St. Cloud State University~ 2013
Stephen Carroll, PhD
Date, Course, Topic
Notes on
what’s being
presented
Thoughts
& feelings
that arise
This makes sense!
Q: How does this
connect with … ?
Summary:
Summary Reflections:
ASAP – before sleeping
What’s worth reviewing &
remembering?
For Best Results:
Review Summary
within 24 hours
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
• Students arrive in our classrooms knowing very little about the
kinds of learning they are expected to do in college
• Much of what they do “know” is wrong
• Using the habits of learning they developed in high school leads
to inefficient and ineffective learning
• Reduced performance caused by the inaptness of their learning
habits creates motivation and engagement problems that
further reduce their academic performance—and learning.
• Teach students how to learn
• Metalearning Flight School is based on current research in
cognitive science, the neurobiology of learning and learning
theory
• Seven years worth of data and experience show that it makes a
significant difference in students’ learning
• It’s especially effective in making students more self-motivated
and more self-directed learners
This is not a miracle cure and it will be difficult at first. It will take
you and your students a while to unlearn old habits and to
develop new ones. (It takes ~21 days to break in a new habit.)
What I can promise you is that if you teach your students how to
learn, they will learn more, learn faster and retain what they
learn longer—thus, your performance as faculty will increase as
well.
Start with one day—the first day of class, perhaps.
• Motivate you to try metalearning
techniques with your students to help
them become more effective learners
• Provide you with theories, resources,
tools and inspiration to help you develop
your own metalearning lessons
• Provide you with tools to prove it works
1. Help students discover self-motivations for learning
2. Align their definitions of learning with ours (redefine
learning)
3. Teach students how learning works and derive principles
they can use to guide themselves
4. Derive strategies and tactics from principles (application)
5. Practice often to develop effective learning habits
6. Maintain those habits
Overcoming unhelpful beliefs about learning:
• Carol Dweck’s work on mindset
• Students who believe in innate talents and aptitudes don’t learn
as well as those who believe improvement is possible
• So we need to prove to them improvement is always possible
Overcoming unhelpful learning habits:
• Especially in the wake of NCLB, students are used to simply
doing as they are told. They don’t expect to be responsible for
or to direct their own learning.
• We need to break this habit quickly and forcefully.
Part 1: Building Self-Motivated Learners
Start with the foundation and the goal
Videos online through
metalearninghabits.org
learninghabits.wordpress.com
and on our YouTube
Youtube.com/user/learninghabits/videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwu8QqhrOP8
Part 1: Building Self-Motivated Learners
Key Take-Aways:
• Get students to recognize that they have goals of their own and
that these goals will require them to change who they are and
how they think
• Get students to commit publically to their own learning goals
for your course so that these goals can be used to guide and
regulate classroom activities and behavior
• Show students how their current learning habits prevent them
from attaining their goals
• Places the burden of responsibility for learning on the student
• Connects students’ learning to their goals
• Helps them develop a practice of self-reflection and selfregulation in relation to metalearning
• Herbert Simon: “Learning takes place in the mind of the student
and nowhere else, and the effectiveness of teachers lies in what
they can induce students to do.
-”What we Know about Learning, Journal of Engineering
Education
• What is learning?
•What does it mean to learn something?
•How can you tell when you’ve learned
something?
Part 2: Defining Learning
•
•
•
•
•
•
Knowing something
•
Understanding something
Being able to teach something •
•
Getting it
•
Eureka!
