The Power of Mindful Learning (12 page)

There are alternatives to memorization: mindful ways to learn
information so that it serves both the purpose of passing tests in
school and that of keeping the information available for future
creative use. As mentioned previously, memorization is a way of
taking in material when it is personally irrelevant. Making the
information relevant can remove the necessity for memorization. Read the following list of words and then look away and
see which of them you remember: generous, helpful, authoritative, rigid, dependent, serious, funny, tender, weak, smart. Apart
from the words at the beginning and end of the list, which we
tend to remember because of their placement, the words we
recall effortlessly are likely to be the ones that speak to our selfimage. Information that is about ourselves, about the parts of
ourselves we really care about, is the easiest to learn.' For
instance, Hazel Markus and her colleagues found that people who have incorporated stereotypical ideas about masculinity or
femininity into their self-concepts have better memory for
words reflective of this stereotype than do people for whom the
stereotype is less important.' Similarly, imagine that you are trying to lose weight but love eating greasy hamburgers. If someone tells you that one of those tempting burgers contains 2000
calories, your entire day's ration, you are likely to remember that
number without having to repeat it over and over again to yourself. Psychologists call this the self-reference effect.

Many psychologists view the self as a complex, organized
structure involving a variety of attributes or pieces of information about the person.10 When information in a person's environment is relevant to any of these attributes it is more likely to
be remembered. Steeplechase results are more likely to be
remembered by those who are involved in horse racing, or who
fancy themselves in that role, than by those who have no interest in horses.

The notion of relevance in education is hardly new, and just
how relevant material should be has been hotly debated. One
problem in making material relevant is the difficulty of doing
so for several students at once-students from diverse backgrounds, with different interests and experiences.

There are two ways a teacher can make facts or ideas seem
personally important. The most common approach is to shape
or interpret ideas so that their relation to the lives, interests,
and curiosities of the majority of students is readily apparent.
When critics of education clamor for relevance, they are usually
speaking of this sort of relevance. The second approach is to change students' attitudes toward the material, that is, to teach
students to make the material meaningful to themselves.

This second approach is illustrated in the way in which
actors learn scripts. They read a play through to get an idea of
what it is about and to become engaged in its story and meaning. Before they attempt to learn their lines, they consider the
meaning of the lines in relation to the larger plot and to the
perspectives of the other characters. They begin to know what
would bring the other characters to say what they say." The
illustration stops here, though, because at this point actors need
to memorize the material. After all, each person's lines are cued
by the exact lines that go before. Also, playwrights want to hear
the lines they actually wrote, and directors expect control over
what happens next.

Noticing new things about any body of information is involving. When students draw distinctions, the distinctions are necessarily relevant to them. Distinctions reveal that the material is
situated in a context and imply that other contexts may be considered. For instance, although few people worry about learning
to watch sporting events, consider how seemingly irrelevant
details in spectator sports can teach us about demographics or
even prejudice. Suppose that a spectator notices that the majority of players on a certain team have blond hair. That person
might wonder whether there is a relationship between hair
color and that sport. This consideration could lead to noticing (caring about/being interested in) what hair color dominates
among players in other sports. Such a seemingly trivial distinction could lead to an awareness of the absence of blacks or
Asians or whites on some teams and to questions of what that
absence might signify. As a more serious example, think about
asking students to examine photographs taken of people at the
time of the Civil War or the depression. Details observers note
about expressions, clothing, and so on are the basis for much
anthropological information about a period.

Drawing distinctions allows one to see more sides of an
issue or subject, which is more likely to result in greater interest. Teaching students to draw distinctions sets the stage for
mindful learning, that is, as noted in the introduction, for creating new categories, being open to new information, and
being aware of different perspectives. Students learn to create
working definitions that are continually revised and do not
exhaust the potential phenomena. This kind of conditionally
learned information is potentially accessible, even when not in
the forefront of one's mind.

There is an analogy here in computer science. A computer
that has virtual memory is one that swaps information to create the illusion of having more memory than it has; by swapping, a computer can appear to have much greater memory
than its hardware permits. Computers achieve virtual memory
by managing the activities run on them, so that at any one
time only a fraction of the programs in use are under active
consideration. Computers swap among applications so that
current, but momentarily unused functions remain accessible (more so than when they are on a floppy disk in a drawer)
without using up memory and the computer can effectively
handle more information.

Recently Matt Lieberman and I examined the effects of a
mindful attitude on the learning of reading selections." We
asked ninth-grade students to study one of two essays from
their high school literature book: Sylvia Plath's "Reflections
of a Seventeen Year-Old-Girl," or O'Henry's "The Ransom
of Red Chief." We asked half the students simply to learn the
material. We expected that this instruction would result in
students' trying to memorize the material. We asked the
other students to make the material meaningful to themselves: "This may entail thinking about how certain parts of
the information remind you of past, present, or future experiences, how the information could be important to yourself or
someone else, or simply finding some significance of the
story in relation to anyone and/or anything. Remember, what
is meaningful to one person is not necessarily meaningful to
another."

