Education Week 4/27/2011 Reflection

Studies Find "Desirable Difficulties" Help Students Learn:  I have considered myself to be pretty dedicated to my studying outside of the classroom for a long time.  I can remember as far back as fourth grade that I would be studying and doing homework.  Specifically there was one time when my friends were going to have a home run derby tournament at the park a quarter mile from home and I couldn't go because I was studying; that was in fourth grade.  It makes me feel good when I read about certain study tips that I have been doing for years.  I was really surprised to find out the science and the numbers behind those effective and non-effective study tips.  Whenever I study vocabulary words, I always do the whole list.  It has never really made a whole lot of sense to me when people only study a small amount of words at a time because that is not how the test is given to you.  The entirety of the list is shoved in your face on the test, or, my preference, you have to learn a huge list well enough so that when you are given a group of ten people or places (or whatever) you have to write about those one.  In college, I had a lot of history tests and religious studies tests set up in that way.  I really enjoyed that.  Even when I have a giant list of key people, places and events to learn, I try to start early and make a third of the list a week before and study that, and a few days later make the second park of the list and study the two of them together, and finally go with the third.  I always found it helped me out.  The fact that students thought it was easier to learn words that were bigger fonts is kind of strange to me.  I am a person who has always written everything pretty small.  If anything, the larger font would make things even harder for me to remember, especially if it were typed out.  I try to handwrite everything because I find that, more often than not, I am able to remember how I write certain things and that will help me remember the material associated with how its written.  It's sort of like when people do color coding for their flash cards, but instead of colors, I use the way my handwriting looks to help me remember.  When I am a teacher I will definitely want to pull that factoid out to show students that the more you study so that recall can happen is three times as likely when a student is able to answer correctly five times instead of just once.  That is incredible motivation in my eyes.  Why not study a little bit more and make the entirety of the time used to study that much more effective?  A teacher could say, "once you think you know it, study for another twenty minutes" and I really think the ones who are motivated to learn are going to latch on to that and put it to good use.