This is a Text investigation. Consider your essential question in the context of at least two outside sources you have identified that connect to your essential question. How do these ideas resonate with or challenge your own beliefs, experiences, or practices? Be sure to give concrete and specific examples. You may want to address: ways the sources answered parts of your Essential Question, what additional questions were raised, or how your essential understanding of your project was altered or confirmed by the readings you did. Make sure to cite your sources.

What is one piece of advice almost every single high school and college freshman receives when it comes to learning and recalling studied information at a future time? – Find a single dedicated environment for you to carry out your studying in (like the library or a study room) and always come back to this same place to get into the “studying learning zone” to maximize your learning potential.

After spending time researching cognitive psychology and famous neuroscience trials I discovered that this cherished piece of advice that is predictably passed down to new scholars is not backed by cognitive psychological experiments – in fact varying the environmental context of learning contributes to better recall of learned material over a longer period of time. This is the same conclusion distinguished psychological research professor Robert Bjork came to after his famous 1978 experiment “Varying the environmental context of learning”. After hearing about this study from Bjork in his UCLA lecture on “how we learn vs how we think we learn” it solidified for me the importance of this research for my senior project. Learning is something we become intimately familiar with during our elementary years and should be something we continue to practice throughout our lifetime – yet students never take dedicated time to actually learn how to learn. We never take the time to understand the neuroscience behind memory and recalling learned information. We never take the time to learn what habits and environments contribute to better recall at a future date. We never learn why it is we forget information and why that process actually helps us recall other information(famously known as the Forget to Learn theory) – so let’s get learning already.

Adolf Jost, an Austrian psychologist, contributed to our understanding of what it means to forget information with his now famous, Jost’s Law: “If two associations are of equal strength but of different age, a new repetition has a greater value for the older one.” Translation: Studying a new concept right after you learn it doesn’t deepen the memory much, if at all; studying it an hour later or a day later, does. I have become intimately familiar with the “cram the night before the test and hope for the best” method of studying. Surprisingly, this method of learning usually works for the next day, I am able to scrape by the test just fine – but Jost’s law and other clinical psychological experiments helped explain to me that long term recall after learning with this method is practically nonexistent. I encourage whoever is reading this right now to quiz yourself on something that you only ever studied the night before a big test and see how much you remember now. Do you actually remember what was so important about James Madison’s Federalist No. 10? How about recalling Emma Lazarus’ famous sonnet, “The great Colossus” that is inscribed on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty? Jost’s law and other psychologists like Wozniak helped me realize two things, 1) that my traditional method of learning does me more harm than good and 2) that there are optimum learning intervals and habits that have been scientifically proven to maximize recall ability in the future. After a single study session, one can recall a new word for a couple days. But if restudied the next day, the word is receivable for about a week. After a third review session, a week after the second, the word is retrievable for nearly a month. Takeaways like this, that so effectively uncover more about my essential question, were only attained because of the freedom afforded to me by this senior project time. Research like this will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I suppose my new essential question should be expanded to more general questions like,  “What does it mean to learn?” “Can one maximize their learning potential? How?” “Do different mediums / experiences alter the effectiveness of learning?”

Sources:

Robert Bjork – UCLA lecture on “how we learn vs how we think we learn”

Adolf Jost, Wozniak, and Ebbinghaus, – “How We Learn, The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens.”