How students who struggle with a course become masters of learning

My four-year old daughter Rosemary made an unusual music request one morning. Did she ask me to play heavy metal? Did she ask for punk rock? Did she ask for show tunes? None of these. Here’s what she said, “Play the music without words.”

She didn’t know the correct term but I knew what she meant and I played the classical station.

This childlike approach is far different than what most of us adults do

If we don’t know the words, we struggle to remember them, we rack our brains when it would be far easier to just describe. Similarly, if we don’t know how to do something, we may struggle with learning it the hard way, even though far easier paths to learning exist.

We’ll discuss three ideas that reduce the struggle in learning:

A – The mastery focus

B – The two powerful questions

C – The most world’s effective learning strategy

A – The mastery focus

In 2003, Carol Dweck and Heidi Grant studied pre-med students who were taking organic chemistry. They wanted to see how their goals affected their learning. Some had validation goals – meaning they wanted to prove they were smart; others had mastery goals – meaning they wanted to grow and improve.

What they discovered was that students who focused on validating their ability performed worse overall

They got an entire letter grade lower than students who were focused on mastery. Often this drop in performance happened after one bad quiz score. Then it was downhill from there. These students would spend fewer hours studying and continue to perform worse.

They would say things like “The harder it gets, the more I have to force myself to read the book and study for the tests. I was excited about chemistry before, but now every time I think about it, I get a bad feeling in my stomach.”

But how did the students focused on mastery respond to setbacks?

After a low quiz or test score, they tended to redouble their efforts. One wrote “It’s a lot more difficult for me than I thought it would be, but it’s what I want to do, so that only makes me more determined. When they tell me I can’t, it really gets me going.”

Those with a focus on mastery worked even harder after getting a low grade. But that’s not all they did, they asked entirely different questions after a poor performance.

B – The two powerful questions

Just two questions led the mastery-focused students to entirely different approaches to learning than the validation-oriented students. They asked “How hard did I work?” and “How effective were my strategies?” As a result, when they got a low score, they assumed there was something they could do about it.

They looked at their approaches to studying and improved them

Here’s what one student said about how she approached the course “I looked for themes and underlying principles across lectures,” and “I went over mistakes until I was certain I understood them.” Their approach was similar to strategies such as self-explanation that has been proven to improve learning of difficult subjects. Students who focused on validation tended to just review notes and re-read chapters.

They didn’t engage in deeper learning strategies

And when trying to explain their poor performance they wouldn’t ask “What didn’t work about my learning strategies?” Instead, they were more likely to assume they weren’t good at the subject. They were also highly unlikely to use one extremely powerful learning approach. In fact, it can be called …

C – The world’s most effective learning strategy

In 1984, Benjamin Bloom created a study to measure the impact of two different approaches to learning: mastery-teaching – which involves making sure students have mastered one topic before moving onto the next – and one-on-one tutoring. The study had three groups. Group C (the control) was a regular class. Group A was lectures taught using mastery learning. Group B had mastery learning plus one-on-one tutoring.

The results were amazing

The mastery learning (Group A) beat the regular classroom (Group C) by one standard deviation. And Mastery learning plus tutoring (Group B) beat Mastery learning by one standard deviation. I’m not a statistics buff but these are astounding results. Bloom put them into common terms when he wrote:

“The average tutored student was above 98 percent of the students in the control class.”

Remember the pre-med students who focused on mastery in organic chemistry? You might have guessed, but they were the ones most likely to ask the professor or other students for help to master their subject. They were also the ones most likely to request tutoring as well. And they were even more likely to learn from a key mistake many students make – falling for the fluency illusion.

This happens after reviewing the material many times

It starts to feel so familiar that we mistake this for actually understanding the material.

Mastery-oriented students overcome this fluency illusion by trying to explain difficult concepts to themselves or others. When you try to explain a difficult concept, you will often find blind spots or holes in your understanding. Then you can go back and fill these holes by asking questions and seeking answers from your learning materials, other students or your teachers.

But isn’t it possible that I’m really no good in the course that I’m struggling in? Maybe it’s really too hard for me?

It can make sense to feel this way. This is especially true for students who have had mostly good grades and then finally get to a class that truly challenges them. Fortunately, students who make it to college, especially with good grades, rarely lack the ability to do well. Hundreds of studies show that what limits most students is the strategies they use when learning, not their innate intelligence.

So we’ve covered three ways struggling students can master their courses:

-A: A focus on mastery instead of validation

-B: Asking “What about my strategies were ineffective?” leading to deeper learning strategies.

-C: And finally, the power of tutoring to massively improve learning.

When I turned on the classical station for Rosemary a symphony was just concluding

We heard only the final notes. After it was over, my daughter said, “That was the most beautiful sound I ever heard.” When we choose a mastery focus for our learning, we will still experience challenges and difficulty but those difficulties give rise to a beautiful process of learning and growth. Only by sticking with it and applying more effective strategies is that growth possible.

Next step

Check out acclaimed physicist Richard Feynman’s study strategy for learning hard subjects, it can apply to learning just about any topic. In fact, I suggest it for people who want to learn challenging subjects in psychology such as Relational Frame Theory as well. Here’s a 6-minute video showing how to use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f-qkGJBPts

In the business world, the closest things to tutoring are coaching or mentoring. Most successful people have someone skilled and knowledgeable in their corner that helps them grow far more quickly than they would have otherwise. This is why I have a coach. If you don’t and are ready to accelerate your own growth, then consider scheduling a call with me. On the call, we’ll discuss your goals and whether or not we’d be a fit. To schedule the call, use this form: https://www.selfinfluence.net/schedule/