Strategies

In the mid-seventies, Raugh and Atkinson had remarkable results using the keyword method to teach Russian vocabulary to college students. While later studies have not tended to find such dramatic results, nevertheless, a large number of studies have demonstrated an advantage in using the keyword mnemonic to learn vocabulary.

Some researchers have become huge fans of the strategy. Others have suggested a number of limitations. Let’s look at these.

Remembering for the long term

The keyword method is undeniably an effective method for accelerating learning of suitable material. Nor is there any doubt that it improves immediate recall. Which can be useful in itself. However, what people want is long-term recall, and it is there that the advantages of the keyword method are most contentious₁.

While many studies have found good remembering a week or two after learning using the keyword mnemonic, others have found that remembering is no better one or two weeks later whether people have used the keyword mnemonic or another strategy. Some have found it worse.

It has been suggested that, although the keyword may be a good retrieval cue initially, over time earlier associations may regain their strength and make it harder to retrieve the keyword image. This seems very reasonable to me — any keyword is, by its nature, an easily retrieved, familiar word; therefore, it will already have a host of associations. When you’re tested immediately after learning the keyword, this new link will of course be fresh in your mind, and easily retrieved. But as time goes on, and the advantage of recency is lost, what is there to make the new link stronger than the other, existing, links? Absolutely nothing — unless you strengthen it. How? By repetition.

Note that it is not the keyword itself that fails to be remembered. It is the image. The weakness then, is in the link between keyword and image. (For example, the Tagalog word araw, meaning sun, is given the keyword arrow; when tested, araw easily recalls the keyword arrow, but the image connecting arrow with sun is gone). This is the link you must strengthen.

The question of the relative forgetting curves of the keyword mnemonic and other learning strategies is chiefly a matter of theoretical interest — I don’t think any researcher would deny that repetition is always necessary. But the “magic” of the keyword mnemonic, as espoused by some mnemonic enthusiasts, downplays this necessity. For practical purposes, it is merely sufficient to remember that, for long-term learning, you must strengthen this link between keyword and image (or sentence) through repeated retrieval (but probably not nearly as often as the repetition needed to “fix” meaningless information that has no such mnemonic aid).

One final point should be made. If the material to be learned is mastered to the same standard, the durability of the memory — how long it is remembered for — will, it appears, be the same, regardless of the method used to learn it₂.

Are some keyword mnemonics easier to remember than others?

A number of factors may affect the strength of a keyword mnemonic. One that’s often suggested is whether or not the mnemonic is supplied to the student, or thought up by them. Intuitively, we feel that a mnemonic you’ve thought up yourself will be stronger than one that is given to you.

One study that compared the effectiveness of keywords provided versus keywords that are self-generated, found that participants who were required to make up their own keywords performed much worse than those who were given keywords₃. This doesn’t answer the question of the relative durability, but it does point to how much more difficult the task of generating keywords is. This has been confirmed in other studies.

The quality of the keyword mnemonic may affect its durability. Mnemonics that emphasize distinctiveness, that increase the vividness and concreteness of the word to be learned, are remembered less well over time than mnemonics that emphasize relational and semantic information (which is why the emphasis in recent times is on making interactive images or sentences, in which the keyword and definition interact in some way). Having bizarre images seems to help remembering immediately after learning (when there is a mix of bizarre and less unusual images), but doesn’t seem to help particularly over the long term.

The advantage of a semantic connection may be seen in the following example, taken from an experimental study₃. Students in a free control condition (those told to use their own methods to remember), almost all used a keyword-type technique to learn some items. Unlike those in the keyword group, the keywords chosen by these subjects typically had some semantic connection as well. (The use of somewhat arbitrary keywords is characteristic of the strategy as originally conceived by Atkinson). Thus, for the Spanish word pestana, meaning eyelash, several people used the phrase paste on as a link, reflecting an existing association (pasting on false eyelashes). The keyword supplied to the keyword group, on the other hand, was pest, which has no obvious connection to eyelash. (It is also worth noting that verbal links were more commonly used by control subjects, rather than mental images.)

It has been suggested that keywords that are semantically as well as acoustically related to the word to be learned might prove more durable.

Controlled presentation

For experimental reasons, the information to be learned is usually presented at a fixed rate, item by item. There is some suggestion that an unpaced situation, where people are simply presented with all the information to be learned and given a set time to study it, allows better learning, most particularly for the repetition strategy. The performance of rote repetition may have been made poorer by constraining it in this way in some experimental studies.

An unpaced study time is of course the more normal situation.

The importance of one-to-one instruction and the need for practice

What is clear from the research is that instruction in the technique is vitally important. Most particularly, the superiority of the keyword mnemonic tends to be found only when the students have been treated individually, not when they have been instructed as a group. At least, this is true for adults and adolescents, but not, interestingly, for children. Children can benefit from group instruction in the technique. Why this is, is not clear. However, I would speculate that it may have something to do with older students having already developed their own strategies and ideas. More individually-oriented instruction might be needed to counteract this depository of knowledge.

It might also be that children are given more direction in the using of the technique. That is, they are given the keywords; the images may be described to them, and even drawn. Clearly this is much simpler than being required to think up your own keywords, create your own links.

It does seem clear that durable keyword images require quite a lot of practice to create. It has been suggested that initially people tend to simply focus on creating distinctive images. It may only be with extensive practice that you become able to reliably create images that effectively integrate the relational qualities of the bits of information.

Some words benefit more from the keyword mnemonic

It has been suggested that the keyword mnemonic works effectively only on concrete words. For the most part, researchers only use concrete words (which are easily imageable). Studies which have compared the two are rare. The weight of the evidence is probably against the view that the mnemonic should be restricted to concrete words, but it may well be more difficult to come up with good, concrete images for abstract words. However, verbal mnemonics (a sentence can link the keyword with the definition) don’t suffer the same drawback.

In experimental studies, the words are usually vetted to make sure they’re not “easy” to learn because of obvious acoustic or graphic similarities with familiar words. The implication of this for real world learning, is that there is no reason to think that such words require a keyword mnemonic.

