Skip to main content

Intuitions About Teaching and Learning

Most learners rely on their own intuitions when selecting their study strategies. The same is true of teachers; we look back to our experiences as both students and teachers in deciding which strategies to use with our students. But how reliable are these intuitions?

It turns out, not very reliable.

When relying on intuition, both students and teachers can select strategies that may not help learners be successful. We can see this in the tendency of college students to see reading and re-reading their textbooks and notes as the best way to learn.[1] Studies overwhelming demonstrate that re-reading takes more time on the part of the learner, but does not improve students' abilities to retain information in the long term.[2] To learners, however, re-reading feels good. As Yana Weinstein and Megan Sumeracki describe it in their book, "The more we read a passage, the more fluently we are able to read it. However, reading fluency does not mean we're engaging with the information on a deep level, let alone learning it in such a way that we can actually remember it and use it in the future."[3] Likewise, students who engage in more effective strategies are likely to see them as not as effective for their learning--often because they require more effort on the part of the learner.[4]

We further compound our faulty intuitions with a tendency to engage in confirmation bias activities, in which we attempt to find evidence proving that our intuited strategies are good for our learners and simultaneously ignore evidence that suggests our intuitions might be flawed.[5]

In the area of legal research instruction, one major intuition-based strategy we engage in is massed practice. Massed practice of skills feels good; both teachers and learners feel like their students are better absorbing new skills. When practice is spaced out, it feels more painful. When we attempt to retrieve information from the knowledge structures in our long-term memory, as required by spaced practice, it takes more effort than the massed practice in which learners have no time to beginning forgetting.[6] Yet, for long-term retention, studies have shown that spaced repetition is far superior.

Certainly, the myth of massed practice is not the only teaching technique that legal research instructors choose to use based on their intuition and past experiences. We must dig deeper than just because it "seems" like this strategy has worked well in the past. I continue to be amazed as I read more of the cognitive theory research how strategies I've never considered before have been scientifically shown to benefit learners and how strategies that are commonplace in legal academic can be a detriment. We need to be conscious of the reasons why we are structuring our courses in certain ways, and be thoughtful in our choices when selecting teaching strategies.



[1] Yana Weinstein & Megan Sumeracki with Oliver Caviglioli, Understanding How We Learn: A Visual Guide 23 (2019).

[2] Id.

[3] Id. at 23-24.

[4] Id. at 24.

[5] Id. at 23.

[6] Peter C. Brown et al., Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning 47 (2014).

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the...

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki...

Research Conferences as a Practice Skill

Many first year legal research and writing include a conferencing component. Most of these conferences, however, focus primarily on the writing process. Conferences are held after students have struggled through the research process and have drafted at least some part of a memo or brief. There are many pedagogical reasons for the importance of research conferences (e.g. students are provided with individualized feedback), but one that is often overlooked is that research conferences help prepare students for practice by giving them opportunities to collaborate with other legal professionals and to orally communicate about the legal issues they are facing. Through research conferences, students learn how to discuss the authorities they have located effectively and to communicate how they are relevant to the legal issues they are facing. This practice collaborating is key. As Susan Azyndar noted in her article " Work with Me Here: Collaborative Learning in the Legal Research Class...

The Experiential Simulation Course Checklist, Part 1

When developing courses to meet the requirements for experiential simulation courses, there are three ABA standards that come into play: Standard 303(a)(3), Standard 302, and Standard 304. When combined, there are eight bullet points that one must meet to comply with the standards for experiential simulation courses**: " Primarily experiential in nature " (Standard 303(a)(3)):  To meet this bullet point, an ABA Guidance Memo provides additional help. It notes that the "primarily" suggests "more than simply inserting an experiential component into an existing class." Furthermore, the "primarily" "indicates the main purpose of something." It is clear that the experiential nature of the course should be central to the course's design and should be prevalent across the entire length of the course. In fact, the ABA notes that the "experiential nature of the course should . . . be the organizing principle of the course, and th...

Cultivating Trust in the Classroom

Cultivating trust is one of the keys to effective collaboration. This is especially true in the classroom. The relationship between instructor and student can have a huge effect on how much the student learns. But how do we cultivate trust? Here are just a few ways: 1) Creating " psychological safety ." In a study by Google of what helps teams collaborate well, Google found that psychological safety, as measured by taking turns in discussions and team members demonstrating high degrees of social sensitivity. In the classroom context, this means students need to feel free to ask questions and speak up without fear of rejection by those sharing their classroom space. Instructors can foster this by making it clear that there are no "stupid" questions, by cultivating a supportive classroom atmosphere, and by encouraging students who ask questions or make comments with positive reinforcement. 2) Listening actively . When students feel that instructors and classm...