The Disadvantages Of Overlearning

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At the start of school, students prepare for learning and gain knowledge in various subjects. They learn math, history, sciences, reading, writing, and other subjects when they start a new year from preschool to college. In addition, students learn what they need in order to learn about their world, preparing to go to the world with the wisdom from teachers to do their dream job. However, learning can become difficult when the students have to retain the knowledge from a given topic in order to pass a quiz, test, or exam. If students gain too much information to process in one sitting, could overlearning be a benefit or a burden for students? How much studying should they do and can they retain knowledge in time for the exam? My theory is to …show more content…

Even though overlearning boosts test scores more than adequate learning, it sharply decline over time (184). The problem with overlearning is that students cannot process on what they learned last week compared to the upcoming week. For example, if a reading teacher tells a student to read the entire book of The Hobbit in a week, some students cannot retain what they learned from the book. As a result, they do poorly on quizzes, cannot participate in class discussion, or create a paper on the reading. When a student retain more knowledge than he can handle in one week, he loses most of the information in the future, resulting in poor performance scores. In contrast to benefits of overlearning, students cannot retain information for the test if the teacher overloads the information in one …show more content…

According to Rohrer and Pashler (2008), spacing in learning means to break down material where a student finds it easier to learn. They used the example of vocabulary words; for spacing, students learn when they have a set of vocabulary words for one week and another set in another. Let’s say they learn 15 vocabulary words each week. In a week, they will learn how to spell the words, to read the words aloud, and to write the words in a sentence. In order to learn these vocabulary words, they need to use strategy of chunking where they learn 3 or 5 words at a time in order to recall what each word means (Cervone, 2014). As a result, they will understand them 15 words in a week rather than overloading more than 15. The numbers can go different amounts; however, the main goal is not to overload them with too many words, which may result in forgetting it all together. The main goal is to how to help students study better to remember the information from what they learned before an exam.
The reality is that students have different ways of studying. One way is rehearsing. Students use flashcards to remember important vocabulary words. In addition, the Quizlet website supply different ways, such as matching words with the definition or quiz themselves. Rehearsing also ties into another way of studying: memorizing what they

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