Retrieval, Content Mapping, and Student Study Practices

This past weekend an article appeared in Scienceindicating that “retrieval practice” produced better responses that more elaborative learning activities such as concept mapping.  Those of you who read Teaching Thursday know that “concept mapping” and “deep learning” are important buzz-words in the present teaching and learning discourse.  Informed by cognitive psychology and class room practices, these concepts  have become watchwords among faculty engaged in more sophisticated conversations on teaching and learning and form an easy parallel with terms like “active learning” or “learning centered” which marked out engaged faculty ten or twelve years ago.

J. Karpicke and J. Blunt’s article, however, argues that using more elaborate techniques like concept mapping to stimulate deep learning does not actually produce better results than the more tried-and-true retrieval practices.  Retrieval practices in the experiments run by Karpicke and Blunt involve reading passages and then recalling information from these passages in what the author’s call a “free recall test”.  The students then repeated this practice over a controlled period of time while another group of students built more complex content maps.  Without going into great detail about either of the two experiments, the results showed that students engaged in the more simple and olde skool retrieval practice produced better results than students trained in content mapping.  The authors suggest that this is because retrieval practices requires students to organize information in a more context specific way than content mapping which relies upon a set of flexible, yet abstract models for understanding the relationship between ideas.  In other words, the retrieval method encouraged students to understand the intrinsic organization of ideas in a text whereas content mapping allows students to re-order these ideas and, in the processes, translates them to a different, and perhaps less useful context.

This study made me think a bit about student study environments and the place of elaborative learning activities in student practices.  At the same time, I’ve been looking at some of the videos produced by Michael Wesch’s Kansas State students in his Visions of Students Today project (check out the project here and here).  I wondered how the life styles documented in these short YouTube videos (you can find them under the hashtag VOST2011) would accommodate practices like content mapping.  It seems that retrieval practices may be better suited to accommodate the unstructured environments where most students spend their times.

I know as a students that I used very simple retrieval exercises to learn basic data in history and foreign languages. For example, I made flash cards and sorted them constantly into piles of words that I knew and words that I didn’t know. I would then go through the pile of words that I didn’t know and resort them again. This very easy and basic retrieval exercise allowed me to make use of unstructured moments. I also tended to rewrite my class notes into more and more condensed form. Typically the first time through my notes, I relied heavily on the notes that I took in class.  When I condensed these notes for studying for a test, I tended to rely less and less on earlier versions of these notes and more and more on my memory.  I assumed that I learned by compressing the course content into a more manageable and structured unit; in fact, I probably learned by making the notes which was a very simple retrieval exercise.  Again, this practice was simple and seemed directed toward a goal: managing and compressing the quantity of information that I needed to learn for the exam.  Content mapping would have struck me as a mediating exercise that made studying content take more time.  At the time, I saw my life as too busy to indulge in activities that did not result in my immediate goal: doing well on the exam.

At the same time, concept mapping appears to assume that there is a disjunction of some kind between the context for the content presented in class and some kind of deeper foundational meaning.  Retrieval practices would tend to assume that the foundational meaning intended by the instructor is somehow inherent in the material presented in class. In other words, the foundational meaning is already mapped onto the content of the class and any additional remapping of this content runs the risk of obscuring important relationships between idea.  Concept mapping, then, becomes an unnecessary step between the deep (or shallow!) learning goals of the class and the retention practices.