General Conclusions
Nobody has to learn how to learn. Simple forms of learning are
automatic and may even begin in the womb. Every normal person is born
learning, and mentally active people die learning. "To be living," is
nearly synonymous with "to be learning," and the evidence suggests that
when one stops learning, one's mind starts dying. Yet nobody learns
nearly as much as one could.
Some learning requires mental effort. You can listen passively
and learn to recognize and perhaps to enjoy a Mozart concerto. But if you
want to understand musical composition, you need to study that subject by
attending lectures and reading books. To become an expert requires years
of study. The result may not be that you enjoy Mozart more, but you would
certainly appreciate him more. College learning is a form of verbal
learning that requires a lot of mental effort.
The more you learn about a subject, the easier it gets to learn
more about it. In part this is because knowledge is cumulative, with old
learning providing a framework on which to add new information. Learning
also gets easier because we learn how to learn. For example when you
study a foreign language, you not only learn the meaning of foreign
words, you also learn something about how to study vocabulary lists. If
you learn that "mesa" in Spanish means "table" in English by repeatedly
saying "mesa-table, mesa-table...," you are learning to learn foreign
words by the method of rote repetition. Your skill in using that method
may improve the more you practice it, and you are likely to use that same
method when learning other foreign words.
There are usually several ways to learn verbal material. You
couldn't even get to college without having learned some of the successful
ways to learn. Because the ways you have learned how to learn work, you
are not likely to try out other ways unless you make a deliberate
commitment to do so. And even if the other ways are better, they
usually require more than just token practice. Faced with the practical
realities of classes and exams, most students quickly revert to their
"tried and true" ways. That is as it should be. This workbook will have
achieved its purpose if it has raised your awareness of the fact that the
way you learn verbal material is itself learned, and is therefore subject
to new learning as opportunities arise.
Return to the rote repetition method of learning mesa-table. You
should now know that such rehearsal does not build a very strong reverse
association from table to mesa. You should now know to make cards with
English on one side and Spanish on the other. Not only can you use such
cards in both directions, you can rehearse them at times that would
otherwise be wasted. You should now know that cards require you to
practice the test response, namely recalling the answer from memory. You
should now know that learning tends to dissipate over time, so you must
review the words that you have learned from time to time. You should now
know that knowledge is non-verbal, so you need to associate mesa with an
image/idea/thought of a table, not with the English word table. In doing
so, you should now know how to use imagery in such learning, for example,
by imagining a messy-looking table. In sum, even if you revert to rote
repetition when faced with a last-minute effort to learn, you should know
that there are other, more effective ways.
Why college?
When I ask freshmen why they are in college, the most common
answers are, "My folks wanted me to go," and "It just seemed like the
thing to do." Anyway, it beats getting a job. Some freshmen have
definite career goals, but most are undecided. The result is apathy,
often leading to poor performance, failure, and dropping out.
Whatever your reason for being in college, the first imperative is
to take it seriously. If you are the traditional college freshman right
out of high school, you probably have many other things on your mind
besides academics. Non-traditional students going to college after
several years of non-academic pursuits have a real advantage. They tend
to be more mature, more self-confident, more committed to success.
Whichever, don't short-change yourself. As long as you are in college,
resolve to do your very best. The stakes are too high to treat it as a
game where you win some and lose some.
The day I graduated from high school, my aunt, who was a college
professor, said to me: "You'll never feel as smart as you do today." How
right she was! The more I have learned, the more I have become aware of
how little I know. I think that the most unique feature of a college
education is that it can open one's mind to the infinite reaches of
knowledge that are known or waiting to be discovered. In the early grades
of education, each topic was finite. You learned the alphabet, and once
you knew it, that was that. You learned the multiplication facts, and
once you learned them, that was that. Even in high school, if you studied
Shakespeare, it seemed as if you learned
all there was no know about his work. Each subject had a beginning and
an end.
In college, every subject you study should begin to reveal an
endless domain of knowledge. Your professors have spent many years
studying their subjects, and they are at best experts in only a small
aspect of their fields. The greatest value of college education is not in
the actual content of what you learn. A college education prepares you
for a lifetime of continuing education. It is not an education that you
can "use" in the sense of technical and vocational skills. It is an
education you can use to achieve a quality of life that goes beyond the
necessities of life.