How important is the image?

Most research has focused on using an image to link the keyword with the definition. One study which compared the using of an image with the use of a sentence (in a study of children’s learning of Spanish words) found no difference (the sentence mnemonic in fact scored higher, but the difference was not significant)₄.

Is the keyword mnemonic of greater benefit to less able students?

Several researchers have suggested that the keyword mnemonic might be of greater benefit to less able students, that the keyword mnemonic may be a means by which differences in learning ability might be equalised. One study that failed to find any superiority in the keyword mnemonic among college students, pointed to the high SAT scores of their students. They suggested that those studies which have found a keyword superiority using college students, have used students who were less verbally able₅.

What seems likely, is that teaching the keyword mnemonic to more able students has less impact than teaching it to less able students, because the more able students already have a variety of effective strategies that they use. It is worth noting that, just because students are instructed to use a particular strategy, that doesn’t mean that they will. In one experimental study, for example, when subjects were asked about the strategies they used, 17 out of the 40 control subjects (instructed to use their own methods) used the keyword method for at least some items, while every keyword subject used the keyword method for at least seven items (implying they didn’t always). In that study, it was found that, for the control subjects, the probability of recalling keyword-elaborated items was .81 vs .45 for other items; while for the keyword group, the probability of recall for keyword-elaborated items was .80 vs .16 for those items for which they didn’t use a keyword mnemonic₆.

Comparing the keyword mnemonic to other strategies

As a general rule, experimental studies into the effectiveness of the keyword mnemonic have compared it to, most often, rote repetition, or, less often, “trying your hardest to remember” (i.e., your own methods). It is not overwhelmingly surprising that the keyword mnemonic should be superior to rote repetition, and the study quoted just above reveals why comparisons with “free” controls might show inconsistent (and uninformative) results.

Studies which have directly compared the keyword method to other elaborative strategies are more helpful.

A number of studies have compared the keyword strategy against the context method of learning vocabulary (much loved by teachers; students experience the word to be learned in several different meaningful contexts). Theory suggests that the context method should encourage multiple connections to the target word, and is thus expected to be a highly effective strategy. However, the studies have found that the keyword method produces better learning than the context method.

It has been suggested that students might benefit more from the context method if they had to work out the meaning of the word themselves, from the context. However, a study which explored this possibility, found that participants using the context method performed significantly worse than those using the keyword mnemonic₅. This was true even when subjects were given a test that would be thought to give an advantage to the context method — namely, subjects being required to produce meaningful sentences with the target words.

The same researchers later pursued the possibility that the context method might, nevertheless, prove superior in long-term recall — benefiting from the multiple connections / retrieval paths to the target word. In an experiment where both keyword and context groups learned the words until they had mastered them, recall was no better for the context group than it was for the keyword group, when tested one week later (on the other hand, it was no worse either)₂.

Two more recent studies have confirmed the superiority of the keyword mnemonic over the context method₇.

Another study looked at the question of whether a combined keyword – repetition strategy (in which subjects were told to use repetition as well as imagery when linking the keyword to the English translation of the word to be learned) was better than the keyword strategy on its own. They failed to find any benefit to using repetition on top of the imagery₈.

Given the procedures used, I can see why this might occur. Imagine you’re trying to learn that carta is Spanish for letter. The obvious keyword is cart. Accordingly, you form an image of a cart full of letters. However, having constructed this image, you are now told to repeat the salient words “carta - letter” over and over to yourself. It’s not hard to see that many people might completely lose track of the image while they are doing this. Thus the repetition component of the strategy would not be so much augmenting the imagery link, as replacing it. Repetition of the link you are supposed to be augmenting (a cart full of letters) might be more useful (in fact, I personally would repeat to myself: “carta – letter; a cart full of letters”).

Backward recall

The value of the keyword mnemonic is of course, in forward recall — that is, in the above example, you learned that carta meant letter. When you see the word carta, the keyword mnemonic will help you remember that it means letter. But if you are asked for the Spanish for letter, how helpful will the keyword mnemonic be then?

A study that looked at this question found that the keyword mnemonic was no worse for backward recall than the other strategies they employed₈. On the other hand, it was no better, either — and this despite being superior for forward recall (remembering the English when given the Spanish). The failure of the method was not due to any difficulty in recalling the keyword itself. Remember, the English meaning and the keyword are tied together in the mnemonic image, so it is not surprising that remembering the keyword given the English was as high as remembering the English given the keyword. But the problem is, of course, that generating the (unfamiliar) Spanish word from the keyword is much harder than remembering the (familiar) keyword from the Spanish.

Using the keyword mnemonic to remember gender

One other aspect of vocabulary learning for many languages is that of gender. The keyword mnemonic has successfully been used to remember the gender of nouns, by incorporating a gender tag in the image₉. This may be as simple as including a man or a woman (or some particular object, when the language also contains a neutral gender), or you could use some other code — for example, if learning German, you could use the image of a deer for the masculine gender.

Why should the keyword mnemonic be an effective strategy?

Let’s think about the basic principles of how memory works.

The strength of memory codes, and thus the ease with which they can be found, is a function largely of repetition. Quite simply, the more often you experience something (a word, an event, a person, whatever), the stronger and more easily recalled your memory for that thing will be.

This is why the most basic memory strategy — the simplest, and the first learned — is rote repetition.

Repetition is how we hold items in working memory, that is, “in mind”. When we are told a phone number and have to remember it long enough to either dial it or write it down, most of us repeat it frantically.

Spaced repetition — repetition at intervals of time — is how we cement most of our memory codes in our long-term memory store. If you make no deliberate attempt to learn a phone number, yet use it often, you will inevitably come to know it (how many repetitions that will take is a matter of individual variability).

But most of us come to realize that repetition is not, on its own, the most effective strategy, and when we deliberately wish to learn something, we generally incorporate other, more elaborative, strategies.

Why do we do that? If memory codes are strengthened by repetition, why isn’t it enough to simply repeat?

Well, it is. Repetition IS enough. But it’s boring. That’s point one.

