How Students Actually Learn: Memory & Attention

Vicki Davis (00:05): Today’s show is sponsored by EF Explore America and the STEM Tours. To show your students how STEM impacts the world up close and in action, go to efexploreamerica.com/STEM and stay tuned at the end of the show to learn more.

Vicki Davis (00:25): Today, I’m so excited to be talking to Blake Harvard, who writes at The Effortful Educator, a psych teacher whose new book is Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning. Blake, you are really into how we learn?

Blake Harvard (00:44): Absolutely. I teach AP Psychology, and we talk about a lot of different topics, but my favorite without a doubt is cognitive psychology, which gets into how do we learn? It’s talking about different types of memory and how the brain works as far as we know. Through teaching psychology, I became intensely interested in: if we know how we learn, if we know things about memory, shouldn’t we be tailoring our class to that? How do we know if what we’re doing in class — how we design our lessons, the learning environment — is maximizing what we know about how the brain works, or possibly working against it? I got into this close to a decade ago, and I just love reading research and writing about it.

Vicki Davis (01:23): When you hear “Do I Have Your Attention?” I always think of Ferris Bueller — “Bueller, Bueller” — but you’re really talking about something serious. What is the overall feeling that you want teachers to have about this?

Blake Harvard (01:42): It is vitally important. As teachers, if we don’t have the students’ attention, there’s no learning. We know that attention is a necessary component of learning. I know that sounds silly, but it’s true — it’s a part of the memory processing model, and in my estimation, it’s where we lose students the most. It’s where teachers can sometimes get off course, because we think, “I need to garner their attention.” So we end up adding a lot of things to our lessons to make them more fun and exciting. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but we need to make sure we’re still focusing on what we need to focus on for learning the content. A lot of what I write about focuses on components of memory, especially attention — what gets in the way of our students’ attention in the classroom, what can steal it, and the research on that.

Vicki Davis (02:36): We’re both teachers, and I have a feeling we have some very similar philosophies. For example, one thing I’ve seen you write about is the power of the pre-test — just asking four or five questions at the beginning of class or the beginning of content. Can you talk about the power of that? I’d look at a pre-test and think, “What? You can’t expect them to know it.” But that’s not really the purpose, is it?

Blake Harvard (03:00): It’s great if they get it right, obviously, but pre-testing is telling their brain — consciously or almost unconsciously — “here’s what we’re going to talk about today.” There’s a lot of research into the impact of asking questions, even about something you haven’t covered yet. It zeros the brain in: “When I hear this term or concept today, it must be important. Coach Harvard already asked me about this — I really need to pay attention. This must be a piece of content I’m going to need to know.” The pre-test isn’t about getting it right. It’s about telling them what’s coming and what they need to focus on.

Vicki Davis (03:41): Let’s flip this. We’re talking about paying attention, but what are mistakes we teachers make — I’ve certainly lost my students’ attention before — that, if we shift away from them, our classrooms would be better?

Blake Harvard (03:56): The first one that comes to mind, something I used to do, is that if I was getting to a topic that was particularly confusing or difficult — I knew my students usually struggle with this — my instinct was to make the instruction almost more confusing. It was like, “This is really complex, so I need to give them a really good activity so they really get it.” But if the material is already complex, we don’t also need to give them a complex way of learning it. Our memory, especially working memory, is limited in its capacity. Only so much can we hold in conscious memory at one time. If they’re consciously trying to learn the new material while also learning the instructions for the activity, something’s got to give — and usually what gives is the material they’re supposed to be learning, because they want to make sure they complete the activity correctly. It’s almost like a sliding scale: the more complex the material, the simpler the activity and the more explicit the instruction should be. But we don’t see that all the time — the teacher in us thinks, “This is tough stuff, I need to make the activity awesome,” and awesome usually means more. You don’t want to do that.

Vicki Davis (05:01): Do you have any “wows” — like, “hey, this is something we probably don’t need to do”?

Blake Harvard (05:19): This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule that works 100% of the time with 100% of students — if it were, somebody would have packaged it up and would be selling it to your district office for lots of money, and anybody telling you that is selling you something. But think about the learning environment. To a degree, we may not have control over our seats — do we have desks, do we have tables? But it comes back to: am I teaching something brand new to my students? Is it a topic that’s confusing, with a lot of components, really complex? In cognitive psychology we call that element interactivity — are there lots of elements to this topic? I’m not saying group work is bad, and I’m not saying facing the front is bad. Research shows you need to tailor the seating to your goal from the lesson. If students are taking in a lot of new or complex information, they probably need to be seated facing where the instruction’s coming from. If I’m a high schooler and you have me turned around facing the wrong way because I’m in a group setting, just having to turn around might be enough for me to not pay attention.

