Supporting parents in the quest to help their children learn as effectively and efficiently as possible, A Parent's Guide to The Science of Learning translates 77 of the most important and influential studies on student learning into easily digestible overviews. This book will develop parents' understanding of crucial psychological research so that they can help their children improve how they think, feel and behave in school (and, indeed, in life).
Each overview summarises the key findings from the research and offers tips, hints and strategies for how you can use them in your home. Covering important areas such as memory, motivation, thinking biases and parental attitudes, this book makes complicated research simple, accessible and practical.
From large- to small-scale studies, from the quirky to the iconic, this book breaks down key research to provide parents with the need-to-know facts. Essentially, it is a one-stop shop that offers guidance on how to parent even better.
A Parent's Guide to The Science of Learning answers the sort of questions that every parent wants to know but doesn't know where to find the answers. This includes the small, everyday questions through to the big, life-changing ones. Some of the questions answered in this book include:
How much sleep does your child need?
Should I actually help them with their homework?
Why does my child forget what they have just learnt?
How much screen time is too much?
What can I do to help them do better at school?
Is it really that important that we all eat meals together?
How can I help my child learn to better manage their emotions?
How can I encourage them to be a better independent learner?
A hugely accessible resource, this unique book will provide parents with the knowledge they need to best support their children's learning and development.
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Numerous researchers from around the world have run studies that support these findings. For retrieval practice to be most effective, it has to be done at “low stakes”, which means it does not increase stress levels of students and is not used as a form of judgement of their abilities. We still do not know the optimum time to space sessions for distributed practice, which is currently being explored.
There is evidence to suggest that many students actually prefer to use study strategies that are least likely to lead to better learning. For example, several studies (#20, #69) have found that, even though it leads to lower exam results, students were most likely to rate simply re-reading the core material as more helpful rather than other, more effective strategies, such as doing lots of quizzes and tests. Likewise, many continue to revise whilst listening to music, even though this does not help (#15).
PARENTING IMPLICATIONS ✔
How can parents use these findings? It will vary depending both on the age of your child and the subject they are studying. The testing effect can be harnessed through regular short quizzes. Likewise, distributed practice is important in education systems in which students no longer do modular exams (such as in the UK), so encouraging your child to revisit previous topics throughout the year is even more important.
It is important that we teach our children what does and doesn’t work. Each minute spent highlighting or re-reading is 60 seconds not spent doing something more effective. As the authors of this study state:
A premium is placed on teaching students content and critical-thinking skills, whereas less time is spent teaching students to develop effective techniques and strategies to guide learning … teaching students to use these techniques would not take much time away from teaching content and would likely be most beneficial if the use of the techniques was consistently taught across multiple content areas, so that students could broadly experience their effects on learning and class grades.
THE ONE ABOUT ASPIRATIONS AND EXPECTATIONS
RELATED RESEARCH
Subsequent research has found that most aspiration interventions do little to improve a child’s educational attainment. Having high aspirations but being unable to achieve them has been found to lead to student resentment, frustration and social withdrawal.
The research has been far more positive on the impact and predictive power of high expectations if combined with high aspirations. Students’ high expectations of themselves have been found to increase their confidence that they will answer more questions correctly on a quiz. Research suggests that having high expectations is most beneficial if done at the start of the school year or at the beginning of a new project, as this allows students to approach the year or project with no negative pre-conceptions or ideas.
An interesting related area of research has focused on the impact that parental and teacher expectations have on student performance. In most cases, this has been found to help raise student performance. A word of caution, however: if expectations are too high and unrealistic, then this can lead to an increase in stress and anxiety (#43).
PARENTING IMPLICATIONS ✔
Since this study suggests that combined high aspirations and expectations are important, it is interesting to consider how parents can help develop this. One possible way is to start by looking at our own attitude towards education, as evidence suggests that this may have a big impact on our children’s educational achievement (#9).
These high expectations and positive attitude towards education can be conveyed through discuss ing how important school is, the overall value of education and how a positive attitude towards their teachers is important to learning and getting the most out of that education.
Another approach would be to help our children bridge the gap between aspirations and expectations. As the authors of the study note:
[We] should encourage their students to raise and maintain high levels of aspirations. However, these high aspirations should be reinforced by equipping students, particularly those coming from poor and disadvantaged families, with necessary skills.
These skills include any that help harness the motivation that comes with having high aspirations that can be turned into better grades. These include strategies such as metacognition, self-regulation and effective memory strategies such as spacing (#4) and retrieval practice (#20) and teaching the material to someone else (#36).
THE ONE ABOUT THE PLANNING FALLACY
RELATED RESEARCH
A lot of research has addressed the importance of setting goals, deadlines and knowing how long is left in a task (#74). Setting goals can help students focus their attention, minimise distractions and enhance work ethic and persistence. Likewise, setting regular deadlines has been found to help students manage their time and energy over the course of the year as well as improving overall grades (#47). This is because the further away a deadline seems, the less impact it has on people’s attention, which subsequently reduces how effectively they spread out their efforts.
Other research to help people better manage their time has revolved around minimising procrastination. One popular strategy includes just doing the task for a few minutes, since actually starting a new project is half the battle. Other techniques include improving self-regulation so that students are less likely to get distracted, as well as doing the hard and important tasks early in the day, as students probably have more energy in the morning than late at night.
PARENTING IMPLICATIONS ✔
As students get older, independent study is emphasised more. Clearly, time management is an important skill needed for this, as is making accurate estimations on how long different tasks will take.
Results from this study suggest that there are two key things that parents can do to help children make more accurate predictions. The first is to break a task down and help them set short, regular deadlines. The second is to help them make clear, explicit comparisons to previous similar tasks they have done. Helping them draw similarities and distinguish differences, as well as reflecting on how long these tasks took, will help improve their planning time.
The researchers of this study offer a word of warning on this, though, noting that “it seems that people can know the past and yet still be doomed to repeat it”. Parents can play a key role in helping their students learn from their previous mistakes. Indeed, the researchers state that “individuals will generate more realistic and accurate predictions if they take past completion times into account. This improvement in prediction should only occur, however, if participants’ recollections are valid and if their present task is comparable with the projects that they recall”. Parents are well placed to offer guidance and provide a sense of perspective on this.
THE ONE ABOUT SPACING YOUR LEARNING
RELATED RESEARCH
The Spacing Effect is one of the longest and most enduring findings in cognitive psychology. It was first detailed in 1885 by German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, who found that humans tend to forget large amounts of information if they only learn something once. This is partially why students suffer from a ‘summer learning loss’ over the school holidays (#73). Since Ebbing-haus, research has consistently shown the power of spacing ...
