This article was originally published on 17 September 2021

John Dunlosky is not a revision guru. And yet, over the past decade - as the UK’s evidence-based education movement spilled out from social media and into the Inset days and twilight sessions of schools - the work of the professor of psychology at Kent State University often got put in the box of “revision strategies”. And there he stayed, his findings utilised to help students pass exams.

But that’s quite a narrow reading of the 2013 paper that launched him into the consciousness of research-informed teachers. “Strengthening the Student Toolbox” was not about helping students ace a test, it was about helping them to be better learners. The paper assessed some of the most common and effective techniques for learning, rated them against each other and explained how and why they worked (see box, below). It went way beyond the “don’t use highlighters” message for which he is sometimes now known.

It’s a good time to revisit Dunlosky’s work, and to correct any misconceptions about his message, because at the core of his research is an insistence that learning should not just be about knowledge and skills but about learning how to learn. Achieve the latter, Dunlosky argues, and you can maximise the former.

Tes sat down with Dunlosky to talk about his work, his rise to prominence, the “right” way to interpret his findings and what he sees as the most crucial element to get right if we are to build better learners.

Tes: ‘Strengthening the Student Toolbox’ has had a huge impact on education. Why do you think it hit home so much for teachers?

Professor John Dunlosky: It was highly accessible, the take-home messages were straightforward and, thank goodness, many of the study strategies to build a better learner that we thought were most valuable were relatively easy to implement. Many of the things we recommended that teachers do were things that they could grab on to and try out in their own classrooms.

[Another factor is a] decision we made when we were writing this article - that we would only evaluate the effectiveness of techniques that would be free. What we had to offer were some things that you could do without any cost to see if it could benefit your students.

Were you aware that it often got put into a ‘revision strategies’ box in the UK rather than being viewed as a more general guide to teaching? Does that bother you?

It does not bother me at all. These strategies are great for revision, so it’s super that students are being encouraged to use them. If some instructors eventually decide to harness their power while teaching, even better.

Do you think the underlying message of your work - that it is key to train pupils to be better learners as well as to teach knowledge and skills - is getting through enough in schools? Does Western education provide enough balance between the teaching of knowledge and the teaching of learning strategies?

No, the imbalance is so extreme, it’s almost shocking. Very little focus is placed on training students to become better learners. However, I absolutely understand what teachers are up against with respect to helping their students obtain a certain level of knowledge. Students need to pass a variety of different tests and exams that evaluate them on their knowledge, [not] the quality of their learning strategies and their independence as learners.

Is this imbalance a teaching and learning problem or a curriculum problem?

I think both, actually, but let’s start with the curricular issue. If I were the king, I would have a lot more speciality areas in the curriculum where students are just focusing on specific areas that they’ll repeat over and over again until they get it right.

Does that mean less breadth of knowledge taught? Time is a zero-sum game so, if teachers decide to instruct their students on how to use effective learning strategies - as well as hold their students accountable for using them - then something else will need to be displaced.

Even so, the strategies are not that difficult to train, role model and use, so just a little extra instruction about strategies spaced across each school year may be all that is needed to help students become more habitual users of effective strategies. And, if doing so helps them learn more efficiently, then time may be saved in the long run.

Just imagine students beginning a higher-level course and not remembering most of the key ideas that they had learned earlier - a great deal of instructional time will be needed to review the prior material. But, if students had learned those key ideas well enough to retain them, then I suspect time would be saved in the long run.

I think teachers can have a role in changing this but the administrators set the curriculum and, here in the United States, unfortunately, sometimes the administrators at a higher level set that curriculum for political reasons - and hence it’s just a mess.

What are the problems you see in teaching and learning practice?

We need a more global use of the key strategies we identified across classes. So, as a pupil moves from class to class, teacher to teacher, if they tend to be encountering the same set of effective strategies, then the light bulb would go off, and [students would] realise the [techniques] are working in all these different classes.

The challenge is getting all the teachers on the same page with this and that is most likely to happen at a higher level, where school principals realise that this is a good direction, so that they’re overlaying strategy [and] developing independent self-regulation skills on top of the content to make it a group effort.

You mentioned taking time away from knowledge content to teach these strategies. Do we have any idea how much tuition and practice it would take to teach these effectively?

I wish I knew the answer. I suspect that the goal would be to train students to use effective strategies that they can apply to help them succeed and, by using them and experiencing their benefits, they would essentially be engaged in a “learning to learn” exercise throughout the year. In this way, training students to become independent and effective learners would be woven into the teaching of knowledge itself.

How early can these sorts of effective strategies be taught?

The time to begin building a more effective learner is very early on because many of the strategies are not that difficult to use. It would be super if we started showing students how to gain that knowledge in the most effective way, even in third or fourth grade [Year 4 or 5], so that they can more quickly turn into independent learners and they won’t need the crutch of an instructor.

Let’s take a simple example: everywhere across the world, students need to learn to spell. We have them use a variety of different techniques early on to learn to spell and that’s a great time to implement something like retrieval practice.

Students initially tend to find retrieval practice a little bit more demanding. But, with the first graders and second graders [Year 2 and 3 pupils] we’ve worked with, they also find it like a game because now, instead of just copying something, you’re seeing if you can actually get it from memory.

So yes, early on, teachers can start using these practices, and students can get used to them and see their impact. Just implementing that at first, second or third grade will have a long-term impact on students’ use of those strategies.

