Throughout the development of
students from their youth until young adulthood, and beyond, our institutions
strive to teach us concepts and basic courses to aid in critical thinking and
problem solving that is crucial when navigating life. While every student can
excel in their favorite subjects, it is important to know how the learning is
done. Certain learning styles that work for students in a subject they have a
high affinity for will not work for other, more challenging courses that
require more time and effort, regardless of student preference. Because Western
education strives on test-taking systems and point averages to quantify the
amount of learning an individual student has done, learning has become an
interwoven memory as it is needed to remember key concepts to use in applied
questions or recall facts. While one would think seeing information in large
and concentrated blocks, researchers at York University in Toronto found that
smaller and more spaced-out blocks of studying are much more effective at
allowing the brain to retrieve newly learned information and remember what was
just learned.
In further detail, the students who participated in the York
University spaced learning experiment were asked to attend a meteorology
lecture for 45 minutes. While the control group took an online quiz the day
after the lecture, the experimental group took the same quiz eight days later.
The two other factors in the quiz were the complexity of questions: out of the
40-question quiz, 20 were factual, where a recall of information was necessary,
and the other 20 were applied questions that required the recall of concepts
and successful application. Five weeks after the quiz, and at the end of the
experiment, both groups took a final test where the experimental group did
significantly better. More specifically, they performed a half-letter grade
better than the control group in absolute performance: both in applied and
factual questions.
While no shocks were administered to the students taking the
exams, learning, and memory play a critical role in the hippocampus. In Dr.
Grella’s experiment, the emotions connected to hippocampus-mediated memories
were altered by inducing a shock on mice who had their dentate gyrus tagged by
a mix of viral components. After shock-based conditioning, the mice’s memory of
their environment where they experienced the jolt elicited a learned fear
response in behavior, as shown in the reactivation of the ventral dentate gyrus
after tagging from the viruses. Furthermore, in different environments, the
fear-based behavior of freezing was reduced to that of anxiety-like actions.
This suggestion is also found in learning processes much like that of spatial
learning: the location where information is processed and encoded in memory
will aid in its recall. Furthermore, the more associations that are made to the
memory, such as different spaces and emotional states of the individual forming
the memory, the stronger and quicker it can be recalled. Even though
behavior is unaffected by this, it is a contributing factor to the informal
theory of spacing effect learning.
Conclusion: In conclusion, through observations done by
test-based studies like that of the York University staff and the more in-depth
experiments with mice and dentate gyrus pathways done by Dr. Grella, how fast
learning and memory can be encoded and processed rely on several different
factors.
References:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959475214001042?via%3Dihub
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