Working Smarter, Not Harder: Our CCS Quizlet Project

Conway Christian School is committed to allowing our high school students to be involved in numerous co-curricular activities — from community service to athletics, drama, music, and more — that they might intimidated to try in a large public school environment.  We believe it creates a sense of community at school, and confidence that students can attempt new and different activities and succeed. Sometimes our students can sail along through junior high, based on fairly enriched backgrounds and stable homes, with little thought for developing a serious method for mastering challenging academic material on a tight schedule. When they arrive in high school, however, and all those new opportunities present themselves, some students can become overwhelmed.

Between transition stress and developmental issues, it's easy for many junior high students to feel they can't really get traction about how to do well.  Some feel baffled as to how to affect the outcome.  It's not enough for teachers to simply say, "try harder."  We've been watching the process from the junior high and high school side for a while, discussing strategies for better equipping students before ninth grade.  Toward that end, I'm running a pilot project with a web 2.0 app called Quizlet this nine weeks in my seventh and eighth grade history classes.

How we learn is a very individual process, but a 2013 study published here suggested many study techniques students use often have a very low payoff for the time spent on them, while other techniques would have benefit over a student's entire academic career and across all content areas. I've decided to focus like a laser on training my social studies students to use them effectively and consistently, tracking their compliance and their achievement.

So what are these "silver bullets" of study? Short and sweet, they are:

1.  Distributed practice. Think eating an elephant one bite at a time.  Students who review material ten minutes per day rather than two hours the night before a test have a serious advantage. One reason is that sleep consolidates learning, so having some "sleeps" between reviewing the material and testing over it is helpful. Being exposed to material initially imprints it lightly on our brains, then reviewing it again soon afterward sort of "smooshes" it deeper into the wrinkles of the brain. These regular, short review sessions not only help students perform better on tests, but result in increased long-term retention.

2.  Self-testing.  One problem for many students is that they try to study without ever  "knowing what they don't know." Creating scenarios where students engage questions, whether from end-of-section reviews in the text, from Cornell notes, or from flashcards, enables them to sort what they have mastered from what they do not know, and to use their time more efficiently. Careful, however: it's important for students not to assume the questions on an assessment will be worded exactly as their flashcards. That can result in sense of false competence. It's essential that we train students to self-assess while they read by trying to predict questions an instructor might generate over material they have been exposed to. These questions could be knowledge targets or higher-order thinking questions.

So, what common study methods did the researchers say were less effective?  According to the study, highlighting and underlining while reading yields very little benefit.  Re-reading and summarization, creating mnemonics, and mental imagery have narrow applications.  The data were so compelling that the researchers felt those techniques should be shelved for most applications and replaced with the two methods above.

Why Quizlet?  Quizlet allows me to create a closed class, have students join it, and track student behavior and progress.  Students can create flashcards and peer review them to make sure they are correct, then watch as they study using old-fashioned flash card techniques with a twist:  auditory learners can have the cards read aloud by the voice on the program and they can receive either the term first or the definition/description first.  Quizlet will  generate fill-in-the-blank, matching, true/false, or multiple choice quizzes. Students can flag the terms/concepts they have consistently mastered, and ask to be quizzed only over the ones they are missing.  They can generate a report over how many times they have missed or answered items correctly.  Students can even play timed games (only after they master the material), competing against others in the class.  Quizlet is available from a laptop, phone, or any other portable device to use between activities, while waiting in the doctor's office, or traveling to and from school.  Students can even print hard copies of the terms and definitions as cards or as handouts.

We are devoting the first ten minutes of class every day in room 106 to a silent preview/review of material using Quizlet.  I am excited to see how we progress, but my early intuition is that it has already been worth every minute we have spent in 8th grade.  During this first chapter of our Quizlet project, I have noted students confidently using vocabulary in class discussion that comes directly from their review.  For now, that's the introduction.  I look forward to reporting on our progress soon.



Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K., Marsh, E., Nathan, M., & Willingham, D. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4-58.