abits and beliefs that guide self-regulated learning : Do they vary ith mindset ?

Prior research by Kornell and Bjork (2007) and Hartwig and Dunlosky (2012) has demonstrated that college students tend to employ study strategies that are far from optimal. We examined whether individuals in the broader—and typically older—population might hold different beliefs about how best to study and learn, given their more extensive experience outside of formal coursework and deadlines. Via a web-based survey, however, we found striking similarities: Learners’ study decisions tend to be driven by deadlines, and the benefits of activities such as self-testing and reviewing studied materials are elf-regulated learning etacognition indset tudy strategies mostly unappreciated. We also found evidence, however, that one’s mindset with respect to intelligence is related to one’s habits and beliefs: Individuals who believe that intelligence can be increased through effort were more likely to value the pedagogical benefits of self-testing, to restudy, and to be intrinsically motivated to learn, compared to individuals who believe that intelligence is fixed. © 2014 Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights With the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, there are increasng opportunities to learn on our own, not only during the years f formal education, but also across our lifespan as our careers, obbies, and interests change. The rapid pace of technological hange has also made such self-directed learning necessary: the bility to effectively self-regulate one’s learning—monitoring one’s wn learning and implementing beneficial study strategies—is, rguably, more important than ever before. Decades of research have revealed the efficacy of various study trategies (see Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan, & Willingham, 013, for a review of effective—and less effective—study techiques). Bjork (1994) coined the term, “desirable difficulties,” to efer to the set of study conditions or study strategies that appear to low down the acquisition of to-be-learned materials and make the earning process seem more effortful, but then enhance long-term etention and transfer, presumably because contending with those ifficulties engages processes that support learning and retention. xamples of desirable difficulties include generating information or esting oneself (instead of reading or re-reading information—a relPlease cite this article in press as: Yan, V. X., et al. Habits and beliefs Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (2014), http://dx.d tively passive activity), spacing out repeated study opportunities instead of cramming), and varying conditions of practice (rather han keeping those conditions constant and predictable). ∗ Corresponding author at: 1285 Franz Hall, Department of Psychology, University f California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, United States. Tel.: +1 310 954 6650. E-mail address: veronicayan@ucla.edu (V.X. Yan). ttp://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.04.003 211-3681/© 2014 Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Published by reserved. Many recent findings, however—both survey-based and experimental—have revealed that learners continue to study in non-optimal ways. Learners do not appear, for example, to understand two of the most robust effects from the cognitive psychology literature—namely, the testing effect (that practicing retrieval leads to better long-term retention, compared even to re-reading; e.g., Roediger & Karpicke, 2006a) and the spacing effect (that spacing repeated study sessions leads to better long-term retention than does massing repetitions; e.g., Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted, & Rohrer, 2006; Dempster, 1988). A survey of 472 undergraduate students by Kornell and Bjork (2007)—which was replicated by Hartwig and Dunlosky (2012)—showed that students underappreciate the learning benefits of testing. Similarly, Karpicke, Butler, and Roediger (2009) surveyed students’ study strategies and found that re-reading was by far the most popular study strategy and that self-testing tended to be used only to assess whether some level of learning had been achieved, not to enhance subsequent recall. Even when students have some appreciation of effective strategies they often do not implement those strategies. Susser and McCabe (2013), for example, showed that even though students reported understanding the benefits of spaced learning over massed learning, they often do not space their study sessions on a given topic, particularly if their upcoming test is going to have a that guide self-regulated learning: Do they vary with mindset? oi.org/10.1016/j.jarmac.2014.04.003 multiple-choice format, or if they think the material is relatively easy, or if they are simply too busy. In fact, Kornell and Bjork’s (2007) survey showed that students’ study decisions tended to be driven by impending deadlines, rather than by learning goals, Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.