Coping with college life. Everyone has problems from time to
time. If you are a "traditional" college student, by which I mean a
person in the 18-22 age range coming directly from high school, college
comes at a pivotal time of your life. It is a time of striving for
maturity, independence, identity. If you are a non-traditional student,
the problems associated with late adolescence are replaced by others that
are appropriate to your status. Whichever, your first challenge is to
resolve your personal problems or to insulate yourself from them enough to
attend to your studies.
The key to successful coping with college life is self-discipline.
If you completed the time-management schedule given in Appendix A, you
know that there is time to do everything but not much left over to waste.
One component of that schedule is attending class, and some students infer
from the fact that college courses are based on the mastery concept that
class attendance is optional. In one sense, it is. If you can manage to
pass a course while cutting many classes, perfect attendance is not
necessary. But you can not learn a subject as well if you skip classes,
and you are also developing bad disciplinary habits. After all, going to
class is a major part of your "job" as a college student. Even if you are
paying full tuition, you are paying only a fraction of the cost of
maintaining the institution. Good discipline implies good attendance.
If you have not already developed good self-discipline habits, it
is imperative that you do so as quickly as possible. The best technique
for acquiring self-discipline is called "contingency management." The
essence of this technique is to list the various things that you need to
do, and also the things you want to do, and arrange them in an order from
the least to the most enjoyable. Then, working around your fixed
commitments such as attending class, start doing them in that
order...hardest to easiest, least liked to most liked. Along the way,
include plenty of self-reinforcers. Whenever you complete a task, be it
attending class or doing a homework assignment, take time to do something
you really like. "Managing" the contingencies means to reward yourself
for doing the things that need to be done.
In developing self-discipline, I urge that you NOT attempt to use
self-punishment when you do what you shouldn't do, or fail to do what you
should do. It is certainly appropriate to withhold rewards that you might
have enjoyed, but do not inflict pain or discomfort on yourself for
misbehavior. It is well beyond the scope of this book to explain the
effects of aversive punishment, but you are likely to do more harm than
good with self-punishment. If you concentrate on rewarding yourself for
doing what is right, such behavior will prevail without trying to punish
yourself for doing what is wrong.
Creatures of Habit. Whatever we do in any situation is what we
are most likely to do the next time we are in that situation. As this
happens repeatedly, the behavior becomes more and more habitual. This is
fine if the behavior is optimally adaptive. For example, the habit of
arising at an early hour in the morning is great. Many other habits are
desirable because that way of doing something is just as good as any
alternative. For example, it really doesn't make any difference which leg
you put in your pants first. Being a creature of habit has many
advantages in coping with everyday life.
However, sometimes our well-established habits are not optimal and
it is good practice to try out new alternatives from time to time. For
example, I recall resisting shifting to an electric typewriter because I
felt I was so proficient with a manual machine. Then, after become adept
with an electric typewriter, I was reluctant to shift to a word processor.
Each shift required some period of adjustment, but the ultimate advantages
are enormous. As I now recall writing my first book on a manual
typewriter, with erasers and carbon paper, I am amazed that it ever got
written. Hence, just because your old way of doing something works
doesn't mean it is the best way.
In this book, I have focused on old versus new ways of learning.
But the point I am making applies more generally than that. We are all
creatures of
habit and undoubtedly miss out on many ways that we could improve our
lives were we only to explore new and different ways of doing routine
things. I urge you to keep your mind open to new solutions to old
problems. I can almost guarantee that there is now, or will someday be, a
better way to do virtually
everything that you now do habitually.
Primacy.
College learning often involves new information that is
counter-intuitive or contrary to what you believed before. This conflict
between old and new ideas tends to have one of three consequences. First,
there is a tendency to distort the new ideas in such a way as to make them
somehow fit with the old
ideas. This consequence is that you never really understand the new idea.
Alternatively, your mind may simply reject the new idea and you never
really learn it at all. Finally, you may succeed in learning the new
idea, but it is easily forgotten and your memory reverts to the old idea.
None of these consequences is conducive to success in college.
Unfortunately, there is no foolproof antidote to the primacy
principle. Early learning is extremely resistant to change. But if you
are aware of that fact, you can take precautions to minimize its effect.