I think a question we need to ask is: how much experience do students need with these strategies to adopt them without being directed? We don’t know yet but I suspect the earlier we begin introducing them in the classroom, the larger impact they’ll have.

One of the areas of your work that has most widely been implemented in the UK is the use of regular, low-stakes quizzes across lessons. What should these look like, in your view?

Research shows that low-stakes testing can have an impact on students’ knowledge. And the idea is really straightforward: just beginning or ending each class with a very brief quiz, two or three questions about the most important topic from the prior class.

Typically, I set aside five minutes and it is about posing a couple of well-developed, even multiple-choice, questions.

When I do this with HE students, it truly benefits them. They say that they embrace it more when I explain why I’m doing it, so I’d be very explicit and let your students in on the game. It’s not just for learning - we’re doing this to reduce their anxiety. And it’s not about leaving them to it: I’m going to help them navigate the multiple-choice questions and they’re going to learn a little content as well.

Spaced practice has also been hugely popular in the UK - is there a ‘best’ way to implement this?

If students are going to master anything, you need to repeat the content over and over again until they get it. There’s no way around it. Even when a student answers a question on a particular piece of information correctly, they will forget that content. It’s just natural.

Anyone who coaches any kind of sports team understands this, we just tend to forget some of these lessons when we’re teaching mathematics and biology.

Often, spaced practice is best used outside of the classroom. When you’re developing homework, you might have a worksheet on content A. But then next week, not only give them a worksheet on content B, but revisit content A again. I think that kind of spaced practice can be valuable and repeating those activities is the basis of all mastery.

There are no definitive rules on how much time should elapse between revisits or how content should be spaced.

One of the criticisms of techniques like the ones we have discussed, and of cognitive science in general, is that there is little assistance when it comes to motivation. As you have said in the past, these techniques are rarely fun and they can seem more difficult than other approaches, risking turning student engagement off.

An important aspect of [being] an educator is convincing students that the knowledge you’re teaching will benefit the students. You also have to show the benefit of these learning strategies for [students] to really embrace them.

There is some wonderful work coming out from Phil Higham at the University of Southampton, where he was using successive re-learning, which is using retrieval practice until you hit a criterion and then coming back and doing it again.

What I found really exciting about this research is that Higham also had the students rate their anxiety level and how much they thought they were learning throughout the semester.

At the beginning of the semester, the students said they were more anxious and were learning less when they used successive re-learning. No doubt they were more anxious but we know they were actually learning more. However, by the end of the semester, students were rating successive re-learning as more effective than other techniques and also saying that they felt less anxious when they were using it.

Why they felt less anxious, I can only speculate. But my hope is that, by using this relatively difficult technique, they realise “I’m getting better at taking tests”.

If we become more and more explicit in schools about the benefits, and have students use these strategies more often, they’re going to enjoy them more because they’ll see the benefits, which might have the wonderful added effect of reducing their anxiety.

Is it possible to ‘overuse’ the techniques you describe?

When students are engaged in learning, they are always using some form of technique, even if it involves just re-reading notes from a class, so, I’m not sure it’s possible to overuse techniques because students are always “doing something” when they are studying. Instead, I’m recommending we help students to ditch those strategies that are less effective (eg, passive listening and reading) for more engaged forms of learning.

I don’t think they would become saturated. These students use techniques like this all the time to learn outside of the classroom. We know students are good at playing video games, they’re good at dance, they’re good at sports. They’re using really effective strategies to excel at those - all we want them to do is use the same strategies to excel in the classroom.

However, with many of the strategies that I recommend students use, like successive re-learning, it does take time and you would not want to use it on all of the materials you want to learn. My hope is that, as students use these strategies more and more, they’ll realise this is the way to go when they really want to have durable learning. So it comes down to the student making an educated decision about what they really want to learn well versus what they just want to get by on. That’s a sophisticated learner and I think that’s where we want to get students to.

In your blueprint for an effective learner, you obviously have these strategies for knowledge acquisition but are they equally effective for more abstract aspects, such as socioemotional learning? Should we be using the techniques to teach empathy or critical thinking as well as facts?

I suspect they can be used for that, because the majority of techniques that I’ve been promoting are really about just practising skills and rehearsing knowledge that a student wants to retain.

So, giving students many opportunities to practise (ie, retrieval practice) their empathy skills across time (spaced practice) that involves feedback (eg, instructor offering guidance on how to show more empathy) seems like a recipe for ensuring students will show more empathy in the long run.

Why wouldn’t the same be true for teaching critical thinking skills? The idea is simple: if something is worth instructing, then why just touch on it once and move on? Keep circling back to the important stuff, have students practise it and give them feedback to guide them to improve.

With that said, let me emphasise that my optimism really could use a healthy dose of evidence-based research to know how well such strategies would work for teaching more abstract concepts.

If you could pick one thing that will be key to focus on in class in the next 12 months, what would it be?

If we could develop techniques and experiences so that children could learn to manage their time, which would translate through their entire lives, we would transform society.

When I see effective people - whether they be young students, old students, athletes - I’m looking at someone who understands how to manage their time and stay disciplined to that particular time-management activity.

Time management is the essence of expertise, mastery and incredible performance. I understand why we don’t train these skills early on because, for a first or second grader, all their time is managed for them. But we then get HE students who don’t think they need to manage their time because their time has always been managed for them.

If I had another career, I would do all my research on time management to show how important it is.

Simon Lock is senior digital editor at Tes