Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Friday, February 18, 2011

Facilitating learning

Jakob Nielsen has long been an expert on Web site design. He is an expert because he does research and pays attention to research other people do. I read one of his books when I first began designing Web sites. I still refer to it. He collaborates Donald Norman, a designer whose book The Design of Everyday Things was a favorite of mine several years ago. Norman was also a consultant to Apple Computer.

Nielsen and Norman emphasize "usability" in everything from web pages, to product design, to learning materials and processes. It should be no surprise, then, to find the following article on Nielsen's web site about enhancing learning on the Web.

If you use Web pages or blogs or even handouts, this bit of research is probably worth the time it takes to read it (at least once).

Nielsen's advice fits with what I told my students (to their seemingly endless amusement) about reading chapters in their textbooks three times. I guess my advice was a little bit short of the mark.

Test-Taking Enhances Learning

I have long worried that the Web is unsuited for real learning. The basic problem is users' superficial "surfing" of information: as countless studies have shown since 1997, people tend to scan text on websites instead of reading it closely…

[T]here are cases in which users really do need to learn something rather than get only the highlights. Educational sites obviously fall in this category, whether targeted at teens or college students…

145% More Info Retained after Taking Tests

How can we help users learn more from our website content? A recent research study comes to the rescue here.

Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Janell R. Blunt from Purdue University published a paper in Science this month that measured the amount of information people could remember a week after reading a scientific text.

Students who completed an elaborate test after reading the text remembered 145% more content after a week than students who simply read the text and didn't do anything else…

The test-taking condition was a retrieval practice test, which is much more elaborate than traditional tests. The full procedure was:

Read the text.

Recall as much of the information as you can on a free-recall test.

Read the text again.

Complete another free-recall test.
It's no big surprise that people remember more after this elaborate procedure, which involves working with the information 4 times. However, the researchers also studied a condition where people simply read the text 4 times. These readers also remembered more a week later than people who had read the text a single time, but only 64% more… the point is to get users to exercise their memory after reading your content, and then offer them a chance to revisit the material after they've seen how little they remember…