John Dunlosky Summary

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In John Dunlosky’s article, he discusses what he has found to be some of the most effective, and least effective, studying techniques for learning and retention of material. In the article, he reviews the effectiveness of ten different study strategies and discusses how effective and applicable they are. Dunlosky first discusses the strategies which he found to be the most effective. The first of these strategies is practice testing, which involves students quizzing themselves over information as a review before taking a real exam. Practice testing was found to help boost long term memory more than simply reviewing or rereading the most important points of the material. Students should be encouraged by their teachers to write notes in a …show more content…

This technique involves students distributing the practice for one type of problem across a period of time. Distributed practice has been found to show significant benefits over massed practice, which is when students practice one type of problem until they feel they have learned it sufficiently before moving on to the next type of problem. Distributed practice makes the learning itself feel more difficult because the student is practicing all different types of problems, but it allows the student to retain the information for longer versus massed practice. Students should also distribute practice over multiple sessions. This can be difficult for many students because they may only begin to study the night before the exam, and at that point their only option is cramming. In order to distribute practice over time, students should set aside blocks of time throughout the week several evenings before the exam. Studying for a briefer period of time several different times is more effective than studying all night the night before the exam. Teachers can help students to employ distributed practice by helping them to map out their study sessions throughout the week and what they should practice each session. By using distributed practice along with practice tests, students will find that they can master and remember materials more …show more content…

The first one of these strategies is called interleaved practice. Interleaved practice is similar to distributed practice, but it specifically involves practicing different types of problems over time. Interleaved practice is more helpful than massed practice, although students may favor massed practice because they will become more fluent with the type of problem that they are working with, but interleaved practice will force the student to think about what type of problem they are working with and how to solve it. Interleaved practice has not been studied as much as the first two strategies discussed, but initial research outcomes have shown positive results. The next of the learning strategies that showed promise is elaborative interrogation and self-explanation. Elaborative interrogation is when a student attempts to explain why a fact is true. Similarly, self-explanation is when a student attempts to relate new information to something they already know. These strategies can be effective because they encourage students to actively process the information they are learning in order to rationalize it. However, these strategies have not been studied enough to be categorized as highly effective

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