•
Making a connection to
something new
•
• Insight
•
• Discovery
•
• Enlightenment
•
Knowing that
(vs. knowing how)
Memorizing
Being able to recall
Remembering something
Understanding the principles
Seeing the logic
Being able to extrapolate
Seeing how it works
Epiphany
Part 2: Defining Learning
•
•
•
•
•
Being able to do something
Knowing how
Facility
Doing it
Mastering a procedure
or process
• Increasing level of proficiency
• Following correct procedures
• Being able to use
what I know
• Being able to apply something
in a new situation
• Acquiring the knack of
something
• Gains in craftsmanship
• Getting better at something
Part 2: Defining Learning
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Learning to like something
Getting engaged
Being inspired
Being motivated
Finding joy
Wanting to do more
Wanting to practice
Looking for chances to use
what I know
• Learning to love something
• Learning to see the beauty or
complexity or artistry in
something
• Learning to appreciate
something
• Gaining confidence
• Becoming more interested in
something
Part 2: Defining Learning
• Being able to do something
without
• Using what I know as a
paying a lot of
matter of course
attention
• Doing things automatically
• Knowing when to use what
I've learned
• Integrating what I know into • Ability to improvise based on
my life
what I already know
Part 2: Defining Learning
How we define learning affects
how we teach and shapes how
students learn in our classes.
Part 2: Defining Learning
• Fueled by attitudes and desires (emotion)
• Supported by skills and understanding
Part 2: Defining Learning
Teaching ≠
We want to move away from the learning-asacquisition-of-facts and teaching-as-SherwinWilliams model toward defining learning as
durable habit formation and teaching as
developing and mentoring self-directed
learners.
Cross-lateral activity opens up the corpus
callosum
•Gets more of your brain involved
•Balances the load
•Aids memory
•Makes learning easier
3-5 sentences in 3 minutes
•
Acquire new material
Transfer
•
Retain new material
•
Transfer use of new material
Acquire
Retain
The A in ART is for Acquisition
Mnemonic:
Actively
Build
Connections
Part 3: How Learning Works
Part 3: How Learning Works
2 pyramidal neurons forming a synapse
Part 3: How Learning Works
Ideas are patterns of neural firing
Part 3: How Learning Works
More complex ideas are more complex
patterns—made up of smaller patterns
Part 3: How Learning Works
• Learning has the physical and metaphorical structure of an
analogy.
• Therefore we must teach analogically, not de novo.
• “Nothing we learn can stand in isolation; we can sustain new
learning only to the degree we can relate it to what we
already know.” (Sci Am Mind, July 2010.)
New Brain Cells Forming
Part 3: How Learning Works
Part 3: How Learning Works
• Therefore, we must teach our students to seek challenge
• Always prefer the difficult over the routine or the easy
• Optimal learning occurs in “flow state”—midway between
boredom and anxiety
• Analogy: crosswords and sudokus
Based on Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2002)
Habits of Acquisition (Making
Connections)
•
•
•
•
Note-Taking
Reading strategies
Paying attention/active learning
Not multitasking
Part 3: How Learning Works
R is RETAIN (Acronym)
• REview,
• Test,
• Analyze,
• INtegrate.
Part 3: How Learning Works
Retention is controlled by Repetition and Chemistry
Part 3: How Learning Works
• The importance of review within certain windows
• How to make review happen in the classroom
• Daily review at start of class
• Daily summaries at end of class
• Review summaries offline on a regular basis
• Repeated review is necessary for habit formation
and transfer
• Frequent low-stakes quizzes
• Classroom mantras
• Emotions
• How much and what kind of sleep you’re
getting
• How much and what kind of exercise you’re
getting
• Hydration and nutrition (including caffeine
and alcohol)
• Physical cycles and rhythms
Part 3: How Learning Works
Amygdalas
Part 3: How Learning Works
Part 3: How Learning Works
•
•
•
•
•
•
Repetition and reinforcement
Strong emotion
Sleep (then review)
Exercise
Hydration and nutrition
Richness of the learning and studying
environments
Part 3: How Learning Works
T is for Transfer (Bus transfer)
Transfer is
taking what
you know and
applying it to
what you don’t
know. You
can’t get there
from here.
Part 3: How Learning Works
• Transfer is about pattern recognition and
• Changing set
• It is the most difficult part of learning
• … and the least practiced!
• Students need to practice as much as
possible
Part 3: How Learning Works
1) Learning ONLY works when it is active and conscious.
2) Learning actively connects new ideas to old
information.
3) Learning IS making connections/patterns.
4) Involving multiple senses enhances learning
Part 3: How Learning Works
5) Learning works best if it requires real effort (if it is difficult).
