A Secret They Should Have Taught You In School: How to Learn More with No Extra Effort

Effectiveness sometimes means we have to learn something new, whether it be reference information, new processes, or other data.  Although I firmly believe that memorization of simple data is a mistake as long as the data can be accessed when needed, sometimes, you just have memorize stuff! 

The faster we learn this new information, the more quickly we can effectively use it to be more productive.  There are ways to speed up the learning process to make this task as quick and painless as possible.  One way to increase learning is to use the Primacy and Recency Effect to our advantage.  In fact, the old adage that says to go fast, one must go slow, is quite appropriate here.

The Primacy and Recency Effect is a phenomenon in which human learning is more effective at the beginning and end of a set of data.  An example would be in order here.  Let’s say that you have to memorize this set of data in 2 minutes:

39104940285465840302884658596874564524264759382028

The Primacy and Recency Effect states that after two minutes, you will remember the items at the beginning and the end of the list more accurately than those numbers in the middle.  You will be lucky if you remember anything from the middle. 

Here is another example about how the brain pays more attention to the first and last items in a set of data.  This time, the words in a simple paragraph:

i cdnuolt blveiee taht i cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht i was rdanieg.
the phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mind is amazanig. aoccdrnig to a rscheearch taem at cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosnt mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. the rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit  a porbelm.  amazanig huh? yaeh and yuo awlyas thohgut slpeling was ipmorantt.

If you look at each word, you will notice that the correct letters are present.  However, the only ones that are in the correct positions are the first and last letter in each word.  The others, if the word has more than three letters, are jumbled.  Yet, you could still read and understand the paragraph.

So what does this have to do with learning?  The brain learns more at the start of the learning and the end of the learning (the beginning and end of the data set).  Your teachers have known this for a long time.  This is why the beginning and end of a class is the most important.  At the beginning of the class, the teacher should spell out the learning goals of the period and provide some teacher input.  An overview of the procedures to be followed are also usually taught at the beginning of the period.  At the end of the period, the teacher sums everything up and hits the most important parts again.  They do that because students remember what is taught at the beginning and end of the class much more accurately than what is taught in the middle of the period. 

How can you exploit this?  When you are learning something for your job, simply increase the number of starts and stops in your study time.  That’s right, simply throw some breaks in the study period to break it up into more starts and stops.  By tossing in two 10–minute breaks into one three-hour study period, you can now have three one-hour study periods, each separated by a 10–minute break.  Instead of one start and one stop, you now have three starts and three stops.  Although you have increased the time from three hours to three hours and twenty minutes, there is still only three hours of study time.  The additional time are rest breaks.  You have not studied any harder or longer, yet, the Primacy and Recency Effect guarantees that you will remember more of your learning.

To go fast…go slow.

Comments

[Steve Pavlina]

Nice post!

One nitpick: The word "yuo" should be "you" if you want to maintain consistency where first and last letters are correct.

[dpvtank]

you bring up good points bert. But, this seldom happens for teachers. Let me give you an example of a typical math class.

Walk in --> Start Lesson ---> Assign work ---> End

That's the general structure. What you said may work well for students that actually do have some (if any) intellectual curiosity, but for the vast majority, taking these little "breaks" would be chaotic. These little breaks will become bigger and bigger. Man is a procrastinating (sp?) machine by nature.

I think the only time where such a technique works is when its about a topic that one truly enjoys. Ofcourse, its only my take on things.

[John Richardson]

Hi Bert, interesting idea. I have found that the big key in teaching is to find appropriate learning styles. I am a kinesthetic or "hands on" learner. I have to see it and do it to remember it. If I'm in a lecture situation I need to draw pictures of the subject and have them doing some action. The act of drawing stimulates my mind to remember the subject. I do agree that people tend to remember first and lasts. That is why in a speech the opening and the closing remarks must be real powerful.

John

[LB]

Some more information on that jumbled letters effect is here, at the urban legends site.

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/cambridge.asp

Note: it has not classified as an urban legend at this point. It is still in status "Undetermined".

[Phil Gerbyshak]

Very interesting idea. More breaks = more learning, because of the starts and stops. I'll have to try this. Thanks for the suggestion!

[Bert]

To all of you...Thanks for the comments!

Steve - I copied the paragraph straight from the source where I found it. Since it was a quote, I chose not to change it. In the future, I'll include the quotation marks in addition to indenting quotes to make that clearer. :) By the way, congrats on your ToastMasters OpEd piece.

LB - it is true that the study may be an urban myth as the actual study (supposedly) was about the way the brain reads entire word shapes and doesn't read individual letters. My use of it was because the quote itself illustrated primacy and recency, not whether the study was true or not. Had my post been about the study and it's topic, more research into the study itself would have been done. The quote was the important thing in my post, not the topic the quote was about.

dpvtank - Hi! This technique is used primarily in homework. I, as an educator, usually don't advise this being used in the classroom as it does result in "down time" that requires additional time for re-focusing. For the classroom, I advise teachers to simply switch activities. A lecture period of about 15 minutes followed by some hands-on activities for another 20 minutes, back to lecture, then some reading, then finishing back with a lecture review. This gives the lecture more starts and stops. There is one practice where a break is utilized and seems acceptable. After 15 - 20 minutes of lecture, the teacher provides a break that is used by students to revise/reorganize their notes, add additional notes, compare notes with neighbors, and add illustrations to their notes. The lecture then resumes with similar breaks provided every 20 minutes or so. By the way, I'm not a fan of lectures.

John - Take a look in my response to dpvtank above. Rather than using breaks in the classroom, I recommend to my teachers to provide changes in activities (like the ones you mentioned) in the classroom to provide those starts and stops. The varied activities provide opportunities for the teacher to switch to activities that reach students of other learning modalities.