This summary highlights an article in which Kornell and Bjork, educational psychologists, review findings mostly from their own research. Their work explores “self-regulated study,” which involves “decisions students make while they study on their own away from a teacher’s guiding hand” (p. 219). It’s a topic of concern to most teachers as many students do not study all that successfully. Much of what teachers know about how their students study they learn from talking with students and seeing the results of study efforts. The work reported in this article provides a useful empirical benchmark.
The reference
Kornell, N., & Bjork, R. A. (2007). The promise and perils of self-regulated study. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(2), 219–224. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194055
The research questions
- How do students decide what to study?
- How long do they study? That is, how long do they persist before moving to another item, and when do they decide they no longer need to study a particular item?
- How do they study, specifically in terms of their use of two evidence-based strategies: spaced study (as opposed to cramming or what researchers call “massed” study) and self-testing?
Interesting background information
Students do make a wide range of studying decisions on their own—for example, which course to study for, which content in a course to study, what sections of the text to review, what problems to solve, and what skills to practice. A cross-disciplinary survey of 472 undergraduates, conducted by the authors, asked whether students studied the way they did because they’d been taught that was the way to study. Eighty percent of the students said no. “Four out of five students in our sample, therefore, had improvised their method of studying, presumably on the basis of intuition rather than research” (p. 222).
Study cohort
The article summarizes findings from various studies. The cohorts used were predominately undergraduates from a range of disciplines.
Methodological overview
Here as well, different methodological approaches were involved in the research. Virtually all of it was laboratory based. The subjects completed tasks such as learning words in a different language, sometimes with flashcards, and identifying an artist’s paintings after seeing samples of their work. These laboratory settings allowed for tighter control of variables than is possible in actual classroom settings. Although the tasks were not part of actual courses, they were not unlike those students regularly complete.
Findings
How do students decide what to study?
- An overall finding: study choices to a large degree depend on the learner’s goals. Does the learner want to master the material, or are they satisfied to learn only part of it—say, all that’s needed to earn a B?
- If there was no time pressure, study participants chose to study the most difficult items, but under time pressure, they opted for the relatively easy items.
- Study participants learned more when they chose what to study than they did when required to study items they did not chose.
How long do students study?
Once a student selects an item for study, they make two key decisions: how long to persist on one item before moving to the next and when to stop studying an item completely. The perseverance question has been studied more than the completion one. Both appear to be governed by a “judgment of rate of learning which is a judgment not of the learning itself but of the rate of learning” (p. 219).
- An overall finding: the easier the item, the more quickly the learning rate drops off, and that explains why students devote more time to difficult items. But if items are too difficult, the learning rate also drops off quickly, and studying stops.
- When participants studied pairs with strong forward associations (kitten-cat) and weak backward associations (cat-kitten), participants predicted equivalent recall of both pairs and chose to study both pairs for the same amount of time, despite the differences in their degree of difficulty.
- Based on a series of flash card studies in which subjects were allowed to drop flash cards or prevented from doing so, participants dropped not only the cards they knew, leaving more time for those they did not know, but also cards with items they then missed on the test. In a related study, when asked to type in answers as they studied, 58 percent of the items were dropped after a single recall. “Our work on flashcards suggests that people often stop studying something once they feel they know it at the present time, meaning that they often stop too soon” (p. 222).
Students should pace study sessions and self-test, but do they?
Spaced study and self-testing are described as “desirable difficulties” because they “introduce difficulties during study, but enhance long-term learning” (p. 221). As a result, they decrease a student’s perceived rate of learning, and that causes many students avoid using them.
- Overall finding: students don’t recognize that spacing out study sessions is advantageous.
- In one of Bjork’s studies, participants gave higher judgement of learning ratings after massed than spaced study sessions. In another study, where the task was learning the styles of 12 different artists by seeing the artists’ paintings either all at once or in spaced sessions, 78 percent of the participants did better in the spaced condition, but only 22 percent predicted they’d done better when the content was spaced.
- Overall finding: the decision to space or mass study is often a scheduling issue. When asked in the survey how they decide what to study, 59 percent said they studied whatever was due next or past due. Student “study schedules are largely driven by crises” (p. 222).
- Overall finding: “When adopting self-testing as a study strategy, it is important to choose the right time to test oneself, because the more difficult the retrieval . . . the larger the benefits” (p. 222).
- In one study, a majority of participants started seeing a word and its translation simultaneously, but then they switched to seeing the word and self-testing before seeing the translation.
Cautions and caveats
The findings are based on laboratory research—very good lab research, but that leaves open the question of whether the behaviors demonstrated in a laboratory are the same behaviors used when students study on their own. Chances are good that the behaviors are similar, if not the same, so results should be taken seriously but not unquestioningly.
Practical implications (what you might want to do about this research)
“Good study decisions rest on accurate monitoring of ongoing learning, a realistic mental model of how learning happens, and appropriate use of study strategies” (p.219). As this research work shows, that’s not how students are making their study decisions. The researchers acknowledge that becoming a metacognitively sophisticated learner is not easy. It requires going against certain intuitions and widespread practices. The implication for teachers? Only 20 percent of students responding to the survey reported having received instruction on study strategies, and some related research documents that even the small amount of study instruction being provided isn’t always evidence-based.
The article includes the multiple-choice questions used in the survey. Teachers could use them to gather good firsthand information. Results from the students being taught make it easier to target instruction.
Finally, the researchers offer this observation: “If [students’] pressure-driven priorities and activities are not conducive to long-term learning, the fault lies mostly with how we, as educators, structure curricula, requirements, and incentives” (p. 222). Inflexible deadlines and tests in multiple courses at the same time can be barriers to learning, and teachers can do something about both.
Related research
Morehead, K., Rhodes, M. G., & DeLozier, S. (2016). Instructor and student knowledge of study strategies. Memory, 24(2), 257–271. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2014.1001992