Point two is that making memory codes more easily found (which is after all the point of the exercise) is not solely achieved by making the memory codes stronger. Also important is making lots of connections. Memory codes are held in a network. We find a particular one by following a trail of linked codes. Clearly, the more trails lead to the code you’re looking for, the more likely you are to find it.

Elaborative strategies — mnemonic strategies, organizational strategies — work on this aspect. They are designed to increase the number of links (connections) a memory code has. Thus, when we note that lamprey is an “eel-like aquatic vertebrate with sucker mouth”, we will probably make links with eels, with fish, with the sea. If we recall that Henry I was said to have died from a surfeit of lampreys, we have made another link. Which in turn might bring in yet another link, that Ngaio Marsh once wrote a mystery entitled “A surfeit of lampreys”. And if you’ve read the book, this will be a good link, being itself rich in links. (As the earlier link would be if you happen to be knowledgeable about Henry I).

On the other hand, in the absence of any knowledge about lampreys, you could have made a mnemonic link with the word “lamp”, and imagined an eel-like fish with lamps in its eyes, or balanced on its head.

So, both types of elaborative strategy have the same goal — to increase the number of connections. But mnemonic links are weaker in the sense that they are arbitrary. Their value comes in those circumstances when either you lack the knowledge to make meaningful connections, or there is in fact no meaningful connection to be made (this is why mnemonics are so popular for vocabulary learning, and for the learning of lists and other ordered information).

Where does that leave us?

• Memory codes are made stronger by repetition
• Repetition is enough on it’s own to make a strong memory code
• Achieving enough repetitions, however, is a lengthy and often boring process
• Memory codes are also made easier to find by increasing the number of links they have to other memory codes
• Elaborative strategies work on this principle of making connections with existing codes
• Some elaborative strategies make meaningful connections between memory codes — these are stronger
• Mnemonic strategies make connections that are not meaningful
• Mnemonic strategies are most useful in situations where there are no meaningful connections to be made, or you lack the knowledge to make meaningful connections

Mnemonic strategies have therefore had particular success in the learning of other languages. However, if you can make a meaningful connection, that will be more effective. For example, in Spanish the word surgir means to appear, spout, arise. If you connect this to the word surge, from the Latin surgere, to rise, then you have a meaningful connection, and you won’t, it is clear, have much trouble when you come across the word. However, if your English vocabulary does not include the word surge, you might make instead a mnemonic connection, such as surgir sounds like sugar, so you make a mental image involving spouting sugar. Now, imagine each of these situations. Imagine you don’t come across the word again for a month. When you do, which of these connections is more likely to bring forth the correct meaning?

But of course, it is not always possible to make meaningful connections.

The thing to remember however, is that you haven’t overcome the need for repetition. These strategies are adjuncts. The basic principle must always be remembered: Memory codes are made stronger by repetition. Links are made stronger by repetition. If you don’t practice the mnemonic, it won’t be remembered. The same is true for any connection, but meaningful connections are inherently stronger, so they don’t need as many repetitions.

I would also note that the experimental research invariably involves very limited numbers of words to be learned. While this is entirely understandable, it does raise the question of the extent to which these findings are applicable to real world learning situations. If you are learning a new language, you are going to have to learn at least 2000 new words. Does the keyword mnemonic hold up in those circumstances? The keyword mnemonic has been used in real world situations (intensive language courses), but these are not experimental situations, and we must be wary of the conclusions we draw from them. The keyword strategy does take time and effort to implement, and may well have disadvantages if used to excess. Some words lend themselves to other techniques. At least for more experienced students (who will have a number of effective strategies, and are capable of applying them appropriately) the keyword strategy is probably best used selectively, perhaps for particularly difficult items.

Human memory is a complex and varied phenomenon, and we could delve into its mysteries every day for a hundred years and still have plenty to talk about. But if I had to pick one factor that was absolutely crucial to the operation of memory, I would pick the deceptively simple concept of similarity. Similarity.

We all think we know what that means. An orange is similar to a mandarin; a zebra is similar to a horse; a cup is similar to a glass; my son is similar to his brother. A car is similar to an elephant.

??

Well, I might think a car was similar to an elephant. Maybe I’m imagining an elephant thundering toward me, kicking up dirt, unstoppable. Or maybe my perceptions are confused. But whether there’s a logical reason for my perception of similarity or not, whether my perception of similarity is shared with other people or not, all that is required for my brain to make the connection is ... that I perceive a connection.

Similarity — perceived similarity — is a crucial ingredient to the connections made in your head. Similarity enables us to make connections that transcend space and time, and enables us to strengthen connections made as a result of a juxtaposition of space and time.

Thus, when you meet a person and he tells you his name is Tom Brown, the first connection is made simply because the name and person are coincident in space and time. And if you leave it there, that connection will most likely be too weak to retrieve on a later occasion.

You can (and should, if you want to remember) employ another critical element to strengthen the connection: repetition (which impacts on the perceived familiarity of the information, but that’s another story). But the new information (this person is named Tom Brown) will be much more firmly lodged in your database, and much easier to find, if you make other connections, connections to information already stored in your memory. Thus, you might associate the name with the book “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”, based on the similarity of names. There might be some physical characteristic of this new person that you can link to a character in the book. If so, you are much more likely to be able to remember this name when you meet the person again. However, if you are barely familiar with the book, and have to stretch your imagination to make any further connection, such as with the characters in the book, then this similarity of names won’t greatly help you.

The important thing when connecting new information to information already existing in your database, is to ensure the existing information is itself easily retrievable, and that the connections you make are not too obscure.

So, to make new memories easily retrievable:

• look for similarities to existing memories
• look for similarities that are obvious to you (what other people think doesn’t matter in the slightest)
• choose existing memories that are themselves easily retrievable

This article originally appeared in the June 2004 newsletter.

In 2002, a British study scanned the brains of ten "superior memorizers" — eight leading contenders in the World Memory Championships, and two individuals previously studied for their extraordinary memory accomplishments — all people that had demonstrated truly impressive feats of memory, in terms of the ability to quickly memorize hundreds of numbers or unrelated words. The ten "memory champions" were matched with ten controls, who had no memory capabilities out of the ordinary.

