Help students
learn, help students get good grades, or get good student evaluations? I would think that the same learning activities
would result in all three results. But
then, I would be wrong! I start every
semester with advice for students on how to learn; this semester it’s how to learn
Ichthyology and make it stick. If interested, watch
the How to Become an Ichthyologist video.
 |
| Unfortunate dominant learning strategy. Source |
All college
students are very capable at the "cram, pass, and forget" learning strategy. Unfortunately, for them, every
semester is another in a long series of fill, dump, and reload activities. One of the first principles I explain to students is the
"forgetting curve," first described by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885. If we do not have to retrieve what we
just heard or read, most of what we heard or read will be quickly forgotten. Therefore, I provide students of Ichthyology
a number of reading prompts to accompany all assigned readings. Read, recall, write it down, and summarize
what it means in your own words. It
helps to relate a new reading with what you already know or explain it to
somebody else in your own words.
Highlighting, cramming, and re-reading a passage do NOT work. If you take the time to read and respond to
reading prompts, you will retain information longer.
Peter Brown and
his colleagues explained a number of key principles of learning in the book, Make it Stick. The book is a treasure for teachers and
learners. Authors emphasize the
importance of activities that incorporate retrieval practice, generation, and
elaboration. One of the concepts I
found most attractive was the notion of creating “desirable difficulties” in
the classroom. I will often provide the
student a difficult quandary to read before reading a new chapter. Students will not directly find the answer to
the quandary in the reading alone.
Rather they will have to wrestle with thinking about the new problem and
rely on other knowledge. Life is a comprehensive exam!
I am a big
supporter of “Students quizzing students.” Here the student is free to project their
sketches, specimens, or dissected specimens under the document camera as they
quiz their peers. Here students must use new terminology and concepts and
generate non-trivial questions that quiz others. In the Lab Notebooks, students struggle with
deciding what information to include and what to write. This activity is the first stage
of learning: acquisition of information and encoding it for later recall. This is one of the desirable difficulties that
encourage recall and connections with prior knowledge. There is nothing simple about learning
anatomy or how to efficiently identify closely related fishes. Learning is plain and simply hard work, but
the struggles increase intellectual abilities.
Students of
Ichthyology, when they don’t challenge themselves with quizzes generated by
other students, inevitably overestimate their preparedness for exams. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect (Kruger and Dunning 1999). The Ichthyology student who diligently makes
flashcards and uses them to practice recall will soon master the flashcards,
but be unable to pass an authentic exam.
That is why I encourage students to quiz one another and be prepared for
a true unknown in the practical exam of real life.
Students of Ichthyology must realize the practical meaning
of variance among individuals. I use a
class Flickr site to archive, tag, and annotate photographs. Not every specimen will look just like the
illustration in the field guide Use of Flickr permits students to
examine numerous specimens from the same species, genus or family. I also encourage students to draw what they
see in lab; it forces them to slow down and pay attention to what they are
seeing. I believe that drawing encodes
visual features, which are easier to remember than words. “And learning to
draw, without doubt, causes new connections in the brain that can be useful
over a lifetime for general thinking. Learning to see in a different way
requires that you use your brain different” (p. 3, Edwards 2012).
At the highest level
of Bloom’s taxonomy is “creation.” In
Ichthyology class, my students create a digital story and an essay. The digital story assignment encourages deeper reflection on their struggles to learn Ichthyology. The essay is on a fascinating fish topic,
such as “Punishment in cleaner fish,” Why are some fishes gonochoristic?” or “Is
there a “love hormone” in fish?” This learning
activity develops their inquiry skills and challenges them to “make it
interesting to others.” Becoming an
Ichthyologist may not be the career goal of each and every student, but
learning to become a better student of the fishes develops numerous skills
transferable in their future endeavors.
References
Edwards, B. 2012.
Drawings on the right side of the brain.
Tarcher/Penguin, NY. 283 pp.
Brown, P.C., H.L. Roediger, III, and
M.A. McDaniel. 2014. Make it stick: The
science of successful learning. Belknap Press, Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA
313 pp.
Kruger, J. and D. Dunning.
1999. Unskilled and unaware of it: How
difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated
self-assessments. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 77:1121-1134.
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