Computer Slide Shows. A Trap for Bad Teaching

Teachers at all grade levels are increasingly using computer slide shows (like MS PowerPoint shows) to present information. Such slide shows are also common in corporate and government briefings. Such slide shows typically violate many of the principles for good remembering. In this article, published in the education journal, College Teaching, I explain what slide shows typically do wrong and suggest ways to make the content of slide shows more memorable. Click here to read.

What Good Is Learning If You Don't Remember It

I had a paper published in Journal of Effective Teaching that I hope teachers will take a look at. It can be found on-line by clicking here.

Here is the abstract:

Teachers should emphasize the educational importance of understanding, but not at the expense of overlooking the importance of memorization skills. Currently, mainstream educational theory embraces such attributes as insight, creativity, inquiry learning, and self expression. But such emphases lead to a bias and under-appreciation of the role of memory in learning. Students cannot apply what they understand if they don’t remember it. Moreover, a good memory expands the repertoire of cognitive capabilities upon which new understandings can be developed and expedited. Effective thinking does not occur in a vacuum. I advocate adding another “R” to the “three Rs”: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and Remembering. This paper attempts to show teachers how they can help students become better learners — and better thinkers — by improving their memorization skills.

Please comment.

Seven Tips for Learning from Lectures:

In this post I list seven tips you can use when trying to remember the contents of a seminar or lecture. These tips are especially useful for students. Forty-three years of college teaching have made it clear that most students don't get as much out of lectures as they should (and it is not just because of my lectures). When I was a student, I wanted to learn efficiently, so I could have more play time. I soon discovered that everything I could learn in class was something I did not have to study later.

The basis for these tips comes from my book on improving memory and from the posts in this blog. Obviously, I can't review all that here. Take my word for it, these tips work. Please comment to tell me what you have learned about learning effectiveness and efficiency during lectures.

The Tips:

1. Come with the right attitude. Be pumped up. Plan to retain as much understanding and information as possible. As long as you are spending your time in class, you might as well get out of it all you can. Don't be willing to put off the learning until later study time.

2. Do at least a little pre-lecture preparation. Skim text or other sources that deal with the topic of the day. If lectures are inter-related, briefly review previous notes of lectures that this current lecture will build on.

3. Don't take many notes. Take notes only for organizing ideas and for things you don't already know or could figure out. Use a tape recorder if you worry about missing something.

4. Make notes with multiple visual and spatial cues. Use lots of drawings and diagrams.

5. If allowed, ask questions of the teacher. This helps to keep you alert and engaged. Remember the answer. If you have asked good questions, they are liable to show up on quizzes (teachers like to quiz on ideas that come up in class that are not in the book or handouts - its a reward for those who attend and pay attention).

6. THINK about what is being said by the teacher. How does this build on what has been presented in the course earlier? What issues are not getting addressed by this lecture? What is most likely to show up on a quiz? What will take special effort to remember? How can you use this information, either later in this course or in another course?

7. After the lecture:

a. Don't do anything for the next 10 minutes. Without interruption, review what has just transpired, first by looking at your notes, then trying to recall without lookng.

b. Re-work your notes and drawings if they need it.

c. Assuming your handwriting is readable, keep the longhand version of your notes. See in your mind's eye the spatial layout of the notes; recall it as you would a photograph. Cursive handwriting and the hand drawings provide many visual and spatial cues that will facilitate
memory.

d. Come back later that same day for another rehearsal of what transpired in class, first by looking at your notes, then by not looking at them. Vocalize your notes; hearing the information will reinforce the retention especially for auditory learners. Repeat this review in each of the next several days.

Aerobic Exercises Increases Brain Volume in Elderly

As you get older, you will probably at some point start to worry about staying on top of your mental game. Will you get senile? Will you get Alzheimer's? These frightening questions may have a hopeful answer if you live a healthy lifestyle and get plenty of aerobic exercise.

A recent study by Arthur Kramer and colleagues at the University of Illinois used MRI brain scans to evaluate the effects of exercise in aged humans on parts of the brain that are most involved in age-related decline. They studied 59 healthy but sedentary volunteers, aged 60-79, during a 6-month exercise period. Half of the subjects participated in aerobic exercise, and the other half did toning and stretching exercises. Twenty young adults who did no exercise served as a control group. A before-and-after comparison of MRI images revealed that the aerobic group developed more brain volume, both in white- and grey-matter areas. These improvements did not occur in the young subjects nor in the older ones who did only muscle-toning exercise.

While memory as such was not tested, it is highly likely that increased brain volume could only help memory function.

Source: Colcombe, S. J. et al. 2006. Aerobic exercise training increases brain volume in aging humans. The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and medical Sciences. 61: 1166-1170.