Testing revealed that the memory champs scored about the same as the controls on general cognitive ability, but did, unsurprisingly, score higher on working memory and long-term verbal memory. They didn't differ in visual memory.

Participants in the study were shown three sets of images; faces, snowflakes and three-digit numbers. The numbers, being the sort of items which the memory champs excel at, were expected to show large performance differences between the two groups. Faces are a class of stimuli for which most people have a considerable expertise in, so a smaller difference was expected. And snowflakes are a very difficult visual pattern to verbalize, and it was expected that both groups would be equally poor at remembering them.

Their brains were scanned while the participants were asked them to remember which ones they had seen, and the order they were shown in. The expected differences in performance were indeed found, allowing the researchers to differentiate between brain activity that reflected the learning prowess itself from the activity reflecting the amount of information learned.

A number of brain regions were of course active in all tasks, for both groups. But there were differences between the two groups, both in terms of greater activity in some regions, and, more interestingly, in terms of the memory champs using brain regions not used by the controls. Most particularly, regardless of task and regardless of performance, the memory champs engaged the left medial superior parietal gyrus, bilateral retrosplenial cortex, and right posterior hippocampus. These areas are all known to be involved in spatial memory and navigation.

On questioning, nine out of ten memory champions advised that they used the loci mnemonic for some or all of the tasks.

The researcher concluded, "Superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or structural brain differences. Rather, we found that superior memorizers used a spatial learning strategy, engaging brain regions such as the hippocampus which are critical for memory and for spatial memory in particular."

As another researcher commented, "If you use the right technique, with a lot of application and hard work you can improve your memory. It certainly doesn't look like it's a question of neurological machinery."

The most interesting finding from this study was that, among the memory champs, there were no changes in gray matter volume, despite the fact that these people had been practicing mnemonics for an average of 11 years (a range of 3 to 38.5). Similar brain scans of musicians and London taxi drivers have found significant increases in gray matter volume as a function of number of years practice/experience. This finding would seem to support the view that practice in rote learning strategies doesn't have the benefits of strategies that develop understanding and mastery of meaningful knowledge, in terms of building new connections and growing new neurons.

On that note, you might like to read my article on photographic memory (and whether it's really as desirable as all that.)

Does photographic memory exist?

"Photographic" or eidetic memory is said to occur in some 8% of children, but almost all of these grow out of it. The phenomenon is extremely rare in adults, and indeed the very existence of photographic memory is still somewhat contentious. However, it may be that particular brain abnormalities can lead to ways of processing information that are dramatically different from the normal (see the case of Kim Peek).

Is a photographic memory desirable?

It is generally assumed that at any rate such a memory would be a great thing to have. I am by no means sure, however, that such is the case.

Let us dwell for a moment on Shereshevskii, a remarkable memorist made famous in a book by A.R. Luria. Although Shereshevskii did not have a “photographic” memory as such, he had a formidable ability to rapidly and easily commit vast amounts of information to memory, due to his amazing capacity for synaesthesia (the association of one sensory modality with another, so, e.g., you might “see” a tone as green) and ability to create visual images.

However, while advantageous in many regards, this ability did have a quite serious downside. Irrelevant details would tend to be included in his memory, and these would stand in the way of his subsequent recall. The confusion of so many conflicting images and sensory details would also often impede his understanding. He also had great difficulty in forgetting, and as time went on had increasing difficulty with the many items in his memory he did not wish to recall (although he did in fact hit on a solution to this: he imagined the information written on a blackboard, and pictured himself erasing it!)

Interestingly, some time ago, I received an email from a reader who knew an adolescent troubled with a “photographic memory” — she had a great deal of difficulty understanding what she was reading.

My point is that simply being a database, like a computer, is not sufficient in itself. Memory to be useful must be able to be used! And the most effective memory strategies are those that facilitate the use of memory, not simply its storage.

On this note, I would like to quote Mary Carruthers, who has written extensively about the medieval “arts of memory”. Carruthers argues convincingly that the idea that “the good of an art of memory is to remember things in order to regurgitate them by rote later on” is a misconception. On the contrary, “the orator’s “art of memory” was not in practice designed to let him reiterate exactly in every detail a composition he had previously fabricated. … [but] an art of invention, an art that made it possible for a person to … respond to interruptions and questions, or to dilate upon the ideas that momentarily occurred to him without becoming hopelessly distracted, or losing his place in the scheme of his basic speech.”

Similarly, the art of memory practiced by medieval monks involved “the making of mental images for the mind to work with as a fundamental procedure of human thinking.” The technique was designed not simply to provide “immediate access to whatever piece of stored material one may want, [but] also provides the means to construct any number of cross-referencing, associational links among the elements.”

Do experts simply know "more" than others, or is there something qualitatively different about an expert's knowledge compared to the knowledge of a non-expert?

While most of us are not aiming for an expert's knowledge in many of the subjects we study or learn about, it is worthwhile considering the ways in which expert knowledge is different, because it shows us how to learn, and teach, more effectively.

Experts are sensitive to patterns of meaningful information

A basic principle of perception is that it depends on the observer. What is green to you may be teal to me; a floppy disk to me may be a curious square of hard plastic to you. The observer always sees the world through her own existing knowledge.

An essential part of the difference between an expert and a novice can be seen in terms of this principle. A configuration of chess pieces on a board, seen briefly, will be bewildering and hard to remember for someone with no knowledge of chess, and even for someone with some experience of the game. But to a chess master, the configuration will be easily grasped, and easily remembered.

When chess pieces are placed randomly on a board, the chess master is no better than the novice at remembering briefly seen configurations. This is because the configuration is not meaningful. After tens of thousands of hours of playing chess, of studying the games of other masters, of memorizing patterns of moves, the master has hundreds of stored patterns in his memory. When he sees a configuration of pieces, he breaks it into meaningful elements that are related by an underlying strategy. Thus, while the novice would have to try and remember every single piece and its absolute or relative position on the board, the master only has to remember a few “chunks”.

