Many students believe that they cannot “do math,” or understand science, or write poetry, or succeed in some other academic discipline. When you ask them about this belief, you find that what they really are saying is that they believe that learning should be easy, but when they learn in these disciplines, it is effortful. What they don’t know is that learning and remembering involve multiple, interdependent processes.  Some types of learning occur implicitly, that is without conscious awareness.  Other types of learning are very easy, and other types of learning are effortful, perhaps even painful and aversive, such as learning the names of the facial nerves or how to “do” long division.  It is only after they invest in the hard work of learning that additional learning in these fields becomes easy and more automatic. There is no single set of learning principles that will always work.  If I were learning how to ride a unicycle, I would need to practice on a unicycle, no amount of expert explanation would substitute for my getting on the unicycle and pedaling; but I do not have to experience different events in history in order to “know” them.  The best way to learn and recall something will depend, in part, on what it is you want to learn and recall as well as what you already know. 

4.          Experience alone is a poor teacher. There are countless examples where what we learn from experience is, in fact, systematically wrong.  For example, most jurists believe that they can tell from a person’s demeanor whether she or he is telling the truth.  In fact, they cannot.  Therapists believe that a particular intervention has worked when a client improves after that intervention; of course, if most clients enter therapy at times of crisis, then improvement is likely no matter what intervention is taken because of the ubiquitous effect of regression to the mean.  If a client does not improve, then therapists reason that he or she was too sick to benefit from the good treatment.  There are countless examples of this sort of erroneous thinking, where our beliefs about the world are maintained and strengthened despite the fact that they are wrong.  We end up with great confidence in our erroneous beliefs. 

This is important because there is a popular belief that all learning and learning assessments should be “authentic”--a term that I don’t particularly like. I’d settle for phony learning if what was learned met the tests of long-term retention, retrieval when needed, and flexible recall and use of the information that was learned so it can be used creatively—regardless of how it was learned. Authentic situations are often not optimal for good learning. What is missing from most authentic situations and from most real-life situations is systematic and corrective feedback about the consequences of various actions.  When jurists have many experiences where they believe that they can tell if someone is lying and they receive feedback as to whether or not the individual is lying, they can learn that they are not good judges of truth telling.  In real life, the systematic feedback is usually missing, so they continue to believe that they are good at the task of identifying liars when, in fact, they are not.  Similarly, in the absence of reliable and regular feedback, we tend to believe that our interpretations of social events are accurate or the reasoning behind a political belief system is valid when it may not be.

Let me quickly list a few more examples of ways that can be applying cognitive principles to our teaching and learning.

• Virtually all science courses, especially at the introductory level, involve a lecture portion where a lone teacher mostly talks (and writes on the board) and learners take notes—a satisfactory arrangement for learning if the desired outcome is to produce learners who can repeat or recognize the information presented, but one of the worst arrangements for the promotion of in-depth understanding. In this example, the problem is that both the faculty and students believe that achieving a high score on a recognition test (i.e., multiple choice exam in which the questions tap lower level cognitive processes) or a test that requires only repetition of course material is evidence of “good learning.” Unfortunately, it is possible for students to achieve a high score on tests like these and not be able to recognize that a concept applies in a slightly altered context or be able to apply a concept at some time in the future.

• Laboratory exercises are mostly “canned,” requiring very little original thought by the learners and few surprises for anyone, thus bearing little resemblance to the cognitive processes needed in real research laboratories. The more creative aspects of research, including the generation of a genuine question and the multiple decision points encountered in the research process are invisible to students in most laboratory courses, especially at the introductory level, where the vast majority of college students complete their formal science education. It is impossible to estimate the number of potential scientists and scientifically informed citizens who are lost at this level because they fail to see any excitement in research, but there are many reasons to believe that it is a large number.
• AsAsAsAsking learners to recall some information leads to selective “forgetting” for other related information that they were not asked to recall. Thus, the act of remembering strengthens some memory traces and weakens others, a fact that should influence how we test students. Few college faculty are aware of this effect and inadvertently are creating learning activities that actually cause forgetting for information that want students to retain. When students are tested frequently, they receive higher scores than students who are tested infrequently, thus creating the impression that frequent testing is a sound educational practice. Conscientious professors will often use frequent testing because they believe that the high scores achieved on these tests show that frequent testing is a sound educational practice. But, frequent testing also leads to overconfidence in learners who erroneously believe that their long-term retention for the information will be better than it actually is, a belief that should lead them to put less time and effort into studying the material for future recall This is another example where the short-term benefits of an educational practice masks the long-term detriments associated with it.