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Chapter 1: Learning Preferences and Strategies
Learning Strategies A learning strategy is an individual’s approach to completing a task. More specifically, a learning strategy is an individual’s way of organizing and using a particular set of skills in order to learn content or accomplish other tasks more effectively and efficiently in school as well as in nonacademic settings (Schumaker & Deshler, 1992). Learning strategies have been researched for decades. There is even evidence of some of these strategies being used hundreds of years ago! Here are six strategies that are proven to help you move informa- tion into long-term memory and improve your ability to recall the information later. Dual coding. Use images and words together. For example, add drawings to your notes and flash cards. You don’t need to be an artist! The drawings only need to have meaning for you. Use your notes to create a memory palace. Use the Internet to find pictures of the anatomical structures and pathologies you are studying. Create diagrams or flowcharts of processes such as the pathway of food from ingestion to excretion. Elaboration. Connect new information to prior knowledge, experiences, or emotions. For example, when learning the definition and symptoms of peripheral neuropathy, remember a friend or family member who had that pathology and those symptoms. Recall that their hands were painful, they couldn’t feel things very well, and they had difficulty holding onto objects and opening jars. Ask how and why questions. For example, a biopsy procedure is the removal of a tissue sample for microscopic examination. Ask, how is the tis- sue removed? Why is it examined with a microscope? The answers to these questions may lead to additional questions. Connect the answers to prior knowledge, experiences, or emotions. Concrete examples. Use real-life examples to understand abstract ideas. For example, when learning the parts of a neuron, dendrites could be described as branches of a tree. The overview of this chapter used a city and roads to describe how the brain retrieves information from memory. Retrieval practice. Read the question, then pause to pull the answer from memory, with no cues, before revealing the correct answer. The more often you can retrieve the correct answer, the easier it gets to retrieve it. If you make a recording of yourself doing this, you can listen to it while you are exercising, which is also good for learning! When you are completing the practice exercises in the book, keep in mind that you cannot use the retrieval practice strategy for multiple choice, true/false, and similar questions that supply answer choices. For these question types, you are merely recognizing the correct answer instead of retrieving it from memory. Spaced practice. Study the same information multiple times over short periods of time, even across multiple days, rather than in one long study period that covers the same amount of time. For example, instead of study- ing medical terms for 2 hours on Monday only, study them for 30 minutes each day, Monday through Thursday. Also known as distributed practice or spaced repetition, this strategy is the opposite of cramming. There is no research on the optimal amount of spacing. Intervals should be closer together in the beginning and increase over time, as the information becomes easier to remember.
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