💡 Retrieving information from memory strengthens it more than re-reading — testing IS learning
Students hate exams, but cognitive scientists love them — not as assessment tools but as learning tools. The , replicated in over 200 studies, shows that actively retrieving information from memory strengthens the neural pathways involved far more effectively than passive review. Re-reading a textbook feels productive because of — the material seems familiar, so we mistake recognition for recall. But recognition and recall are fundamentally different cognitive processes. Spaced — testing yourself at increasing intervals — exploits the and produces retention rates roughly double those of . The implication is radical: exams shouldn't just measure learning; they should be the primary method of learning.
Vocabulary (6)
Brookings Institution5 words
The Homework Paradox
💡 Homework benefits high schoolers but has negligible academic impact on younger students
The largest study on homework — analyzing data from 50 countries — found that for primary school students, more homework correlated with no improvement in test scores and, in some cases, lower motivation. For high school students the picture reverses: moderate amounts of homework predict higher achievement, but with beyond two hours per night. The paradox is that schools assign the most homework at the age when it's least effective. Researchers attribute this to a confusion between and volume. Assigning busy work — rote worksheets, copy-the-textbook exercises — is . Meaningful homework requires engagement: problems that force students to apply, analyze, and evaluate rather than simply reproduce.
Vocabulary (5)
Extra Reading · William Deresiewicz31 words
THE DISADVANTAGES OF AN ELITE EDUCATION by William Deresiewicz
💡 Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers
It didn’t that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a , and I suddenly learned that I what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of before he work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.
It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely homogeneous. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to as such people were me.
I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges or smart people who don’t go to college at all. I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to their incoming classes a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. But social intelligence, emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite.
What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to stupid people. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.
The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. There is nothing wrong with one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and that elite schools from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong , they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.
An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. are available ; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late. And she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have advisers and tutors to give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. There are few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available : travel stipends, research fellowships. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000 in just one department.
Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over . Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by the same amount. The average GPA at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity — lives of subordination.
An elite education gives you the chance to be rich but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist poverty. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher or a community organizer—that is, . You have to live in an ordinary house instead of a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Paris, but what are such losses when the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you love, every day of your life? Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your .