The master can do this because he has a highly organized structure of knowledge relating to this domain. (It’s worth noting that expertise is highly specific to a domain of knowledge; a chess master will be no better than anyone at remembering, say, a shopping list.)

Expert knowledge is highly organized in deeply integrated schemas.

This sensitivity is thought to grow out of the deep conceptual schemas that experts develop in their area of expertise.

A schema is an organized body of knowledge that enables the user to understand a situation of set of facts. Schema theories include the idea of “scripts”, which help us deal with events. Thus, we are supposed to have a “restaurant script”, which we have developed from our various experiences with restaurants, and which tells us what to expect in a restaurant. Such a script would include the various activities that typically take place in a restaurant (being seated; ordering; eating; paying the bill, etc), and the various people we are likely to interact with (e.g., waiter/waitress; cashier).

Similarly, when we read or hear stories (and many aspects of our conversations with each other may be understood in terms of narratives, not simply those we read in books), we are assisted in our interpretation by “story schemas” or “story grammars”.

A number of studies have shown that memory is better for stories than other types of text; that we are inclined to remember events that didn’t happen if their happening is part of our mental script; that we find it hard to remember stories that we don’t understand, because they don’t fit into our scripts.

A schema then is a body of knowledge that provides a framework for understanding, for encoding new knowledge, for retrieving information. By having this framework, the expert can quickly understand and acquire new knowledge in her area of expertise, and can quickly find the relevant bits of knowledge when called on.

How is an expert schema different from a beginner’s one?

Building schemas is something we do naturally. How is an expert schema different from a beginner’s one?

An expert’s schema is based on deep principles; a beginner tends to organize her growing information around surface principles.

For example, in physics, when solving a problem, an expert usually looks first for the principle or law that is applicable to the problem (e.g., the first law of thermodynamics), then works out how one could apply this law to the problem. An experienced novice, on the other hand, tends to search for appropriate equations, then works out how to manipulate these equations (1). Similarly, when asked to sort problems according to the approach that could be used to solve them, experts group the problems in terms of the principles that can be used, while the novices sort them according to surface characteristics (such as “problems that contain inclined planes”) (2).

The different structure of expert knowledge is also revealed through the pattern of search times. Novices retrieve information at a rate that suggests a sequential search of information, as if they are methodically going down a list. Expert knowledge appears to be organized in a more conceptual manner, with information categorized in different chunks (mini-networks) which are organized around a central “deep” idea, and which have many connections to other chunks in the larger network.

These mini-networks, and the rich interconnections between them, help the expert look in the right place. One of the characteristics that differentiates experts from novices is the speed and ease with which experts retrieve the particular knowledge that is relevant to the problem in hand. Experts’ knowledge is said to be “conditionalized”, that is, knowledge about something includes knowledge as to the contexts in which that knowledge will be useful.

Expert knowledge contains information about when it will be useful.

Conditionalized knowledge is contrasted with “inert” knowledge. This concept is best illustrated by an example.

Gick and Holyoake (1980) presented college students with the following passage, which they were instructed to memorize:

After students had demonstrated their recall of this passage, they were asked to solve the following problem:

Although the students had recently memorized the military example, only 20% of them saw its relevance to the medical problem and successfully applied its lesson. Most of the students were unable to solve the problem until given the explicit hint that the passage they had learned contained information they could use. For them, the knowledge they had acquired was inert. However, when the analogy was pointed out to them, 90% of them were able to apply the principle successfully.

Much of the information “learned” in school is inert. A compelling demonstration of this comes from studies conducted by Perfetto, Bransford and Franks (1983), in which college students were given a number of “insight” problems, such as:

Some students were given clues to help them solve these problems:

These clues were given before the students were shown the problems. Some of the students given clues were also explicitly advised that the clues would help them solve the problems. They performed very well. Other students however, were not prompted to use the clues they had been given, and they performed as poorly as those students who weren’t given clues.

The poor performance of those students who were given clues but not prompted to use them surprised the authors of the study, because the clues were so obviously relevant to the problems, but it provides a compelling demonstration of inert knowledge.

The ability of students to apply relevant knowledge in new contexts tends to be grossly over-estimated by instructors. Most assume that it will happen “naturally”, but what this research tells us is that the conditionalization of knowledge is something that happens quite a long way down the track, and if students are to be able to use the information they have learned, they need help in understanding where, when and how to use new knowledge.

 

Retrieval practice, as its name suggests, is a simple strategy that involves retrieving the target information one or more times prior to testing. It is not the same as repetition or rehearsal! The idea is not to simply repeat the correct information, but to try and retrieve it. Feedback as to the correct answer may or may not follow.

The keyword mnemonic is the most studied mnemonic strategy, and of proven effectiveness in learning vocabulary, most particularly when measured against rote repetition or “use your own methods”, but also when compared with the popular context method (students experience the word to be learned in several different meaningful contexts; they may or may not have to guess the meaning from the context). It has also effectively been used to learn artists’ styles, taxonomic information, attribute information, and the main points in text passages.

Results from using the keyword method have been quite dramatic. For example, in a classic study from the researchers that developed this strategy (Atkinson & Raugh 1975), over a third of the 120 words were remembered more than 80% of the time in the keyword condition, compared to only one item in the control condition (glaz for eye — a mnemonic link so obvious I am sure most of the control participants used it). Moreover, only seven words were remembered less than half the time in the keyword condition, compared to 70 in the control (“use your own method”) condition! Overall, the keyword group recalled 72% of the words when they were tested on the day following the three study days (40 words were studied each day), compared to 46% by the control group. When they were (without warning) tested again six weeks later, the keyword group remembered 43% compared to the control group’s 28%.

As you see, the benefits of the method are quite clear.

Which demonstrates how impressive it is that in a study that compared the two, retrieval practice resulted in the same, and in some cases, better performance than the keyword method.

In this 2007 study¹, two lab experiments involving university students compared the learning of German words using either the keyword mnemonic, retrieval practice, or rote repetition, and found no difference in performance between the two experimental groups, and both significantly better than rote repetition. This was followed by an experiment involving 56 secondary school pupils, comparing the learning of German words learned in four different ways (that is, all the pupils were given the same instruction; groups of words were presented in different ways).

