NYT: Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits

[RJN]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/healt ... 7mind.html

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas.

But individual learning is another matter, and psychologists have discovered that some of the most hallowed advice on study habits is flat wrong.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time.

[bystander]

A study on how to study
Discover Blogs | Cosmic Variance | 07 Sept 2010

[Beyond]

The Title of this thread is "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits." That lets me out Before you can forget about something, you have to have something to forget about.That's why I don't have to do much forgetting about anything, especially study habits

[Ann]

I read that too. Interesting. I particularly remember that it said that you should try to learn the same thing in two different environments. In an experiment, one group of students read the same text in two different rooms, one windowless and cluttered and the other room open and modern, while the other group read the same text twice in the same room. (Let's hope it was not the cluttered windowless room.) The group that had read the same text in two different rooms remembered the text far better than those who had read it it twice in the same room. The explanation was that those who had read the text in two diffeent environments had created more "associations" to the same text. Indeed, they had created more "tracks in the brain" leading to the same text.

Ann

[neufer]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/healt ... 7mind.html

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting seems to leave
a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time.

"Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting...."

Hmmm...I'll have to try that.