12.4.2: Learners

People bring numerous individual differences with them into memory experiments, and many of these variables affect learning. In the classroom, motivation matters (Pintrich, 2003), though experimental attempts to induce motivation with money yield only modest benefits (Heyer & O’Kelly, 1949). Learners are, however, quite able to allocate more effort to learning prioritized over unimportant materials (Castel, Benjamin, Craik, & Watkins, 2002).

In addition, the organization and planning skills that a learner exhibits matter a lot (Garavalia & Gredler, 2002), suggesting that the efficiency with which one organizes self-guided learning is an important component of learning. We will return to this topic soon.

Research attests that we can hold between 5 and 9 individual pieces of information in our working memory at once. This is partly why in the 1950s Bell Labs developed a 7-digit phone number system. [Image: Diamondmagna, https://goo.gl/xeUxfw, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://goo.gl/eLCn2O]

One well-studied and important variable is working memory capacity. Working memory describes the form of memory we use to hold onto information temporarily. Working memory is used, for example, to keep track of where we are in the course of a complicated math problem, and what the relevant outcomes of prior steps in that problem are. Higher scores on working memory measures are predictive of better reasoning skills (Kyllonen & Christal, 1990), reading comprehension (Daneman & Carpenter, 1980), and even better control of attention (Kane, Conway, Hambrick, & Engle, 2008).

Anxiety also affects the quality of learning. For example, people with math anxiety have a smaller capacity for remembering math-related information in working memory, such as the results of carrying a digit in arithmetic (Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001). Having students write about their specific anxiety seems to reduce the worry associated with tests and increases performance on math tests (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011).

One good place to end this discussion is to consider the role of expertise. Though there probably is a finite capacity on our ability to store information (Landauer, 1986), in practice, this concept is misleading. In fact, because the usual bottleneck to remembering something is our ability to access information, not our space to store it, having more knowledge or expertise actually enhances our ability to learn new information. A classic example can be seen in comparing a chess master with a chess novice on their ability to learn and remember the positions of pieces on a chessboard (Chase & Simon, 1973). In that experiment, the master remembered the location of many more pieces than the novice, even after only a very short glance. Maybe chess masters are just smarter than the average chess beginner, and have better memory? No: The advantage the expert exhibited only was apparent when the pieces were arranged in a plausible format for an ongoing chess game; when the pieces were placed randomly, both groups did equivalently poorly. Expertise allowed the master to chunk (Simon, 1974) multiple pieces into a smaller number of pieces of information—but only when that information was structured in such a way so as to allow the application of that expertise.

Encoding Activities

What we do when we’re learning is very important. We’ve all had the experience of reading something and suddenly coming to the realization that we don’t remember a single thing, even the sentence that we just read. How we go about encoding information determines a lot about how much we remember.

You might think that the most important thing is to try to learn. Interestingly, this is not true, at least not completely. Trying to learn a list of words, as compared to just evaluating each word for its part of speech (i.e., noun, verb, adjective) does help you recall the words—that is, it helps you remember and write down more of the words later. But it actually impairs your ability to recognize the words—to judge on a later list which words are the ones that you studied (Eagle & Leiter, 1964). So this is a case in which incidental learning—that is, learning without the intention to learn—is better than intentional learning.

Motivation to learn doesn't make much of a difference unless learners use effective strategies for encoding the information they want to retain. Although they're not flashy, methods like spaced practice, interleaving, and frequent testing are among the most effective ways to apply your efforts. [Image: Cali4beach, https://goo.gl/twjIVg, CC BY 2.0, https://goo.gl/BRvSA7]

Such examples are not particularly rare and are not limited to recognition. Nairne, Pandeirada, and Thompson (2008) showed, for example, that survival processing—thinking about and rating each word in a list for its relevance in a survival scenario—led to much higher recall than intentional learning (and also higher, in fact, than other encoding activities that are also known to lead to high levels of recall). Clearly, merely intending to learn something is not enough. How a learner actively processes the material plays a large role; for example, reading words and evaluating their meaning leads to better learning than reading them and evaluating the way that the words look or sound (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). These results suggest that individual differences in motivation will not have a large effect on learning unless learners also have accurate ideas about how to effectively learn material when they care to do so.

So, do learners know how to effectively encode material? People allowed to freely allocate their time to study a list of words do remember those words better than a group that doesn’t have control over their own study time, though the advantage is relatively small and is limited to the subset of learners who choose to spend more time on the more difficult material (Tullis & Benjamin, 2011). In addition, learners who have an opportunity to review materials that they select for restudy often learn more than another group that is asked to restudy the materials that they didn’t select for restudy (Kornell & Metcalfe, 2006). However, this advantage also appears to be relatively modest (Kimball, Smith, & Muntean, 2012) and wasn’t apparent in a group of older learners (Tullis & Benjamin, 2012). Taken together, all of the evidence seems to support the claim that self-control of learning can be effective, but only when learners have good ideas about what an effective learning strategy is.

One factor that appears to have a big effect and that learners do not always appear to understand is the effect of scheduling repetitions of study. If you are studying for a final exam next week and plan to spend a total of five hours, what is the best way to distribute your study? The evidence is clear that spacing one’s repetitions apart in time is superior than massing them all together (Baddeley & Longman, 1978; Bahrick, Bahrick, Bahrick, & Bahrick, 1993; Melton, 1967). Increasing the spacing between consecutive presentations appears to benefit learning yet further (Landauer & Bjork, 1978).

A similar advantage is evident for the practice of interleaving multiple skills to be learned: For example, baseball batters improved more when they faced a mix of different types of pitches than when they faced the same pitches blocked by type (Hall, Domingues, & Cavazos, 1994). Students also showed better performance on a test when different types of mathematics problems were interleaved rather than blocked during learning (Taylor & Rohrer, 2010).

One final factor that merits discussion is the role of testing. Educators and students often think about testing as a way of assessing knowledge, and this is indeed an important use of tests. But tests themselves affect memory, because retrieval is one of the most powerful ways of enhancing learning (Roediger & Butler, 2013). Self-testing is an underutilized and potent means of making learning more durable.

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Factors Influencing Learning by Aaron Benjamin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.