Effective learning hinges on the depth of cognitive processing applied to information, rather than the intention to learn or superficial study strategies.
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Hi, I’m Dr. Stephen Chew.
I’m a professor of psychology here at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama.
This is the second in a series of five videos on how to study effectively in college.
In the first video we examined some basic beliefs that can undermine your learning.
In this video, I’ll explain some basic principles of how people learn and how you can use those
principles to improve the effectiveness of your study.
Let’s start by examining how accurate your understanding is of how people learn.
Take a look at the following statements.
Pick the one that represents the most important factor in successful learning.
Only one is correct.
In order to find out the correct one, I want you to imagine you are in a classic psychology
experiment by Thomas Hyde and James Jenkins from 1969 and see if you can guess the results.
The basic design of their study is shown here, with 5 different groups of participants.
Each group of participants was presented with a list of 24 words.
The instructions the participants were given about what to do with the words varied from
group to group.
Once all the words were presented, everyone had to try to recall them from memory.
Hyde and Jenkins looked at the impact of two variables on learning.
The first one, on the left, is whether or not you knew you are going have to recall
the words after all of them were presented.
If you were in one of the two groups in the Intentional condition, you were forewarned
that you would have to recall the words after they were all presented.
If you were in one of the two groups in the Incidental condition, you weren’t forewarned
about the recall test.
It’s like taking a surprise pop quiz.
Any learning that occurred was incidental.
The other variable Hyde and Jenkins looked at was how participants rehearsed or encoded
words, what became known later as “levels of processing.”
Two groups had to listen to the words and check whether or not it had the letter “e”
in the spelling.
The other two groups had to rate whether or not they found the word pleasant.
Now, why would this make a difference?
If you are checking for “E”s, then you are focusing on the spelling of the word,
which is called shallow level of processing.
If you are rating its pleasantness, you are thinking about the meaning of the words related
to your own experience.
That is called deep level processing.
So, say the word in the list is “dance”.
If you were in the Intentional condition, you knew you will be asked later to recall
[that word].
If you were in the Incidental condition, you haven’t a clue about the recall test.
In the other variable, if you are in the “E” checking group, you think about the spelling
and mark down “yes”.
If you are in the pleasantness group, you think about dance and check “yes” if you
like dance and “no” if you don’t.
The two variables combine to give you four different groups.
There was a fifth group just told to memorize the words as best they could.
The list of 24 words was presented one word at a time, and each group carried out its
instructions.
Afterward, all the participants were asked to recall as many of the 24 words as they
could.
Who do you think recalled the most words?
Let’s look at the results and see what happened and see what it says about learning.
The average percent recall is shown on the y-axis.
First, did the intent to learn matter?
If it did, then the Intentional learning groups should do better than the Incidental Learning
groups.
But they did not.
Intent to learn had no effect at all.
Now, look at level of processing.
If level of processing matters, then deep processing, rating pleasantness, should recall
more than shallow processing, checking for E’s.
You see the deep processing groups recalled a lot more than the shallow processing groups
regardless of whether they were intending to learn or not.
Now there are two key points here.
First, people who use deep processing learned the material whether they intended to or not.
On the other hand, the people who used shallow strategy, even if they wanted to learn, they
did not learn.
Second, people who processed words at a deep level, even if they weren’t trying to learn,
remembered them just as well as that control group who were doing their best to learn.
So, the depth of processing matters and the intention to learn doesn’t.
You can have every intention to learn, but if you use a shallow strategy, you won’t
learn.
Let me say a little bit more about the Levels of Processing because it is a powerful idea
for student learning.
Levels of processing says that memory is composed of a continuum of levels from shallow to deep.
Shallow levels involve studying meaningless, superficial properties of what you are trying
to learn, like mindless re-reading or memorization.
The deepest levels of processing involve thinking about material meaningfully, interpreting
the information and relating it to your prior knowledge or experience, or creating a mental
image of the information.
Deeper processing leads to better recall.
You also have to understand the idea of orienting tasks.
Orienting tasks make people process information at a certain level of processing.
Orienting tasks make people process information at a certain depth.
In this case, checking for E’s is a shallow orienting task, making people process words
at a shallow level.
Rating a word’s pleasantness is a deep orienting task, causing people to think about the meaning
of the words, process them deeply, and thus learn the words.
Now let’s return to the question of the single most important factor in learning.
We can rule out number 1 because we just saw that intention and desire to learn are not
important.
Number 2 is also not correct.
In the study, both groups paid close attention to the words to do their orienting task.
Attention is not enough to guarantee learning.
What about Number 3?
You hear a lot about learning styles.
Some people are visual learners; others are auditory or kinesthetic learners.
There is simply no good research evidence that supports the validity of learning styles,
so forget about them.
Besides, if you plan to be successful, you should become good at learning in multiple
ways.
What about number 4?
I did make a big deal about committing enough time to be successful.
But time alone is not sufficient for successful learning.
That leaves number 5, which is correct.
It relates to depth of processing.
If you read a text without comprehension, or if you memorize definitions without really
understanding them, you are using shallow processing and you will not learn.
If you think about meaningful connections, you are using deep processing, and you will
learn whether you intend to or not.
If you picked incorrectly, don’t feel bad.
Most people get this wrong.
If you picked correctly, congratulations.
You are on the right path to successful study.
So, let’s summarize what we have learned in the first two videos.
Here are the factors which don’t help or even hurt your learning.
Now I’m not saying that desire to learn, attention or engagement are bad things, but
deep processing is the crucial element.
A lot of students want to learn, but they use shallow strategies, and they don’t learn.
Now here are the factors, which do contribute to your academic success.
So how do we go about processing information deeply and developing a connected understanding
of material?
That is the focus of the next two videos.
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