A few generative strategies that are commonly reported among students-summarization, self-explanation, and practice testing-are compared below. This is supported by strong evidence for the “generation effect,” in which new knowledge or skills are more robustly encoded and retrieved if you generate a solution, explanation, or summary, rather than looking it up ( Jacoby, 1978). The desirable difficulties framework suggests that study strategies whereby students actively generate a product or test themselves promote greater long-term learning than study strategies whereby students passively consume presentations. In the following two paragraphs, we expand upon these study habits of interest. The desirable difficulties framework ( Bjork and Bjork, 2011), describes two main kinds of effective habits that apply to our study: 1) using effortful study strategies or techniques that prompt students to generate something or test themselves during studying and 2) distributing study time into multiple sessions to avoid “cramming” near the exam.
Study habits can include a wide variety of behaviors, from the amount of time that students study, to the strategies that they use while studying, to the environment in which they study. Which Study Habits Are Difficult in a Desirable Way? Additionally, we examined the relationship between study habits and performance on exams while controlling for prior academic preparation and total study time. In the present study, we investigated the frequency with which students reported carrying out effortful (active) or superficial (passive) study habits in a large introductory biology course. Bjork defines these effective, effortful tasks as desirable difficulties ( Bjork, 1994). In contrast to students’ judgments, many effortful tasks are highly effective for learning. As one example, students may feel that they have learned more if they reread a text passage multiple times than if they are quizzed on that same material ( Karpicke and Roediger, 2008).
Often, students feel that they learn more from cognitively superficial tasks than from cognitively effortful tasks. One such challenge is that students often misjudge their learning during the monitoring and reflection phases ( Kornell and Bjork, 2007). There are many challenges that learners encounter in developing self-regulation. This requires students to perform several metacognitive tasks on their own, including setting goals, choosing strategies, monitoring and reflecting on performance, and modifying those steps over time ( Zimmerman, 2002).
One of our goals in college courses is to help students develop into independent, self-regulated learners. These results add nuance to lab findings and help instructors prioritize study habits to target for change. Third, on average, students reported being distracted about 20% of their study time, and distraction while studying negatively predicted exam performance. Second, on average, students started studying 6 days before an exam, but how early a student started studying was not related to performance on in-term (immediate) or cumulative (delayed) exams.
In addition, both the number of active strategies and the proportion of their study time using active strategies positively predicted exam performance. First, we found that, on average, students used approximately four active strategies to study and that they spent about half of their study time using active strategies. Notably, in these analyses, we controlled for potential confounds, such as academic preparation, self-reported class absences, and self-reported total study time. In this study, we described students’ self-reported study habits and related those habits to their performance on exams. However, we often depend on students to study effectively without explicit instruction. Students’ study sessions outside class are important learning opportunities in college courses.
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