Need to Learn Something Quickly? Try a Nap

Daytime naps are said to rejuvenate energy and lower stress. Now there is evidence that naps speed up consolidation of memories. Maria Korman and her group at the University of Haifa evaluated consolidation of a procedural memory task of learning to bring the thumb and finger together in a specific sequence. Half of the subjects were allowed to take an afternoon 90-min nap after training, while the other group stayed awake. The group that napped showed a distinct improvement in task performance when tested that evening. After a night's sleep, both groups showed the same improvement in acquired skill. So, it would appear that the nap just speeded up the consolidation process, rather than improving on the improvement that a regular night's sleep can produce.

The role of napping on interference effects was also tested. We know from numerous studies that consolidation of new learning is easily disrupted by distracting or other new learning experiences. In this experiment, another group of subjects learned a different thumb-to-finger movement sequence two hours after practicing the first task. Learning a second task right after the first was expected to interfere with learning of the first task. This proved to be the case; there was no improvement in performance of the first task either that evening or the next day after a normal night's sleep. However, based on the findings of the first experiment where a nap speeded up consolidation, the experimenters created yet another group of subjects that were allowed a 90-min nap between learning the first movement task and the second movement task. In this case, performance on the first task was improved when they were tested the next day after a normal night's sleep. Thus, the nap actually prevented the otherwise memory disrupting effect of a second learning task, presumably because the nap speeded up memory consolidation of the initial learning so that it was resistant to interference effects.

There are practical implications here, at least for procedural memories. This study indicates that if you need to learn a "how to" kind of task quickly, you should take a nap just afterward. One perhaps trivial illustration might be for football coaches who introduce some new training in the morning of a game to be played later that evening. After the morning workout, they should let the players take a nap that afternoon. Or for "two-a-days" workouts in the summer, maybe players need a nap between sessions, not just to rest but to consolidate the training.

Source: Korman, M. et al. 2007. Daytime sleep condenses the time course of motor memory consolidation. Nature Neuroscience. 10 (9): 1206-1213.

Learning to Pay Attention

One of the things that sets professionals apart from amateurs is their ability to focus on their area of expertise. I mean that literally. For example, recent brain imaging studies of 20 non-musicians and 20 musical conductors showed that the brains of both groups diverted activity from visual areas of brain during listening tasks. Activity rose in auditory areas of brain as it fell in visual areas. But during the harder tasks, brain activity changes were less marked in the conductors. The conventional interpretation is that when the brain focuses, it becomes more active in the areas that are processing the subject of the focus. In well-trained subjects, such as conductors in this case, their brain doesn't have to work so hard to pay attention to music, so there is less need for the brain to be more active in the auditory areas. So what this suggests is that ability to focus is a learned capability that derives from an actual lasting change in brain.

In the experiment, subjects during the scan were asked to listen to two different musical tones palyed a few thousandths of a second apart and identify which was played first. The task was made harder for the conductors, to allow for the differences from non-musicians. During the task, brain activity increased in the auditory areas, while it decreased in visual areas. In other words, the brain seems to allocate processing resources to the part of the brain that needs it the most. As the task was made harder, non-musicians diverted more and more activity to the auditory region as they struggled to concentrate.

The leader of the study, Jonathan Burdette, said "This is like closing your eyes when you listen to music." That is, you can pay attention to the music better when you brain is not being distracted by visual stimuli. He went on to make this analogy: "Imagine the difference bewtween listening to someone talk in a quiet room and that same discussion in a noisy room - you don't see as much of what's going on in the noisy room."

Three conclusions for improving everyday memory come to my mind:

1. The more knowledgeable you become in a certain area, the easier it is to pay attention to salient information. That is, the more you know, the more you can know.This is a different twist on the old saying, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."

2. Focus, and the attendant remembering that focus enables, is affected by distracting stimuli. If you are trying to learn visual information (graphics or text), a noisy background of music will make remembering worse because your brain can't focus its resources where it belongs.

3. The more you know, the more you can know.


Source: Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center (2007, November 6). Listen Up, Tune Out: Training And Experience Can Affect Brain

Role of Memory in PTSD and Other Anxiety Disorders

You don't have to be a combat soldier to develop anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Any bad experience in ordinary daily living is a learning experience that can be remembered for a long time. Such learning has associated with it unpleasant emotional responses.Much of this maladaptive learning is conditioned. That is, sensory cues, sometimes not even recognized consciously, trigger recall of disturbing memories or even just the negative emotions that went with the bad event.

As I explained in my book's section on memory consolidation, the original learning could have been disrupted by other, non-threatening events and distractions. Unfortunately, bad experiences typically get rehearsed extensively immediately after learning and that enhances consolidation of the bad situation and the distressed emotional state at the time.

Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health problems and are often treated with so-called extinction therapies. That is, therapy is geared toward unlearning our fears by deliberately re-living the disturbing event under safe conditions and thereby learning we can cope successfully. It is like the old idea of getting back on a horse after you fall off. But that is not a good analogy, because if you get back on a horse, you could fall off again - hardly reassuring.

