What Works, What Doesn’t
What is the text about?
What Works, What Doesn’t is a scientific article that aims at exploring the various learning techniques. The article explains that for more than a century now, both cognitive and educational psychologists have coined, studied, and tested several learning techniques that involve aspects such as re-reading, summarizing, and self-testing. From the analysis of the article, it found out that practice testing; which includes all kinds of factual information such as foreign language learning, when applied to medical students, is most useful among pre-scholars to around fourth years’ students. Out of the three aspects considered in the study article, rereading particularly text learning imagery proved to be the least effective.
Where is it from?
What Works, What Doesn’t article is a scientific study authored by a mixture of associate professors and professors. The authors of this article include John Dunlosky who is a professor of psychology at Kent State University; Katherine A. Rawson who is an associate professor of psychology at Kent State University; Elizabeth J. Marsh who is an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University. Other authors include Mitchell J. Nathan who is a professor of psychology, education psychology, and curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Daniel T. Willingham who is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. The article is published in Scientific American Mind in September/October 2013, under volume 24 issues 4.
Why you choose it? What makes it unique for you?
Over the last decades, teaching and learning have become a controversial issue in psychology. Although teaching has recently been identified and elaborate, learning has little knowledge to show its application to the medical field. Therefore, this article tries to examine the cognitive and educational psychologists’ perspective on learning techniques while focusing on medical students. The article incorporates a systematic review approach that analyzes the research objective basing on how it works, when it should be used, its practicability and the rating. The systematic review approach is totally different from the usual cohort review approach that most scientific research utilizes. Further, instead of the article analyzing the learning behavior of medical students, it identifies a learning technique and review medical students’ opinion about the technique thus making it unique from other studies.
How you plan on analyzing it?
On analyzing ‘What Works, What Doesn’t’ article, first I will have to read it through to get to understand the main idea of the authors. Then I would describe the article consciously by explaining what the article entails. Then, I would document the purpose of the article that makes the article relevant and important. Further, I would identify the research method the article utilizes to provide to provide facts on the research question and objectives. Then, I would do an evaluative check on the article to point out the evidential facts outlined in the article. Since the article is scientific, I would evaluate to find out other articles that the authors make reference to. Finally, I would analyze the sources utilized by the authors to understand how the authors made conclusive thoughts.
Any other relevant information about it?
The article points out that some learning techniques accelerate learning while others are a waste of time for the students. The article also contributes that the learning techniques should be applied to a wide range of learning conditions, thus assisting learning of different age groups, abilities, and prior knowledge levels. Despite the main objectives of the study, the article also highlights distributed practice, elaborative interrogation, and interleaved practice as learning techniques. Finally, the article highlights that students fail to use effective study techniques because their teachers are not educated on effective learning aspects.