In the first section of the instruction booklet, each English word with its German translation was presented with an elaborating sentence (for example, “The German for SHARP is SCHARF, scharf also means hot (as in spicy).”; “The German for LIGHTHOUSE is LEUCHTTURM, Leuchtturm consists of the two words for shine and tower.”) — this was the elaboration strategy. In the next section (retrieval practice), the English and German words were read out when first presented, and on the following pages the students were required to retrieve the German word on seeing the English word. There were filler pages in between each retrieval attempt on the expanding schedule of 1-3-5-7 (that is, one intervening filler item before the first attempt, three items before the second attempt, and so on). In the third, keyword, section, the English and German words were presented with a description of a suggested image (e.g., “The German for SHARP is SCHARF. Imagine cutting a German flag with SHARP scissors.” “The German for LIGHTHOUSE is LEUCHTTURM. Imagine people LOITERING near a lighthouse.”). In the last section, a strategy combining both the keyword and retrieval practice was employed.

The time allowed for each page was controlled, and was only a few seconds.

There were two tests: recalling the English meaning on seeing the German words, and giving the German words when presented with the English meaning. The tests were given twice — immediately, and one week later. For the easier task (giving the English in response to the German), words learned using the elaboration strategy were significantly more poorly remembered, and results from the other three strategies were not significantly different in the immediate test, but after a week, the words learned by the combined method were significantly better remembered than those learned by the others. Words learned by the retrieval practice strategy were slightly, but not quite significantly, better remembered than those learned by the keyword method.

For the harder task (remembering the German), the difference between retrieval practice and keyword mnemonic reached statistical significance.

The big advantage of retrieval practice is of course that it is a very simple, easily learned technique. It also requires much less cognitive effort than the keyword mnemonic, which puts off many people because of the difficulty of finding good keywords, and the effort (which is greater for some than for others) of creating images.

There are two aspects of the retrieval practice strategy, as it was used here, that should be noted. One is the basic principle that retrieval is always better than rehearsal, because retrieval is the task you should be practicing for, and because rehearsal gives you no feedback as to how well you have learned, and retrieval does. That is why testing is so valuable — more valuable as a learning tool than as an assessment tool. Testing teaches; even pretesting (before the student even knows the information to be learned) improves learning. (Two studies on this are reported in a Scientific American article at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong )

The second aspect is that the retrieval occurred on a distributed schedule.

I have talked before about the importance of spacing your learning (rehearsal; practice). So now I’ll just add one thing, from a recent (2009) study².

Interleaving practice is a related strategy that has (mostly in the area of motor skills, but of wider applicability) been shown to improve learning. With interleaved practice, a lesson is followed by practice problems relating to many earlier lessons, ordered so that no consecutive problems are of the same type. As is readily apparent, interleaving naturally involves distributed practice, so it’s not clear whether interleaving is on its own, separate from the effects of distribution, of benefit. This new study managed to disentangle interleaving from spacing, and found that, even when spacing was held constant, interleaving more than doubled test scores (77% vs 38%).

However, and this is perhaps the really interesting part, it did so having impaired performance during practice. That is, not unexpectedly, performance was poorer during the learning period, when practice was interleaved.

And here we bring in a concept that is also of relevance in discussing the value of testing for learning: the idea of desirable difficulty (a term devised by Robert Bjork and colleagues).

In these days of trying not damage students’ self-esteem by having them experience failure, it is well to remember this concept.

(I have summarized this material in a 7-minute video.)

How many words do you need to learn?

An analysis of English vocabulary* has found that the first 1000 words account for 84.3% of the words used in conversation, 82.3% of the words encountered in fiction, 75.6% of the words in newspapers, and 73.5% of the words in academic texts. The second 1000 accounts for about another 5% (specifically, 6% of conversation, 5.1% of fiction, 4.7% of newspapers, 4.6% of academic texts).

In other words, if you learn the top 1000 words, you would understand 84% of the words used in ordinary conversation, and if you learned the top 2000, you would understand 90% of the words used.

While the effort to learn this second 1000 words may seem a lot of effort for not much gain, the difference between understanding 84% of the words and understanding 90% is actually quite dramatic. Learn those first 2000, and you can go out there and talk to people, and the words you don’t understand will be obvious by context a lot of the time.

You will also have enough to read novels (87.4%) — not quite as good a coverage as in conversation, but good enough, especially when you consider the advantage a book has over conversation — you can take as long as you need to understand what’s being said.

I haven’t seen such analyses in other languages, but I imagine that the results would be similar (perhaps even higher coverage given, since it is generally agreed that English has a particularly large vocabulary).

I.S.P. Nation says, in his widely regarded text on learning vocabulary in another language₁, that “high-frequency words are so important that anything that teachers and learners can do to make sure they are learned is worth doing.”

In one sense, high-frequency words are easier to remember because you come across them so often. But words are inherently different in how easily learned they are. What factors govern the learnability of individual words?

Factors that affect how easily learned a word is

The most important factor in determining how easily words are learned is, of course, how similar they are to the words in one's native language (or another language you know well). Learning a language that is closely related to a language you already know is obviously a very different proposition to learning a language that is unrelated. Thus, learning Spanish when you already know French and English and Latin (my own position) is made infinitely easier by virtue of the vast number of words that are "cognate" (words that are the same or very similar in both languages).

You do need to pay particular attention to so-called "false cognates" - words which appear similar, but have different meanings. But in most cases that doesn't require any special strategy; the observation that they are different is enough (provided, of course, that you are sufficiently aware to remind yourself every time you come across the word - this is much easier if you are immersing yourself in a language).

Another factor is the similarity between the word and other words in the chosen language that you've already learned.

Another factor is the context in which you are learning the word. You generally don't learn only one word at a time. So factors that will influence ease of learning will be:

• the relationship between the words (it's more difficult to remember words that are similar in meaning, if you try and learn them at the same time);
• how many words you're learning at a time (if the words are difficult, learn fewer);
• the order in which you learn them (words you learn first and last are more easily remembered, therefore you need to give more attention to those in the middle, to make up for it)

What's your goal?

