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Most people learn through trial-and-error. That is, they start studying in a particular way, they see what works and then they try to do more of that.

To a certain extent, trial-and-error is unavoidable. You’re never going to get perfect information on the best way to learn something, so you have to try out different approaches and go with your best guess about how to learn.

But even if some trial-and-error is always necessary, relying completely on trial-and-error very often results in inefficient habits. When we are faced with different learning methods and we don’t know which ones are effective, we often guess wrong.

An interesting 2011 study conducted by J.D. Karpike and J.R. Blunt showed, in an interesting way, how sometimes our guesses about which learning method is most efficient is often completely wrong.

During the study, they had participants use four different studying strategies and later tested them. The first group studied the passage just once. The second group studied the passage repeatedly. The third group made a concept map and the fourth group did active recall.

Which group did best on the subsequent test?

Active recall students got 60% correct. Repeated studying got 45%. Concept-mapping 40%, and studying only once got a dismal 30%.

This shouldn’t be too surprising to people who have been following this bootcamp. In the very first email, I pointed out the difference between recognition and recall, and the value of practicing recall.

What is more interesting however was the subjects own assessment of the value of the different methods. In a follow up study, the authors had the participants practice with all of the different methods and then asked them which was most effective.

The students here thought the ranking was: repeated studying, concept mapping, active recall and then one-time studying.

Aside from the obvious case that one-time studying gets beaten by doing some sort of review, the participants were completely wrong about the effectiveness of the other methods. And, again, this was after they had a chance to try it out for themselves.

Trial-and-error led them to believe repeated studying would the most effective, when active recall was almost 33% more effective, given the same amount of studying time.

Why would students make this mistake?

In the words of the authors:

“Students generally exhibited little awareness that practicing retrieval enhances learning. … When students rely purely on their subjective experience while they study (e.g. fluency of processing during rereading) they may fall prey to illusions of competence and believing that they know the material better than they actually do.”

In short, students went with what felt like they were learning better. But because this intuition was based on the ability to recognize more easily, not recall, it was highly misleading.

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This isn’t the only example of students believing one strategy is effective when another is actually more effective. Students often believe that they’re learning more from massed rehearsal instead of distributed rehearsal, even though the opposite is the case.

And this is only narrowly considering the case where students honestly believe they’re using the best studying method and they clearly aren’t. I’m guessing the number of students that have full confidence they are using the best method to learn what they need to is far from one-hundred percent.
What should you do to combat ineffective methods in learning?

The answer is that you shouldn’t just use trial-and-error. Yes, experimentation is always necessary and you do need to use your own experience as a guide.

But, there is also a lot of benefit in studying how learning works and using strategies that are based on a sound basis for learning.

This is what I set out to do when building Learning on Steroids. To give you the strategies that I have culled from my researching the science of learning, my personal experience in the MIT Challenge and year without English, and finally from interacting with thousands of different students and collecting data from them on what works and what doesn’t.