Telling pupils to “work hard” without giving them an understanding of how memory works is like throwing an inexperienced swimmer into a lake and saying “swim hard”, says memory and metacognition expert Dr Jonathan Firth.
Being able to swim is not just about the effort you put in, he explains, it is also about being taught the skill - and the same goes for learning.
Pupils, then, need to be taught the skills they need in order to become successful learners as opposed to just being told to apply themselves.
Firth, who taught psychology in secondary schools for over 15 years and now works as a teaching fellow at the University of Strathclyde, says: “We don’t just need an effort - we need to know how to [swim] and it’s exactly the same with study. We need to treat this as a skill that is developed over a number of years and they can gradually improve, get feedback and keep working at.
“Trying hard to do it is not enough if you have never been taught how to do it.”
Firth - who spoke to Tes Scotland after presenting on metacognition in the classroom at last week’s Scottish Learning Festival - also argues that explicitly teaching pupils how they learn should not be left until halfway through secondary, when exams start to loom on the horizon. He makes the case for starting to teach these skills in upper primary school.
The value of teaching metacognition in primary school
“‘Successful learners’ is one of the ‘capacities’ of [Scotland’s] Curriculum for Excellence - we want to be developing successful learners - but I wonder how well we are actually doing that at times.
“I look at school websites and see ‘here’s a presentation we give to the fourth year about how to study’. It amazes me why we even need to tell fourth years how to study. If they have already been in full-time education for 10 years at that point, why haven’t we already told them that? Wouldn’t it have been useful for them to know that in the first year [of secondary] or P5?
“We are leaving guidance on how memory works and how learning works too late, if we do it at all. And also then it becomes quite shallow; it’s just a bunch of tips to do for your exam revision.”
Firth suggests explicitly teaching learners:
- How memory works.
- How to tackle forgetting.
- When and how to practise.
- How to identify gaps in their own knowledge.
- What to do when they get stuck.
Without support like this, he argues, “most of what learners tend to do is ineffective”.
For example, they might revise by rereading or highlighting their notes, or they might think that practising something soon after an initial study session is the best move, yet the evidence suggests that it is better to delay that practice.
“Cramming is a bad idea,” says Firth. “If we have quite intensive practice of something - if we do it today, we practise it tomorrow and then we don’t touch it again until prelim time - that’s not ideal because we had an intensive period of learning followed by a lot of forgetting.
“It would be better to do it today, maybe practise it next week and then practise it once more in a month’s time, because then you are spacing out that practice.
“So really it’s just a way of scheduling learning so as to minimise the impact of forgetting. And it does not mean spending more time practising, it just means doing it at a different point.”
Of course, this has implications for the way that teachers organise learning, as well as the way that students study and revise.
Firth says for teachers to focus on a topic for two weeks and then not to touch it again for months is “not really the optimal way of doing it if you consider the memory aspect of things”.
However, he reiterates that it is not about teachers delivering more content - it is about timing it differently.
Firth suggests that homework could prove a useful tool - instead of recapping on learning done that week, it could recap on what was taught the previous month.
“A lot of homework is very much ‘let’s consolidate the stuff we did today’ and I would like to see more homework that is ‘let’s consolidate the stuff we did last month’, because that’s probably when you are starting forgetting.”
Similarly, he suggests that instead of starting a lesson with a new topic, teachers could spend a few minutes at the start of the lesson quizzing their students about previous learning.
He adds: “Revising that content in an active way, asking them to retrieve it from memory, is more effective than the teacher just telling them again.
“Once we start doing that, and telling learners why we are doing it, it builds that metacognitive knowledge of how consolidation works - modelling it for them and explaining why it works.”
Essentially, Firth’s message is that even though we use memory every day, most of us “don’t understand fairly basic things about how remembering and forgetting work”. And that applies to learners but also to teachers.
“This is why professional learning about memory is so important,” he says.
He acknowledges that for already overburdened teachers this might not be a welcome message - but the sweetener, he says, is that if teachers know more about “how to ensure that learning sticks” it should save time, not increase the burden.
Jonathan Firth provides weekly updates on memory, study skills and learning science. Follow this link for more information
