THE NEW SCIENCE OF LEARNING - Amazon S3 · 2019-03-08 · level education (Carnevale, Jayasundera, & Gulish, 2016). In addition to being educated to get these jobs, there is no doubt

Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek

THE NEW SCIENCE OF LEARNING

How to Learn in Harmony With Your Brain

SECOND EDITION

Foreword byKathleen F. Gabriel

STERLING, VIRGINIA

The New Science of Learning.indb 3 23-11-2018 13:05:36

Sample Chapter www.Styluspub.com

COPYRIGHT © 2019 BY STYLUS PUBLISHING, LLC.

Published by Stylus Publishing, LLC.22883 Quicksilver DriveSterling, Virginia 20166-2019

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, recording and information storage and retrieval, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Doyle, Terry, 1951- author. | Zakrajsek, Todd, author.Title: The new science of learning: how to learn in harmony with your

brain / Terry Doyle and Todd Zakrajsek.Description: Second Edition. | Sterling, Virginia: Stylus Publishing, LLC,

[2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018022978 (print) | LCCN 2018023565 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781620366592 (ePub. mobi) | ISBN 9781620366585 (uPDF) | ISBN 9781620366561 (cloth: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781620366578 (paperback: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781620366585 (library networkable e-edition) | ISBN 9781620366592 (consumer e-edition)

Subjects: LCSH: Learning ability. | Learning, Psychology of. | Brain. | Study skills.

Classification: LCC LB1134 (ebook) | LCC LB1134.D68 2018 (print) | DDC 371.33/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022978

13-digit ISBN: 978-1-62036-656-1 (cloth)13-digit ISBN: 978-1-62036-657-8 (paperback)13-digit ISBN: 978-1-62036-658-5 (library networkable e-edition)13-digit ISBN: 978-1-62036-659-2 (consumer e-edition)

Printed in the United States of America

All first editions printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards InstituteZ39-48 Standard.

Bulk PurchasesQuantity discounts are available for use in workshops and for staff development. Call 1-800-232-0223

First Edition, 2013



1

I N TR O D U C T I O N

With so much talk about students who struggle in their classes and how to improve learning in college and university classes, we tend to forget that learning in everyday life is often effortless. Learning isn’t confined to the textbooks you read, the lectures you hear, or the class notes you struggle to memorize. You learn all the time without even thinking about it and frequently without even trying. You take short-cuts while walking across campus and learn faster ways to get to certain buildings, you watch movies and learn how police catch serial killers, and you play sports or games and quickly learn who is the best player on the opposing team. At times like these, learning is not something you have to struggle with or spend a lot of time lamenting the diffi-culty of the work. You likely find it fun to learn, and this type of learn-ing happens without even thinking about it. There are other times when learning is difficult and takes a great deal of effort—sometimes in the “real world” and often in your academic studies. You may find it challenging to learn when to apply a new math equation, figure out what your boss really wants in a weekly report, decide which database will work best for a new project at work, or break down complicated plays in a new team sport. It is difficult, but critical, to figure out what makes learning easy some of the time and very difficult at other times. You don’t need help learning how to learn when the learning is easy. That you can do on your own. This book is designed to help you learn more about how to learn when the learning is difficult. Notice we said “help you.” Nothing can make difficult learning easy, but there are



2 introduction

research-based strategies to make it a lot easier. That is what this book is designed to do.

Several thousand years ago, the primary obligation of the human brain was to figure out how to do the things essential to all animals: find food (including differentiating between nutritious and poisonous food), not get eaten by a predator (including finding a safe place to sleep), and reproduce to keep the species alive (typically accomplished by finding a mate). Now, in addition to those basic human functions, our brains are inundated with a multitude of things that need to be learned. Unfortunately, the evolution of the biological structures of the brain does not allow for change as rapid as the pace at which our soci-ety is currently changing. Just imagine how much more complicated human life has become in the last 100 years, or just 4 generations. The life you live is massively different in terms of human information processing than the life lived by your great-grandparents when they were your age. College alone is a challenge that many of our great-grandparents never faced. The challenge is that although our world is very different, the brains we were born with are not really any differ-ent from those of our great-grandparents. Although our brains have not changed significantly in the past several hundred years, our under-standing of how our brains work is light-years ahead of where we were just a few years ago. This new information helps to make sense of the dizzying amount of information we face every day.

New insights into how the human brain learns make it clear that many of the learning practices faculty used in the past, and students continue to use, are highly inefficient, ineffective, or just plain wrong. Worse yet, individuals who get bad grades on tests, or fail to under-stand a reading, repeat the same bad behaviors they engaged in the first place. Better learning often does not require more effort or more time, but rather effectively aligning how the brain naturally learns with the demands of the college classroom. This book succinctly outlines sev-eral easily adapted changes that will significantly enhance your college experience by helping you to learn how to learn in harmony with your brain.

