It’s back to school and it’s back to study of a second language for the vast majority of D’Evelyn students. It’s thus fitting to discuss learning strategies that maximize students’ mastery of French, Latin, or Spanish. I took some time this summer to develop my instructional skills by reading a revealing study of the neuroscience of optimal learning, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown et al., (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014). My goal in doing so was gaining techniques for more effective lesson design. I share here four tested and proven approaches to maximal mastery so that you can help your student increase his or her success.
Desirable Difficulty
A key transferable asset for students as they learn in any discipline is the realization that building some difficulty into one’s study routine fosters effective learning. Neuroscientific research demonstrates that overcoming short-term impediments leads to stronger and more lasting retention. Re-reading textbooks and highlighted notes is easy and builds recognition, but recognition does not build reliable recall, production skills, or a capacity for analysis. D’Evelyn students will benefit from early adoption of a study scheme that incorporates information retrieval strategies, which, though hard at the beginning of a lesson, lead to growth through meaningful repetition.
Learn in All Modes
Each student tends to have an “easier” mode of learning (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, etc.). Following on research establishing the value of desirable difficulty, neuroscientists have found that learning primarily in one’s preferred style is actually less powerful than learning in multiple modes. Students who build study routines in which they practice the elements and use of language in all modes (writing, speaking aloud, reading, listening) will gain mastery sooner. In other words, vocabulary and conjugations can and should be practiced in writing, visually, and (with the right study partner or technology) orally and aurally.
Space and Interleave Learning
Massed practice (studying with one focus in a single long setting) is not the way to win, especially when it happens the day before the test! From the beginning of a unit, students each day should do multiple shorter study and learning sessions. Effective learning can now be running through retrieval of vocabulary (in multiple modes!), now verb conjugation (in multiple modes!), or now practicing dialogue with a friend. Interleaving (working in learning and study activities for other courses between study of the Foreign Language material) multiplies the enhanced learning power of using spaced and varied modes of practice.
Calibration
It does no good for a student to wait until a quiz or test to demonstrate how much he or she knows. Calibration is the use of learning behaviors (flashcards with Dad, written reproduction of vocab or conjugations that Mom can check against the original list or textbook, peer quizzing about concepts or skills found in notes, computer drill) which give a student an authentic gauge of current mastery and, more importantly, a gauge of what errors need to be corrected for total mastery. Parents, this is a powerful way to support your son or daughter with the essential elements of language learning!
Moving Forward
Of course Make It Stick discusses these strategies (and others!) in greater detail. I encourage any parent or educator interested in enhancing student learning to read it. As your child learns the rich content of D’Evelyn Foreign Language courses and builds mastery of speaking, writing, and comprehension skills, he or she will benefit from implementing these four strategies as a start. Mastery of a second language requires that students build stronger and faster neural pathways by working to retrieve information from memory, by correcting errors, and by repetition until largely free of error. Especially in the sequentially-structured foreign language classroom at D’Evelyn, making knowledge stick for three, four, five years and beyond is critical. I hope that sharing these strategies give a sense of how to begin making it so!
The PHurrowed Brow 