6) Learning depends on managing emotions well. Positive
emotions (especially self-motivation) accelerate learning by
reducing resistance (electrically and metaphorically).
Negative emotions (esp. fear and stress) block learning and
recall.
Part 3: How Learning Works
7) Varying your modes of learning (rich learning environment)
increases activity, helps reinforce neural pathway
development and moves what was learned to long-term
memory.
8) Active repetition is the best way to create durable learning.
(Moving things from short-term to long-term memory
requires reinforcement within 24 hours.)
Part 3: How Learning Works
3-5 sentences in 3 minutes
•Exercise regularly—
• Moving blood and oxygen to your brain helps it
work more effectively. (Making new brain cells is
a huge metabolic load on the body.)
• The chemicals your body makes when you exercise
help you make connections more easily.
• And taking your mind off of the mental work
you’re doing helps you solve the problems you’re
working on. (Eureka!)
Part 4: Application
• Make sure you are properly hydrated and
nourished.
• If what you eat comes through a car window or if the label
lists ingredients with numbers, it isn’t food.
• Hard mental work is equally taxing to the body as hard
physical work—you have to nourish it to sustain peak
performance.
• Water is key. Even a modest amount of dehydration
decreases your reasoning ability by 20%. (Don’t overdo
it—over-hydration also adversely affects cognition.)
• Caffeine, nicotine and alcohol
Part 4: Application
• Pay attention to your daily cycles and rhythms—
you’re more awake and better able to learn at
certain times than at others. Arrange your day so
that you study during these times.
• Attention Cycle: Take breaks every 20 minutes so that you
remain active and don’t go on autopilot. Do something
physical and bilateral on your break.
• Study Cycle: Take a major break every 2 hours. Spend ten
minutes on a different kind of task. Make sure you get up
and move around. (Put an alarm on your phone to help
you remember.)
Part 4: Application
• Get enough sleep—
• New research shows that mental performance drops off
quite sharply if you don’t get at least six hours of sleep
per night regularly. You cannot learn some things without
this amount of sleep: long-chain reasoning problems,
persistence, etc.
• Teenagers need 9-10 hours of sleep for optimum brain
performance.
• You’ll perform better on the test if you are well-rested
than if you have stayed up most of the night reviewing the
material one more time.
Part 4: Application
•Sleep Cycle: 90 minutes.
• Minimum of 6 hours for optimum performance. (910 hours for teenagers.)
• If you must do with less, you want to wake in the
REM period at the end of the cycle, not a deep
part of the cycle. The less sleep you get, the more
important it is when you wake up.
Part 4: Application
If you wake up in one of these peaks,
you’ll feel rested and perform well.
Sleep cycles:
~ 90 minutes/cycle
REM
1
2
3
7
Chart shows 7 hours of sleep
If you wake up in these troughs, you’ll be tired and groggy all day.
You’ll perform significantly less well on cognitive tasks.
Part 4: Application
• Sleep Cycles
• Plot your cycle so that you know how it works.
• Your period of maximum fatigue will fall 12 hours
after the deepest period of sleep.
• Use the information-sorting function of sleep to help
you solve problems. Focus on the problem you want
to solve repeatedly as you fall asleep. Review in the
morning. (Keep paper by the bed.)
• Lucid dreaming can also help you study.
• Adjust bedtime to the type of test you’re taking.
Part 4: Application
• Note-taking
• Reading strategies
• Finding analogies
• Seeking difficulty
• Classroom mantras
Part 5: Practice
Part 6: Maintain
Evidence that MetaLearning Works
1. Dean’s List (Top 10% of each class)
• Juniors: ~40% of my students make this list
• Seniors: ~45%
2. Elected to honor societies: More than 3 times the rate of the
general population.
3. Campus Leadership Positions: Significantly over-represented in
peer tutoring, EMT group, editor of Santa Clara Review, etc.
The quality of the work my students do
now is better in every way than the work
my students did before I started using
these methods.
The Student
Assessment
of their
Learning Gains
(SALG)
Free Tools at
www.salgsite.org
What Teachers Make