It is a complex and layered issue and I believe it is essential to address it. Today, in this article, we discover the reason, indeed the reasons, why you have never learned a good study method.
I have identified several major problems which, taken together, lead to the sad reality of the fact that students are, unfortunately, largely devoid of a true study method. Let’s see them one at a time!
No, this article is not about the existence of services like custom term paper writing service but rather about more general and abstract topics regarding educational study methods. After all, the previously mentioned services do not impact the student’s ability to learn whatsoever, in fact, they boost the ability by enabling learners with more free time.
The Problem of Communication Between Science and the Education World
We assume that, unfortunately, it is by no means certain that scientists are also communicators and popularizers.
Indeed, although the thing is evolving and changing over the years, there is still strong resistance in the scientific world to pure disclosure, there is still the stigma of “trivialization”, of lowering discoveries and research to the populace. An obtuse, elitist, and short-sighted attitude, as far as I’m concerned, already leads to a starting point in which there are very few channels of true disclosure in this field.
But even outside of this, in general, the communication between the academic and scientific world and that of teaching and practical education, every day, is very little if not nonexistent.
Scientists, teachers, and pupils do not talk to each other, they do not exchange information and results, the courses for teachers based on the principles derived from research in the field of cognitive psychology are very few and extremely superficial, even sometimes the manuals and courses for teachers go astray and perpetrate completely false or outdated myths about learning.
Not to mention the paradoxical fact that not even students of cognitive psychology or neuroscience themselves often benefit from the principles they learn from books because they are presented in an aseptic and abstract, theoretical way, maintaining a rift between scientific theory and the practice of study. Very difficult to fill.
The Problem of Scientific Evidence
Then there is the problem of science itself, just so that one does not think that scientific research is free from errors and complicated situations.
Cognitive psychology is not a hard science and collecting experimental evidence in the field of study and learning is very complicated: there is the problem of creating and administering really effective tests, that of finding a sufficient number of experimental subjects to make a real statistical analysis, there are false positives and the extreme difficulty of isolating and controlling the variables of the experiment.
This is why reading research in the psychological field and drawing clear and unambiguous conclusions from it is extremely more difficult than doing it in the field, say, of chemistry.
You find everything and the opposite of everything and you have to be extremely careful to select what works and leads to tangible results and what doesn’t.
This is why I always advise against focusing on minutiae and specific discussions, on whether the mind map or the concept map works better or is it better to study in the evening at 20 or 21 and things like that because it is very difficult if not it is impossible to arrive at conclusive answers on issues of this type.
Better to focus on those macro-principles that we can analyze quantitatively and qualitatively and which are now consolidated by decades of research and are also reflected in the more purely neuroscientific side.
In short, in general, it is necessary to understand that different disciplines have different degrees of certainty of their results and if on the one hand, one must remain firm on the fundamental principles and not allow oneself to be duped by the sirens of pseudoscience-babble, on the other one must remain open and ready to deal with new evidence. It is a subtle and difficult balance to achieve.
The Teacher Problem
And we are at the most controversial point, the one that will attract me the most piqued and offending comments.
But yes, it’s also a question of teachers. At school, of course, but also at the university. Because there are far too few professors who are interested in these topics, who read articles like this in their free time and beware, it’s not necessarily their fault. Especially at school, they have to bear absurd rhythms and program impositions, they are underpaid as we said before, it is not just a matter of personal will and professionalism.
And then, for the most part, the training courses for the teaching qualification are smoky, vague, full of promising big words of the “didactics by skills” type that in themselves sound good but are not then translated into practice. daily in classrooms.
And here we focus on knowing everything about how an electronic whiteboard works and we do not know, however, the basic cognitive principles of learning and attention, so to speak.
And then, in the large majority, teachers do not train or do not do enough or do not do it on these issues and maintain a closed and set attitude, focused exclusively on their subject and on the notions they have to pass.
Not only that, but they are also often prejudiced and suspicious: I have been taking courses in schools for years and I will never forget the smug looks and snobbishness that greeted me almost everywhere I went.
And finally, there are the difficulties that teachers have in the classrooms, difficulties in discipline, in managing the children, in relationships with parents. The variables are many and they all contribute to moving away from the desire to communicate to students a truly scientific study method.
In the End
The good news is that things are slowly changing: science is increasingly understanding the need to disseminate and communicate its research and results, research on the subject is becoming more and more solid and accurate, and the world of education is slowly showing signs of openness and, if not of real change, at least of desire for change, teachers begin to open up and recognize the problem, new means of communication help students to clarify their doubts and fill their gaps and fight the lies and to the pseudo-sciences, it becomes more and more aggressive.
In short, things are changing, and, little by little, they will continue to change. I like to think that what I do, what we do here together, contributes even minimally to this change.
And I hope that the day when studying will no longer be such a big problem for students is not far off.
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