Your strategy will also be very different depending on whether your primary goal is to understand the language (either in reading or listening) or to produce it (speaking or writing). Learning to speak or write is of course much more difficult than simply learning to understand (which requires recognition rather than the harder recall).

Approaches to learning vocabulary

Your approach to learning a language depends therefore on all these factors. Most particularly, how you learn a language depends on why you want to learn the language.

A large proportion of teach-yourself language books assume your purpose is to travel in a country that speaks that language. Accordingly, the emphasis is on learning appropriate phrases for situations such as eating in a restaurant, buying a train ticket, etc. Another, growing, section is aimed at business travelers, with appropriate phrases for formal introductions, conversations in an office, etc. Both of these categories emphasize the conversational — learning to speak and listen.

None of these, I'm afraid do anything for me. I’ve tried, but they are too far from what I want. Any time I spend on them is wasted by the little voice saying, ‘So? Do I care? Why should I want to know this?’ My own desire is always to be able to read the language.

I was wildly delighted when I found "Literary Chinese by the inductive method" - a 1948 book that teaches Chinese by presenting the text of the simplest classic Chinese text - the Classic of Filial Piety - and providing notes on the meaning of each character, including notes on the derivation of those characters and their elements. This method probably would not appeal to many people, but since my primary reason for learning Chinese is to read the classic texts, it appeals to me hugely.

A large part of the appeal is that you are learning, right from the beginning, something "real". This is a text that people have been reading and studying for over 2000 years. That alone gives the words an intrinsic fascination. And looking at each character through its etymology gives each word a depth of meaning that immediately provides connections, and sometimes, emotional resonance.

For me, that is. I recognize that, for many people, this approach would leave them cold.

The point is that, regardless of how "good" a course/book/program is, what matters is how well it works for you. Which is why, even if you're using a "canned" system, you still need to customize it to your own quirks and style. To do that you need to have a wide variety of strategies to call on, and an understanding of the principles involved.

A general distinction you can make is that between:

• direct study, and
• learning from context

Direct study is more important when you're learning a non-cognate language. It's also more important in the initial stages of learning a language. Learning from context is particularly useful for cognate languages.

Of course learning a language requires both approaches, but the relative proportions will vary.

You need both definitional and contextual information to "know" a word properly. It is also helpful to process words at a "deeper" level - by playing with them, using them, thinking about them.

And of course, you need multiple exposures - a requirement for which extensive reading is the best remedy, but in the beginning, is probably best answered by programmed texts/courses that repeatedly present words in slightly different contexts (e.g., in different sentences).

Let's look at some particular techniques:

Decontextualized vocabulary

Word lists - can be a useful resource. generally decontextualized; however, sometimes they are provided in conjunction with a reading passage, thus providing context - this is, of course, more effective. lists of "most frequently used" words can also be quite motivating. however, lists of difficult or less frequent words are probably more useful. lists are also fairly tedious to learn from. their main use is therefore as a resource - e.g., in order to make flashcards or semantic maps. (look below for some word lists available on the Web)

Set yourself targets (daily as well as longer term)

Study words in their "families" - e.g., write, written, wrote, writing, typewriter, etc

Flashcards

Drill - good for getting in the needed repetition; most useful when they involve multiple media; when they group words according to context (words that "belong" together, for one reason or another), rather than, as is often the case, according to frequency; when they provide full and immediate feedback

Bilingual-dichotic method

This is a somewhat specialized technique. Dichotic listening refers to a technique used in the psychology laboratory, whereby a person wearing headphones hears different messages in the left and right ear. The technique has been used with some success in teaching foreign language words - the foreign word is heard in the right ear while simultaneously the native translation is heard in the left ear (most people process speech better in the right ear). The student is instructed to attend to the foreign language word. The student also has a list of the words to read while listening.

Reading

Graded reading - is, after all, the means by which most of us acquired the bulk of our native language vocabulary; the main problem with this approach, when applied to another language, is that you need to understand around 95% of the words in a text in order to infer the meaning of the rest. this makes it harder to simply grab books aimed at the native speaker - you need graded readers, specifically created for students of the language. another useful resource to build up your vocabulary are bilingual readers.

The great benefit of reading is the repeated experiences of the same words in slightly different contexts; the down side is that it is a time consuming method of learning. also, infrequent words will, of course, appear infrequently - these words really need to be given special attention.

Dictionary use - using a bilingual dictionary is of course helpful, and often necessary; however, it is better if looking things up in the dictionary is NOT your first strategy - better to try and guess the meaning first. effective students tend to use a dictionary flexibly and thoughtfully; they are also better at judging when guesses are likely to be accurate, and which words in a sentence are most important for understanding the meaning.

A useful strategy to prevent you getting too bogged down, is to mark the words you're in doubt about, on your first reading, and then look them up at the end of the passage.

The Web is a great resource for language students - find a newspaper in your chosen language and practice with it regularly; find a radio station that broadcasts in your chosen language

I find DVDs wonderful - look for ones that offer your chosen language. You can listen in your native language and have subtitles in your chosen language; listen to your chosen language with native language subtitles; or, have both the soundtrack and the subtitles in your chosen language.

Retelling

Try to retell passages of text in your own words

Recounting what you have learned to someone else is an excellent way to reinforce learning (trying to teach them is better still!)

Remember to speak aloud words as you read/think them

Talk to yourself - tell yourself what you're doing as you do it; make up sentences about what you can see when you're walking, or waiting for something

Try and think of different ways of saying the same thing

Organization

Have a notebook to record new words and grammar points; don't simply list the words as you come across them, but organize them into categories - categories that are personally meaningful. for ready reference, start the notebook with a list of words you find or think you'll find particularly difficult. (note: useful groups include generic categories, e.g., animals, fruit; functions, e.g., greetings, prepositions; situations, e.g., Post Office, airport, shop)

Make labels for items round the home and stick them up - and don't limit yourself to single words, create sentences. remember to read them aloud at appropriate moments.