Blake Harvard (06:47): That’s not to say that once we get that new information to you, we can’t turn around, form groups, do collaborative work, and build on the knowledge. My analogy is a tree. We love apple trees, magnolia trees — we love to look at the flowers blooming. I see that as the creativity in the classroom. We love it and we should. But you can’t ignore the roots of the tree. If the roots aren’t healthy, you’re not going to have the blooms. The roots are the foundational knowledge students need. You’ve got to build those schemas. If you don’t have healthy schemas, you can’t build on them or be creative with them.

Blake Harvard (07:33): So think about how you design your classroom and what might be stealing your students’ attention, from how they’re sitting to what’s on the wall. I want to remove as many of those barriers as possible. And taking it to the next level: I want students to think about how they study at home. What barriers are there? Are you trying to read your notes while your laptop’s open, your cell phone’s sitting there, and the television is on? You know what’s got your attention, and it isn’t your schoolwork. So I talk to them about it — it’s one thing for me to know about attention and memory; it’s another to impart it to my students, because they deserve to know it too. Many students go to college not understanding how they learn, and that’s a disservice. They need to know: “I don’t need to sit here and study for an hour straight. I’m going to put my phone in another room for 15 minutes, lock in, then take five and check my phone, then come back.” Creating an environment as free from distraction as possible leads to better learning — and anything that can be a distraction probably will be.

Vicki Davis (08:19): Is there any psychological principle about learning that’s the first thing you teach your students — that you just have to know this?

Blake Harvard (08:55): There are two big learning strategies I focus on with my students. There’s more research and more evidence supporting these than anything else that’s been studied. We’ve been studying these since the 1800s — over a century of research, with preschoolers all the way to 75-year-olds. They’re called retrieval practice and spaced practice. This isn’t rocket surgery. The best thing you can do as a student is retrieval practice and spaced practice. Retrieval practice means literally retrieving the memories, retrieving the knowledge. A very popular way of studying is to go home and reread your notes — I did it too. But there’s not a lot of effort, not a lot of cognitive load, in rereading your notes. How many times have you read a passage of your favorite book and then thought, “I have no idea what I just read”? Your eyes were scanning the words, doing their job, but your brain was thinking about what’s for dinner. Rereading is better than nothing, but if you’re going to spend the time studying, do the thing that gets the most out of it. Gather all the questions you can on a topic and answer them. I’m a big proponent of tools like Quizlet because they have students answer questions over and over — actually using the information. I tell my students: you’re not going to prepare for a game by watching practice. You’re going to get out there and practice yourself. Learning is the same way — you’ve actually got to think.

Blake Harvard (10:40): The other thing is spaced practice, which is the opposite of cramming. Cramming is popular — “I’ve got a test tomorrow, I’m studying right now,” or studying five minutes before the test. Some studying is better than none, but you might as well get the most out of it. Instead of cramming, here’s what I say — and you’ll actually save time. Instead of studying for an hour the night before, three nights before the test study for 15 minutes, then two nights before 15 minutes, then one night before 15 minutes. You’ve actually studied less, but because you thought about it over time more often, that memory is stronger in your brain than studying once. It’s like working out: the more consistently I work out, the better I get. Doing it once before the race isn’t good — if I’ve got a 5K tomorrow and today is the first time I’ve ever run, I’m going to be hurting. But if I practice a week or weeks in advance, I’ll be way better. We apply this to dance, theater, whatever practice we’ve got — but we don’t apply it to learning, and we absolutely should.

Vicki Davis (11:52): It’s worked with kids who struggle with short-term memory problems. It takes three days to get from short-term to long-term memory, so typically you have to give them three days to study. I have people in my family with that, and a teacher would say, “Hey, tomorrow we have a test,” and we’d have to go back and say, “No, no — this is going to take three days.” That’s just good learning. And many years ago I learned that students who make a test out for themselves with a key and take it do better. So I always did that. When Google NotebookLM came out, students can load my slides, hit a button, have a quiz, and check their answers. Now everybody can do that. My best students use those tools, and my weaker students reread their notes. If reading notes worked, we’d all have a lot better grades. You have to process notes — you have to do something with them.

Blake Harvard: Absolutely.

Vicki Davis (12:50): I always say, if Einstein were still alive, you wouldn’t get smarter by rubbing his head — you’d have to interact with him. It’s the same with your notes and everything else you’re doing. So, Blake Harvard — the book is Do I Have Your Attention? Understanding Memory Constraints and Maximizing Learning. He’s from Alabama, teaches AP Psych, and now you’re teaching the world about how learning works. There are so many more principles in his book and on The Effortful Educator about this cognitive approach to understanding how learning works. Thanks for coming on the show.

Blake Harvard (13:32): No, thank you so much for having me.

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