We then told half of each of these two groups that they
would be tested after the reading period. We thought that the
inclination to memorize would be so strong that the belief that
a test would follow would cause even the group instructed to
make the material relevant to memorize the material and thus
make the learning less effective and less fun than if they had
engaged with the material.

After a twenty-minute reading period, a test was given to
all students. The test asked students to recall a number of facts from the story and to write a creative essay using the material
in the story in their own way.

For homework, students were assigned another reading
with the same instructions they received for the first. They
were all tested again four days later.

The essays were judged by raters who were unaware of the
groups' instructions. Students who learned the material in the
traditional manner and were told of an impending test performed worse than all other groups. They tended to recall less
information, and they showed less improvement from the first
test to the second. The students instructed to make the material relevant, regardless of whether they expected to be tested,
showed improvement in the intelligence and creativity of
their essays.

Although we encouraged half of the subjects not to memorize the information, they did not necessarily follow our
instructions. After each test we asked the students how they
went about learning the material. Twelve of the twenty-eight
students asked to make the material relevant nonetheless used
only memorization to learn it. When we compared these students with the students who did follow the instruction, we
found that the students who did not rely on memorization outperformed the others on every measure: they recalled more
information from both readings; the essays they wrote were
judged to be more creative and intelligent; and their scores
improved from the first to the second test.

In a second experiment, Matt Lieberman and I tested this
idea with tenth graders.13 The students were assigned a chapter from a high school history book about the passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act presented by Senator Stephen Douglas.
To make the episode meaningful to them, students in one
group were asked, in addition to reading from their own perspective, to read the passage from the perspective of the main
character, asking what they would think or feel in his place, or
from the perspective of his grandchild, asking what he or she
might think or feel. We asked a control group simply to learn
the passage. We tested all students at the end of the class
period. One week later we surprised all the students with a second test on the chapter.

The group who read the material from more than one perspective, that is, mindfully, outperformed the control group on
recall of the information, improvement from the first to the
second test, creativity in the essays, and intelligence, or insight,
of the essays. Again, essays were judged by outside raters.

Since memorizing is the standard approach students take to
learning material, it is encouraging to see that after so many
years of learning this way, so many of them are willing to learn
the material in a new way. Students in our studies not only
made the material meaningful to themselves, but they used different perspectives and thus were introduced to the contextdependent nature of information. Approaching information in
this way invites further distinction drawing, further interpretation. Because the information is not all tied up in a nice, neat
package, there is reason to get involved with it.

In other work, Claudia Mueller and I assessed memory as a
function of conditional learning." We showed ninth-to-twelfth grade students pictures of ten ambiguous drawings (for example, one that could be described as a ball on the ground or a
balloon tied to the middle of a stick). We presented the pictures
either conditionally ("This could be. . . ") or with absolute language ("This is . . .") and asked the students to remember
them. Tests of recall and recognition of the objects in a new
context revealed that conditional learning resulted in better
memory.

For her thesis, Janet Eck tested the effects of memorization
in a medical setting." Because of the volume of information to
be learned in medical school, medical students memorize more
than do most of us. She hypothesized that when called on later
to use that information in a somewhat novel context, students
would overlook possible alternative views. She examined the
diagnosis of diseases that were uncommon in women until
recently. Since the vast majority of medical information has
been deduced from the conditions in 150-to-170-pound white
males, she wondered whether male doctors would be more
likely than female doctors, who would be more familiar with
the perspective of a female patient, to diagnose incorrectly a
disease more common to men than to women. Male and
female patients presented symptoms of medical ailments prevalent in women or prevalent in men. Male and female physicians
were asked for their diagnoses. Not surprisingly, Eck found
that the unusual syndromes, the ones not likely to have been
memorized, went unnoticed and thus were misdiagnosed. In
addition, women who presented signs of having had a transient
ischemic attack or lung cancer were more likely to be misdiag nosed by male physicians than by female physicians, for whom
the perspective was less unusual.

Information learned in an absolute form can be memorized. It remains still with each repetition, regardless of context
and perspective. When we are told that something "could be,"
we understand immediately that it also could not be, or could
be something else. When we teach important information,
information about health, how to pilot an airplane, air-traffic
control, bridge or building safety, and so on, we need to allow
for exceptions, for information that goes beyond these common
instances that appear to be all that is relevant at the time of initial learning. Students learning such information must be open
to factors that could operate in a new context. If we simply
memorize the known past, we are not preparing ourselves for
the as-yet-to-be-known future.

Had Hansel and Gretel noticed more of their surroundings-how one tree differed from another, how the ground
beneath them changed with the growth covering it, the odd
rock or boulder strewn in the path-they would have had an
easier journey home. In their case, as in many cases, memorization was impossible, but a mindful scan of the surroundings (in
the forest, on the chessboard, at a party) will often help us navigate successfully.