In the bathroom and toilet, put up lists of declensions/conjugations or even passages of text or dialog.

Association

Even unrelated languages throw up words that share similarities - look out for these. Be creative.

Physically act out words and sentences - use mime and gestures.

Associate words with pictures

Visualize words

Mnemonics

Review

Periodic review - vital!

To make sure words are "fixed", you need to overlearn them - don't tick them off too soon!

Daily practice is essential, but try not to get into a rut. Routine is useful for establishing a habit, but ring the changes with your activities, both to keep your interest up, and because it is a more effective means of learning.

Remember:

• Experiment with different strategies till you find what works for you.
• Aim to have a variety of strategies to choose from.

Some word lists

English top 1000 words:

https://www.thoughtco.com/common-words-in-the-english-language-4083896

 

http://www.lextutor.ca/list_learn/

I like this because it groups words according to their stem, thus: able: ability abler ablest ably abilities unable inability

 

1000 most common words in French

http://french.languagedaily.com/wordsandphrases/most-common-words

 

1000 most common words in German

http://www.languagedaily.com/learn-german/vocabulary/common-german-words

https://www.thoughtco.com/german-words-in-written-vocabulary-4071331

 

List of High-Frequency Baseword Vocabulary for Japanese EFL Students

http://iteslj.org/lists/Daulton-BasewordVocabulary.html

 

also check out the supermemo language collections: http://www.super-memory.com/sml/language.htm

Distributed practice more effective than massed practice

It has long been known that spacing practice (reviewing learning or practicing a skill at spaced intervals) is far more effective than massed practice (in one heavy session). An interesting example of this comes from a study that aimed to find the best way of teaching postmen to type (this was at the request of the British Post Office). The researchers put postmen on one of four schedules:

• an intensive schedule of two two-hour daily sessions
• one of two intermediate schedules involving two hours a day, either as one two-hour session, or two one-hour sessions
• a more gradual schedule of one hour a day

The researchers found quite dramatic differences, with the one-hour-a-day group learning as much in 55 hours as the four-hour-a-day group in 80. Moreover, the gradual group showed greater retention of their skills when tested several months later.

Research has also demonstrated that people commonly over-estimate the value of massed practice, and tend not to give due recognition to the value of spacing practice. This particular study confirmed this, by finding that, notwithstanding their superior performance, the gradual group were the least happy with the program - for though they learned much more quickly in terms of hours, it took them many more days (80 hours at four hours a day is 20 days, but 55 hours at one hour a day is 55 days).

Micro-distribution practice

What about practice over much shorter intervals? Say you are learning vocabulary in a foreign language - is it better to repeat a word twice in rapid succession, or to space out the repetitions?

On the basis of the distribution principle, the answer is clear. Go through your list once, then repeat it. That way, every item will be maximally distant from its own repetition. But the distribution principle isn't the only memory principle at work here. The other principle is that of generation - that if you produce the word for yourself, this will strengthen the connection better than having the word given to you. And your likelihood of being able to successfully recall the word is greater if you test it earlier.

So you have two opposing principles at work here: one says maximise the time between repetitions, the other says minimise it. Which wins? Well, neither. They're both at work, so you need to take both into account, like this:

• the first time, test a new word after only a brief interval (your own experience is best here, to tell you what length of interval is best for you)
• on successive recalls, gradually increase the interval (your aim is to find the maximum interval at which you can reliably recall the word)
• if you fail to recall the word, shorten the interval; if you succeed, lengthen it

Distributed practice in skill learning

The distribution principle also applies to skill learning, although people are probably even more reluctant to apply it. Practicing a skill in a concentrated block seems to give better performance, and indeed it does - at the time. The problem is, it doesn't lead to better long-term learning.

Part of the problem is that it makes you over-estimate how well you have learned the skill. But most of that learning will fade quickly. To learn the skill properly (i.e., for over the long term), you are best, not simply to distribute your practice, but also practice the skill in the context of a variety of different tasks. For example, if you were learning to type, you could hammer away at one combination of keys (say, asdf) thirty times, then you could move on to another sequence (jkl;) and repeat that thirty times, and so on. But it would be better if you mixed the sequences up.

It is thought that practicing in this way works better because it requires you to repeatedly retrieve the motor program corresponding to each task. It also requires you to differentiate the skills in terms of their similarities and differences, which may be assumed to result in a better mental conceptualization of those skills.

Remembering a skill is entirely different from remembering other kinds of knowledge. It’s the difference between knowing how and knowing that.

Practice, practice, practice

Practice is the key to mastering a skill. One of the critical aspects is assuredly the fact that, with practice, the demands on your attention get smaller and smaller. Interestingly (and probably against common sense), there appears to be no mental limit to the improvement you gain from practice. Your physical condition limits how much improvement you can make to a practical skill (although, in practice, few people probably ever approach these limits), but a cognitive skill will continue to improve as long as you keep practicing. One long-ago researcher had two people perform 10,000 mental addition problems, and they kept on increasing their speed to the end.

How to get the most out of your practice

While practice is the key, there are some actions we can take to ensure we get the most value out of our practice:

• Learn from specific examples rather than abstract rules
• Provide feedback while the action is active in memory (i.e., immediately). Try again while the feedback is active in memory.
• Practice a skill with subtle variations (such as varying the force of your pitch, or the distance you are throwing) rather than trying to repeat your action exactly.
• Space your practice (maths textbooks, for example, tend to put similar exercises together, but in fact they would be better spaced out).
• Allow for interference with similar skills: if a new skill contains steps that are antagonistic to steps contained in an already mastered skill, that new skill will be much harder to learn (e.g., when I changed keyboards, the buttons for page up, page down, insert, etc, had been put in a different order — the conflict between the old habit and the new pattern made learning the new pattern harder than it would have been if I had never had a keyboard before). The existing skill may also be badly affected.
• If a skill can be broken down into independent sub-skills, break it down into its components and learn them separately, but if components are dependent, learn the skill as a whole (e.g., computer programming can be broken into independent sub-skills, but learning to play the piano is best learned as a whole).