As Owen pointed out in his last article, there has been a lot of focus around the learning sciences at Kaplan and more specifically how students balance the many things that are on their plate as pre-meds. Our recent Pulse episode featured that topic. In my discussions with colleagues on our learning sciences team some themes around how students study have evolved that I thought I would share with you.
In a conversation with Larry Rudman, Kaplan’s Vice President of Learning Sciences, the level of engagement that a student has while studying greatly affects how much they are retaining. Studies have shown that if students turn each paragraph they are reading into an opportunity to create a question, they can achieve greater retention of the material that they are trying to grasp. Its almost as if students create small assessment tests of their own to test their understanding as they progress.
By creating self assessment questions, students can come back to topics or concepts they do not understand while working towards the ultimate goal of full recall. Now, by nature, some subjects come easier than others for students. But as it turns out, a little struggling while trying to grasp a subject goes a long way. The act of trying to retrieve information makes for good learning, since this is usually accomplished by rereading a topic to better understand it.
Students like it when they understand everything, but easily get discouraged when there are parts of a subject they don’t understand. A great mechanism to overcome this problem is for students to set up little rewards for themselves and break down larger topics into larger topics, something especially important in the sciences that are so vast in their breadth of material.