Whenever you realize that something is contrary to what you thought
before, make extra effort to see how the ideas are different. Realize
that you may not fully understand the new idea yet. Then try to keep the
ideas separate. Eventually, as more and more new ideas come along, you
will have that "aha" experience of finally getting the point. But you
will always have to be ready to recognize your old ideas when they recur.
The Wandering Mind.
Paying attention is the most critical skill for college learning.
Assuming that you have an adequate vocabulary to understand what you are
hearing or reading, attending to the words and processing the information
they convey is the essence of verbal learning. Doing so is hard mental
work, and we are all afflicted with the tendency for our minds to wander
to easier, more pleasant thoughts. It is therefore important to learn to
recognize when you are paying attention and when your mind is wandering.
The tendency for a student's mind to wander off from academic
subjects is largely a result of word associations. As I like to put it,
your mind has a
mind of its own...namely, that part of your mind that is unconscious. It
seems that your unconscious is always alert for any word that may occur in
a book or
a lecture that is in some way associated with any non(tm)academic topic
that may be troubling you. If you are concerned about money, health, sex,
loneliness, inter(tm)personal relations, etc., your unconscious keeps
trying to bring these to the fore. Unless you are alert to the
temptation, your mind can easily wander from physics to your love life.
There is no cure for your mind's wanderlust. It may help if you
set aside some time in your daily schedule to think about your troubles.
By satisfying the need to worry, to reminisce, to daydream at other times,
you can better resist those thoughts when you are studying. Otherwise,
the best you can do is to learn to recognize when your mind starts to
wander so you can bring it back on course.
Overshadowing.
Whenever a person is exposed to several things at the same time,
s/he may not learn about all of them. If one aspect is more noticeable,
more familiar, or more interesting than some other aspect, it may
capture most of one's attention and therefore most of what one learns.
Everyone remembers best the unusual sight, the dramatic climax, the
unexpected happening. Routine events are "overshadowed" by more
conspicuous ones.
Overshadowing is important to the college student because the
important information that you must learn is often overshadowed by its
context. One common example is a professor who tells lots of jokes in
class. Many students remember the jokes, but do not remember the
professor's points in telling the jokes. Another example is a textbook
(such as this one) that includes many familiar illustrations of the main
ideas. It is easy to remember the illustrations but fail to learn the
main ideas. You must be alert not to let jokes and illustrations distract
you from attending to the really important material.
Let me give an analogy. Most football fans keep their eyes on the
ball, following the exciting aspects of the play. However, if you want to
be a student of the game of football, you will quickly learn that most
games are won or lost by the less spectacular action on the front line.
In similar fashion, you may enjoy the jokes and the illustrations in a
college course but you must learn to keep your attention focused on the
basic ideas being presented.
For learning's sake. Some people say they want to climb a
mountain "because it is there." That is the ideal attitude to take toward
learning: Develop a desire to learn because knowledge is there to be
learned. Even if a course is a required part of a degree program, try to
approach it because of its
intrinsic interest. Learning is easier and better if it is done for the
sake of learning rather than to satisfy some requirement.
The human brain is surely the most marvelous thing in the world.
Its most marvelous feature is the capacity to learn. Nothing else in the
whole universe (except intelligent life on another planet) can acquire
knowledge from experience. Another of its marvelous features is the fact
that millions
of brain cells die every day of our lives, but the remaining cells are
able to carry on without any significant loss of brain power. For them to
do so, however, one must remain mentally active. Increasingly, the
evidence shows that you are most likely to "lose your mind" through
disuse. The most valuable
advice I can give you, or that you can give those you love, is this:
Never stop learning. The expression, "use it of lose it," applies more to
the mind than to the body!
POSTSCRIPT: Appendix J (Science and Behavior) and
Appendix K (Statistics) are not directly on the topics
of learning and memory. However, they provide some
relevant background for courses in the behavior
sciences and hence should be a part of your general
preparation for college. I therefore recommend that
you study them whenever time permits.
I also urge you to take the open-book final exam.
In doing so, remember the importance of being correct
lest you learn your errors. If you are not sure of
an answer, go back to the text and check yourself.
The value of this book to you is dependent on how much
you have learned of its contents.