Modern psychotherapy for phobias and PTSD often involves so-called "cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)," which requires re-living the original bad event under reassuring conditions by talking about it and even writing about it. But this has to be done with re-assessment with conscious realization that the original negative emotions and fear are no longer applicable because the re-living is a simulation in a safe environment. The re-living must include dealing with the negative emotions in the light of reason. Wikipedia's description of CBT is that therapy requires "questioning and testing cognitions, assumptions, evaluations and beliefs that might be unhelpful and unrealistic; gradually facing activities which may have been avoided; and trying out new ways of behaving and reacting." Relaxation and distraction techniques are also commonly included. This re-creation of the bad event allows us to extinguish memory of the original bad situation and its negative emotions.

Extinction is something scientists know a lot about. I recently got an up-date in this area of research at a seminar by Gregory Quick from the Dept. of Psychiatry at the University of Puerto Rico. As Pavlov showed, extinction is a basic phenomenon even in simple animals. If you repeatedly ring a bell and then give foot shock to a rat, it soon learns to become distressed the next time it hears that bell, even if it does not get a shock. In the lab, this is manifest by the rat showing freeze behavior. But, if you repeat the bell enough times without foot shock,the conditioned response (CR)(freeze behavior) is extinguished. At first,scientists thought that memory of the CR is erased during extinction, but even Pavlov, the father of conditioned learning, recognized early on that extinction is a new learning experience. Think of it as learning to unlearn. Extinction creates a new memory that competes with memory of the original CR. Both memories co-exist. However, over time the extinction memory may be lost, and the CR can return. Presumably, the rules for effective consolidation apply to extinction learning as well as to CR learning. Therapy would be more effective if therapy for PTSD and other anxiety disorders was approached like a conventional learning experience whose memory needs considerable nurturing. The confirmation that extinction is new learning comes from experiments showing that traces of extinction memory remain after extinction learning seems to be forgotten. Re-learning of an extinguished response occurs much more readily than it does for an initial extinction learning.Its like re-learning a foreign language. It goes easier the second time.

Memory of a distressing event and memory of its extinction can co-exist. Which memory is retrieved determines whether or not anxiety results.

As this picture shows, memory of a CR and its extinction can co-exist. The practical consequence is that these memories compete for which one is strong enough to be retrieved. Sadly, the CR memory is often stronger. As I explain in my book, cues are extremely important to both forming and retrieving and memory. It seems likely that in typical human situations, there are many more cues in CR than in extinction. Therapy should be aimed at enriching the number and variety of cues associated with extinction learning.

Here is an example applied to humans that this kind of research suggests to me: if you are afraid of heights, it could be because some frightening event happened, perhaps years ago, that involved a high place. You may not even remember what caused the fear, but clearly any high place provides plenty of cues to trigger the memory of that conditioned memory. Now, if you progressively force yourself in small steps to go to high places, under clearly safe conditions, you can learn to extinguish this memory by thinking about how irrational your fear is. For instance, walking up a staircase should not evoke fear if there is no way you can fall off. These new extinction learning experiences need to be consciously attended, rehearsed, protected from interfering stimuli, and otherwise nurtured to promote consolidation. You should strive to construct all sorts of cues that can be associated with your extinction trials. These cues should strengthen the consolidation of your extinction learning and moreover, make the extinction memory more retrievable in the face of other cues that were associated with the original CR. Like any other memory, the extinction cues and environment need to be re-experienced often at periodic intervals so the extinction memory is strengthened at the expense of the original CR that created the anxiety disorder.

Source:

Quirk, G. J. et al. 2006. Prefrontal mechanisms in extinction of conditioned fear. Biological Psychiatry. 60: 337-343,

Benefits of Increasing Working Memory

In an earlier post, I summarized some Japanese research showing that working memory capacity can be increased in young children and that such increase even improves IQ. Accumulating evidence seems to indicate that working memory, with proper training, can be improved in anyone, even adults. Improved working memory results in improved attention (recall my other posts about how the main memory problem in aging is usually not memory per se but poor attentiveness), better reasoning ability, and better self control.

I recently found a paper in which lasting increases in brain function were produced in healthy adults by only 5 weeks of practice on three working-memory tasks that involved the location of objects in space. Subjects performed 90 trials per day on a training regimen (CogMed) and MRI scans showed increased activity in the cortical areas that were involved in processing the visual stimuli. Brain activity increases in these areas appeared within the first week and grew over time.

Similar results have been reported by other investigators. In a few cases, where different kinds of stimuli were used, memory training induced a decrease of brain activity in certain areas, which is interpreted to indicate that the trained brain did not have to work as hard.

While we clearly don’t understand things very well, it seems clear that working memory training not only improves memory capability but also causes lasting changes in the brain.

Reference:

Olesen, P. J., Westerberg, H., and Kingberg, T. 2004. Increased prefrontal and parietal activity after training of working memory. Nature Neuroscience. 7: 75-79.