doing the highlighting<\/em>.<\/p>\nThat is: they found that …<\/p>\n
If the INSTRUCTOR does the highlighting, doing so benefits college students AND K-12 students, but<\/p>\n
If the STUDENT does the highlighting, doing so benefits college studets but NOT K-12 students.<\/p>\n
These findings make rough-n-ready sense.<\/p>\n
We teachers know what the important ideas are. For that reason, our highlighting help students (on average) focus on those important ideas — so they learn and understand more.<\/p>\n
Students —\u00a0especially\u00a0<\/em>younger students — probably don’t know what the important ideas are. For that reason, their own highlighting might not accentuate important ideas (on average), and so they don’t benefit from highlighting.<\/p>\nWhen I ask a student why he highlighted a passage, I sometimes get a version this answer: “Honestly, I realized I hadn’t highlighted anything in a few pages, so I thought I really needed to find something that sounded important.”<\/p>\n
Little wonder, then, that my 10th graders don’t benefit from highlighting.<\/p>\n
Classroom Specifics<\/h2>\n
Of course, this meta-analysis also arrived at other useful conclusions.<\/p>\n
This first one came to me as something of a shock: although highlighting<\/em> does benefit some students,\u00a0reviewing\u00a0the highlights<\/em> doesn’t.<\/p>\nThe researchers write:<\/p>\n
“on average, reviewing highlighted text previously highlighted by\u00a0learners did not improve learning significantly more than students who only read\u00a0or studied the text.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I infer from this finding that highlighting helps (if at all) because it prompts students to FOCUS ON and THINK ABOUT information the first time they read it.<\/p>\n
It does not, however, help students when they return to the highlighted passage later.<\/p>\n
That’s useful to know!<\/p>\n
Another conclusion is less of a surprise:\u00a0training helps.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\nThat is: we can help students (yes, even K-12 students) highlight more effectively.<\/p>\n
According to the meta-analysis, we can…<\/p>\n
… show students examples of good and bad highlighting,<\/p>\n
… help them distinguish between main ideas and secondary ones, and<\/p>\n
… emphasize that too much highlighting reduces the benefit.<\/p>\n
For example:<\/p>\n
I myself don’t ask my English students to highlight much. But, I do ask them to note very specific parts of the text.<\/p>\n
When we read\u00a0Macbeth<\/em>, I ask them to circle\/highlight every time they see the words “do,” “done,” or “deed.” (Believe it or not, those words show an important pattern in the play.)<\/p>\nWhen we read\u00a0Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/em>, they highlight various symbols: hair, gates\/fences, mules, trees.<\/p>\nI hope that these very modest highlights help students spot patterns they otherwise would have missed — without distracting them too much from other important parts of the story.<\/p>\n
In other words: used judiciously and narrowly, highlighting can provide some benefit.<\/p>\n
TL;DR<\/h2>\n
This recent meta-analysis gives us helpful specifics on how best to use highlighting.<\/p>\n
Ideally, we teachers do the highlighting ourselves, especially in K-12 classrooms ; we teach students how to highlight (not too much!); we don’t encourage them to review their highlights.<\/p>\n
In fact,\u00a0as we saw in last week’s post, retrieval practice<\/strong>\u00a0should replace “review the highlights” as a way to review and study.<\/p>\n
\nDunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students\u2019 learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology.\u00a0Psychological Science in the Public interest<\/i>,\u00a014<\/i>(1), 4-58.<\/p>\n
Ponce, H. R., Mayer, R. E., & M\u00e9ndez, E. E. (2022). Effects of learner-generated highlighting and instructor-provided highlighting on learning from text: a meta-analysis.\u00a0Educational Psychology Review<\/i>,\u00a034<\/i>(2), 989-1024.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because the school year starts right now, I’m using this month’s blog posts to give direct classroom\u00a0guidance. Last week, I wrote about a meta-analysis showing that — yup — retrieval practice is awesome. Teachers should be aware of a few detail (e.g.: “brain dumps” are among the least effective kinds of retrieval practice). But for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":7240,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[15,210],"class_list":["post-7235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-classroom-advice","tag-highlighting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7235"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7242,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7235\/revisions\/7242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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