Why is it particularly important to learn how to learn as effec-tively and efficiently as possible? The onslaught of new information,



introduction 3

innovation, and challenges facing our world is not going to dimin-ish. College students today face a new world order where global com-petition for jobs is the norm rather than the exception. India and China have twice as many honor students as the United States has people (Herbold, 2008). These honor students will be seeking the same professional positions that you are seeking. A 2016 study by the Georgetown University Center for Education and the Workplace revealed that those with a bachelor’s degree or higher have significantly better employment prospects (and are more likely to get better jobs—those that pay more than $53,000 per year for full-time employment and come with benefits) than those with only a high school diploma or less. Since 2010, 11.6 million new jobs have been created and 99% of those jobs have gone to individuals with some college- or university-level education (Carnevale, Jayasundera, & Gulish, 2016). In addition to being educated to get these jobs, there is no doubt you will need to update your skills and knowledge on a continual basis to keep these jobs. As a result, as a student in college right now you must expect to become a lifelong learner to remain employed. It is essential that you become a highly efficient and effective learner who retains learned knowledge and skills for a lifetime, not just for a test, if you are to compete effectively on the world stage.

This brief book, based on current research about how the human brain learns, will help you to change the ways in which you prepare to learn, make your learning easier and more effective, and improve recall of newly learned material when you need it at a later time. Think about all of the time you are now spending learning new things for your classes. It is ironic that in higher education most individuals spend most of their time learning and very little to no time learning how to learn better. Taking the time to read and reflect on the material in this book will be one of the best decisions you have ever made as a learner. At this point you might be thinking, “There must be a million books out there about how to study and be successful in college.” There are many books to teach better study habits and skills, but this is not a book designed to teach you specific study skills, learning strategies, or how to improve your attitude toward learning. This book explains the research about how the human brain learns in a way that is easy



4 introduction

to understand and act on. This book gives you a foundation on which you can build study skills as needed, but with a much better under-standing as to why and how those skills can be best implemented.

As just one example, did you know that neuroscientists have shown that understanding of new material and subsequent recall of that material is enhanced if you don’t “stack” your classes so that one occurs right after another? Taking classes back-to-back might help you avoid early courses, reduce your time on campus, or give you one or two days off a week. The problem is that back-to-back classes makes learning much more difficult. Research clearly shows that the human brain needs downtime between different learning experiences in order to process and begin to make new memories of the newly experienced material. The brain needs to work to learn new things, and we need to give it time to undertake the necessary processing. Neuroscientist Lila Davachi of New York University (Tambini, Ketz, & Davachi, 2010) said that “students would be better off taking a coffee break where they just chat with friends for an hour following a college class—it would actually be better for their learning.” Strategic downtime to avoid over-loading the brain processing a lot of new unrelated material, when not overdone, is an effective part of the learning process.

The authors of this book have a singular goal for anyone reading: to better understand how you can learn how to learn in harmony with your brain! It is not difficult to make the changes suggested in this book. But it is critical. Becoming a skilled and efficient learner will be one of the most important determinants of what you can and will achieve in your lifetime. Our purpose in writing this book is to help you reach your full potential by providing you a simple way to under-stand the learning process.

A Special Note to the Reader

We have purposefully written each chapter of this book as a stand-alone introduction to a specific aspect of the human brain. As a result, some information is repeated in multiple chapters because it relates to the topic in that chapter or an activity under discussion. For example,



introduction 5

making new memories is affected by sleep (chapter 2), exercise (chap-ter 3), attention (chapter 8), and practice and elaboration (chapter 6). We believe the repetition will serve to reinforce important information about learning and that you will find it helpful to consider the infor-mation in multiple ways.

Critical Thinking and Discussion Questions

1. Briefly describe one thing you have learned in the past week that was easy and one thing you learned in the past week that was dif-ficult. How did these two things differ from one another? Why was one easy and the other difficult? Don’t simply say, “Because I liked one more than the other.” Think about why one was easier than the other.

2. What is one strategy that you have used regularly that you feel helps you to learn? Ask three different people to describe one strat-egy that each uses. How are your strategies similar to and different from their strategies? For those strategies that are different, why might their strategies work or not work for you?

3. Read one published article that addresses the concept of how people learn. Note whether this is a research article or a popu-lar press article and why that might be important. Identify one strategy or concept from the article that you can implement into your own learning. After trying this strategy a few times explain whether, or to what extent, this strategy or concept facilitates your learning.

References

Carnevale, A. P., Jayasundera, T., & Gulish, A. (2016). America’s divided recovery: College haves and have-nots. Washington DC: Georgetown Uni-versity Center for Education and the Workforce. Retrieved from https://cew-7632.kxcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/Americas-Divided-Recovery- web.pdf



6 introduction

Herbold, R. (2008, December). Does the U.S. realize it’s in competition? Think. Retrieved from http://www.case.edu/magazine/spring summer 2010/competition.htm

Tambini, A., Ketz, N., & Davachi, L. (2010). Enhanced brain correlations during rest are related to memory for recent experiences. Neuron, 65(2), 280–290.



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THE NEW SCIENCE OF LEARNING - Amazon S3 · 2019-03-08 · level education (Carnevale, Jayasundera, & Gulish, 2016). In addition to being educated to get these jobs, there is no doubt