Notes from /Strengthening the Student Toolbox/
Practice testing
Epistemic status: works really well. Works really well.
Structure notes to generate practice tests on the side really easily.
Flashcards are good for this. So is leaving space, like wide margins or the backs of papers, to make up questions.
Prompting recall is better than multiple-choice.
Schedule review sessions, and use these for test-answering instead of rereading.
Distributed practice
Epistemic status: established awesome. Hour for hour, distributing practice over days or weeks is better.
Massed practice leads to false gains. Distribution is better for retention.
Massed practice feels better, but distributed practice sticks better.
Cumulative testing, because that forces repetition.
Study planner; schedule brief review sessions. Use them for test-answering.
Interleaved practice
Epistemic status: Promising.
Mix up the problem types.
Pay switching costs to improve switching times
Pay problem type identification costs, because identifying problem types is hard and practicing it makes you better at it
Doesn't seem to work for everything - not French verbs or comma rules, for instance. But worth trying anyway, since it's cheap and sometimes very effective.
Elaborative interrogation and self explanation
Epistemic status: mixed, awaiting further study; anecdotally strong, preliminary results strong
Elaborative interrogation: Explain why the new fact is true.
Benefits understanding and retention, even when not entirely right.
This is wacky as fuck, but I can think of reasons why it's true. (Ironic?) Those are:
Actual explanations can be refined and tied down later, but connecting up the concept to the existing map is like getting it on the grid. It's less likely to die/fall off, because it's tightly coupled with an already-useful pattern.
Placing the concept in context highlights misunderstandings/important implications fast.
Given that a thing is true, explaining why it's true is merely explaining one's observations. Given that a resource has tol you a thing is true, explaining its truth is actually an intuitively good thing to do.
Getting into the habit of explaining the truth of things seems like a dangerous choice. It needs to be kept in mind at the very least, that the authority is trustworthy.
treating truth as non-exlcusive-middle - a thing told to you is possibly true, because no contradiction has been found yet - seems like a decent way to go about trusting a thing that might later be overturned.
It might be wise to attempt to do the opposite very once in a while, as an exercise in hypothesis-generating and to keep one's credence limber.
the suggestion of "thinking about why something is true" already highlights how said truth is extant and nontrivially dependent on the reasons you come up with. "Why do I think something is true?" is a question that breaks a statement down to its cruxes, and allows for the overturn of that dependent fact far more fluidly (and in a way that is true to life) than merely accepting it and attempting to have featureless calibraton stay stable without any reductive logic holding it in place.
The fear expressed above is possibly Gendlin error. Sticking to something now, and tying it to its foundations, is scary if the thing you're tying down can become necessary.
It is not safe to believe.
This is a tragedy, should you define tragedy by the pain that cannot be healed.
You do it anyway.
This is semiotics.
g- Self explanation: Explain things to yourself to place the new thing in context of the old. Profit by having a context to approach new or interesting types of problems from.
Rereading and highlighting
Epistemic status: well damn established, across a variety of learner profiles. Apparently fairly useless for retention, inference. Well disconfirmed.
I like rereading sometimes, I don't highlight. THis is like, kay.
Summarizing
Epistemic status: one study mentioned. consensus, litrev??? Useful, but requires extensive training in summarization.
I...note-take? This seems adequately akin to summarizing.
Maybe look into how-to-summarize at one point.
Keyword mnemonic and imagery for text
Epistemic status: Dunno. One study is mentioned. Short-term gains, not widely applicable.