Changing Education: What is your learning style?
From a young age, I was taught that there was only one way to learn: listen to your teachers and read the textbook. While my friends picked up this ability with ease, I, on the other hand, struggled to interpret even a paragraph of a textbook, despite the time and effort I put into understanding the material. I realized that I could not fit in the traditional mold. Eventually, I became frustrated with school. It was not until I got involved in the research program, where I started to question society’s learning tradition. I picked up how a researcher learns - reading primary papers, applying that information into prospective projects, and finally presenting that knowledge to other people. This process allowed me to not only understand the information past what I learned in class but also engage myself in information in areas I could never envision enjoying as a child. Applying this process into my life, I was able to not only learn in-class information but also realize the pleasure and importance of being educated.
Even though it ended well for me, I questioned if other students also have similar struggles as I did. According to the U.S Department of Education, around 1.2 million students drop out of high school each year in the United States. Additionally, John Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprise, found that 47% of students dropped out of high school because their classes were not interesting and 67% were not motivated to learn. Students are not only readily dropping out of high school but also not being adequately prepared for college. According to Complete College America, an organization that promotes the number of college graduates, two-thirds of students who attend a four-year college fail to earn their degree within 6 years. Furthermore, only about 68% of high school students graduate on time, of those who do, merely 27% of them are able to persist through the first two years of college. Both issues calls attention towards the need to improve our secondary education system so that students are not only engaged in learning but also prepared for college.
For the past two years, my partner and I have been researching and conducting experiments that aim to creativity improve students’ learning performance and engagement. Last year we looked into how students’ expectations of an assessment could influence students’ learning performance. We divided students into two groups: some expected to teach material to other students or expected to take a test on the material; however, both groups were given a test the next day. We found that students who expected to teach not only did better on the test but also were more engaged in the information. Even though this study was not directly applicable to a classroom setting – due to the deception involved, finding a way to incorporate communicating into education could be beneficial to student’s learning ability.
Another study conducted by Gruber, Gelman, and Ranganath, researchers at the University of California, Davis, found that being in a state of curiosity could improve memory of related and unrelated content. They tested this by having subjects rate how interested they were in knowing the answer to 119 trivia questions. However, right before the answer to a question was shown, the subjects saw a random face. After they went through the questions, subjects were given a surprise recall test; they had to remember the answers to the questions and any faces they remembered. The researchers found that the subjects who were more interesting in knowing the answer to a specific question were more likely to remember the answer and the faces shown. Unlike the previous study, this could be easily be applied in a classroom setting. Most teachers usually present an AIM question before starting the lesson taught for the day. That question generalizes what the student would be learning. It would be interesting to modify it into a trivia question and see if students would be curious to know the answer by the end of the lesson.
Continuing from previous research, my endless search strives to answer this inquiry: how can a combination of these changes in education potentially harness better learning performances in a way that is engaging to students?