For a few decades now, educators have suggested that
computers would vastly improve our ability to teach students. The assumption has been that with computers
we would be able to transport students to places they could not go on their
own, allow them to communicate with people around the globe, and get more
personalized instruction.
So far, the influence of computers in education has been
mixed. Computers clearly allow access to
a much larger library of materials than students would were able to get before
the internet. In addition, students can
view interesting videos that bring more content than the filmstrips and videos
that were the norm in the past.
However, computers have had a downside as well. The internet provides a lot of distraction
that leads students to try to multitask in ways that hamper learning. Video lectures (like MOOCs) have not yet
lived up to the hype. It is just hard to
watch a lecture on a screen. And there
have been few successful methods for personalizing instruction to individual
student needs.
This issue of personalized practice was explored in a paper
by Robert Lindsey, Jeffery Shroyer, Harold Pashler, and Michael Mozer in the
March, 2014 issue of Psychological Science.
They compared three methods for helping eighth-grade students
to learn Spanish vocabulary. For each of
these methods, all students studied for the same amount of time.
One group of students just practiced the most recent lesson
each week for 10 weeks. This process is
similar to what many students do now when their weekly quizzes focus on the
most recent material. A second group got
a generic kind of practice that spaced practice out over weeks in which they
were given the chance to study both material from the current lesson and from
the previous lesson.
A third group used a more complex technique to guess what
material each student was most likely to be just about to forget. This technique used a student’s performance
each week to estimate their overall ability to remember vocabulary, the
difficulty of particular items (judged by how well students in general were
able to learn those items) and how often they had seen those items previously. Using this technique, students spent most of
their time each week on the new items from the current lesson, but then
received a smattering of older items to help them with older information that
they would be likely to forget.
Students got a test at the end of the semester and another
test after a four-week break as they started the next semester. On both tests, students given the
personalized training regimen did much better than those who either studied
just the words from the current week or those who studied the words from the
previous week and those from the current week.
The biggest benefit for the personalized training came for items that
were learned early in the semester.
Students given this training were much less likely to forget those items
than those given the other two techniques.
This finding suggests that when students are learning
information that requires a lot of practice, computers may be used to individualize
practice for the needs of particular students.
Of course, computers are just enhancing a piece of the learning
here. Picking up a new language requires
learning vocabulary, but it also requires learning to actually
communicate. This technique helps with
memorization, but not with the use of the new language.
One concern that I have with this technique, though, is that
students need to learn material, but they also need to learn to study
effectively. That is, students need to
learn that the reason that they succeed with this new technique is because it
finds difficult items from the past that they are just about to forget and gets
them to study those items. These
students will not always have a computer in front of them helping them to
figure out what material to study. So,
they need to learn to apply some of these strategies on their own in order to
maximize their ability to learn in the future.
