice testing). Consistent with this, we saw significant increases in both knowledge and behavior regarding active learning strategies (e.g., testing). This might suggest that individuals need more exposure to and practice with these effective strategies before they can effectively incorporate them into their routines.

Digital devices did not create the challenge of cultivating student attention in support of these kinds of life-altering learning experiences. We have been sidetracked in recent years by assertive voices who lay the entire blame for our distractible natures at the feet of our laptops and phones. But to place the blame exclusively there only works if you ignore the architectural features of our brain that make us prone to distraction, or the long history of humans complaining about the distractibility of their minds. Although we have more distractions today than we had in the past—and more powerful distractions in the form of our digital devices—teachers have always wrestled with the challenge of capturing and sustaining student attention in support of their learning. To overcome that challenge, we need to turn our heads away from distraction and toward attention. Our challenge is not to wall off distractions; our challenge is to cultivate attention, and help students use it in the service of meaningful learning.

This book emerges from my convictions about the essential role of attention to education. It offers many recommendations for how to make attention a priority in your classroom, from the building of community and the design of your course to the structuring of your class period and the development of creative new teaching strategies. I hope that you will find in here a new understanding of the role that attention can play in student learning, new tools for cultivating the attention of your students, and fresh enthusiasm for the task.

If you want to know the best way to learn, this book is for you.

Study Like a Champ provides you with the answer to the oft-asked question “What can I do to get an A?” We take years of psychological research on how learning works and what strategies best help one learn, and we translate the results into easy-to-understand, pragmatic—and, most important—easy-to-follow tips. But that’s not all.

We have watched and listened as our students have tried to study better. We have seen students read other books on how to study yet still not improve. Part of the reason why is that it is easy for scientists and instructors to tell you what to do, but it is a whole other thing to actually be able to do it. So, we looked for reasons why students have trouble following guidance on how to study and have come up with some hacks to help. We also show you evidence to support our recommendations. We want you to know what to do and why to do it.

Furthermore, we show you which strategies work best for learning different kinds of material. Not every class is the same. What it takes to do well in an introductory psychology class may not be the same as what it takes to do well in a computer science class. We have your back.

This guide was written by expert psychology teachers who also conduct the very research on which the tips are based. You are in good hands. Collectively, we have published more than 200 research articles on the very material we share with you. We invite you behind the curtain so you can see the secrets of research conducted both in laboratories as well as in classrooms. However, although we are well versed in writing for peer-reviewed research journals, we wrote this book for you, dear student, not for academic researchers. This book is designed to be useful for every college student who wants to know how to learn well.