“The findings were somewhat unintuitive, because passively using the hint appeared to enhance performance during the study phase of the experiment but had a deleterious effect on long-term learning,” Kornell said.
What are the implications for human learning?
“Many people incorrectly assume the better you do as you’re studying, the more you’re learning,” said Kornell, who works in the laboratory of Robert A. Bjork, professor and chair of psychology at UCLA. “If students don’t test themselves when they read a chapter, they can easily think they know the material when they don’t. When you test yourself as you study, you may feel like you’re making it harder on yourself, but on the test, you will do much better. Robert Bjork calls this ‘desirable difficulty.’ If you want to learn something well, when you’re reading, stop and think about what you’ve read, and test yourself; you learn by testing yourself. If you make it more difficult for yourself while you study, you feel like you’re doing worse, but you’re learning more.
“Active learning is important in humans and — this study demonstrates — in monkeys as well,” he added.
Less effective passive learning includes listening to a presentation and reading without testing yourself or summarizing what you have learned.
“When you summarize the material in your own words, that’s much more active,” Kornell said. “You can’t do that if you don’t understand it.”
Cramming right before a test does not work as well as spacing studying out over a longer period of time, Kornell added, citing other research on learning and memory.
Kornell’s research, supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, was conducted with Herbert Terrace, a professor of psychology at Columbia. The two monkeys, Macduff and Oberon, are housed at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where Terrace has a joint appointment. Neither animal was harmed in the study, and they were fed daily regardless of how they performed in the trials.
“Many people,” Kornell noted, “have had the experience of listening to a computer instructor open a menu and go through a series of steps. Then you try to do it, and you don’t even know which menu or what the first step is. If you are passively following along, you won’t remember it as well as if you’re forced to do it yourself. Active learning is much harder, but if you can do it successfully, you will remember it much better in the long run.
“If you’re learning to serve a tennis ball, you won’t get much out of an instructor taking your arm and practicing the swing over and over,” he said. “That’s not going to help you nearly as much as if you serve the ball yourself.”
The situation is the same for monkeys, according to Kornell.
“The way the monkeys learn to remember the correct answers is through active learning, like humans,” he said. “They have to generate the answers themselves from memory. Generating the correct sequence from memory resulted in more long-term learning than the more passive training with hints.”
Kornell noted that more than a century ago, author William James remarked on the importance of being actively involved in learning. Since then, science has proven him correct. Kornell also noted that his research confirms the teachings of another monkey: Curious George.
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