Reading time: 7 minutes

“But, Mum and Dad, I did study hard and I thought I knew my stuff. I’m not sure why I did so bad on my test?”

It’s a conversation we have all likely been privy to at some point in life.

Unfortunately our brains are not as trustworthy as we believe them to be. All of us (including the author of this post) constantly are subject to cognitive biases, which is a temporary distortion in the way you think, which can cause all of us to misjudge situations from time to time.

There’s a special kind of cognitive bias that explains why do we so easily forget things that we thought we had previously learned. When describing this type of cognitive bias, I like to coin the phrase illusion of learning. An illusion of learning is when we think that we understand something but we actually don’t: we can only recognise it. Illusions of learning cause us to overestimate how much we actually know about a topic.

Illusions of Learning can Obstruct the Learning Process

The main way an illusion of learning can happen is through students mistaking recognition for recall.

Recognition is being able to only “remember” something once it is shown to the person, whereas recall is when someone can “remember” something without any clues presented.

This is an idea commonly discussed in cognitive psychology and one that can be easily illustrated in real life. Take the following example:

A classroom was broken into two evenly intelligent groups. The first group was asked who the President of China was but then for the second group, a list of potential presidents was given, and they were asked which one of person was the President of China. Would there be a difference in the percentage of correct responses between the two groups?

The answer: yes, most definitely.

Scientists actually carried out this exact study, and found that 36% of participants could correctly answer the first way the question was presented and this increased to 60% of participants with the second way the question was presented.

This is because our brain confuses being able to recognise something to being able to fully recall it. The first question was designed to test “recall” because there was no “prompt” or trigger, whereas the second question was geared towards “recognition” because the participant just had to recognise roughly the right answer.

The confusion between recall and recognition has profound implications for the way your children learn.

When your children sit at a desk and reread a section of a textbook again and again, they feel like they are gaining a full retention and understanding of the material.

But they’re not.

They are merely training their “recognition” of the key words and ideas, rather than the full recall and understanding of those ideas.

Then, when it gets to the examination and questions examining recall are asked, the information is promptly forgotten and the best a student can muster is a vague recollection of key words.

For example, if they are learning about why ions form from atoms, then they might read the textbook and think “well that’s logical” and might think they therefore understand it. They might even be able to recognise a few keywords, such as “protons”, “charge” etc. However, in the exam it might give a different context than the textbook or might simply ask the student to fully explain why ions form from atoms, to which they might not be remember any of the explanation or can only piece together parts.

Unfortunately, this story is all too familiar.

I’ve seen it happen with so many students where they can throw together some keywords in a sentence but not actually have any authentic understanding of what they are actually saying. Often they’ll even just completely blank out.

Unfortunately, this is not conducive to high grades.

So, then, why do so many young people study by rereading their notes again and again?

Because they get sucked into an illusion of learning that gives a temporary sense of confidence and therefore convinces them that their studying is working. Then, instead of attributing the resulting failure to poor study technique, students often think the failure is due to being “dumb” or “stupid”.

This simple idea explains a lot about learning and why children get trapped in a cycle of lost confidence and failure.

It’s not about the fact that learning is “boring”, or that they aren’t intelligent — I know plenty of people of average intelligence who have done well in their education, including myself — it’s due to the way they are studying. Students are using methods, such as rereading, that promote illusions of learning that build false confidence and self-assurance that real learning is taking place until an exam, where that false confidence comes crashing down.

Illusions of Learning Happen all Throughout the Learning Process

Unfortunately Illusions of Learning can happen throughout the entire learning process and happens much more often than we realise.

For example, another context we see an illusion of learning taking place is when students do practice questions during study or homework. Often, many textbooks and past exams come with the answers at the back. Many students fail to simulate exam conditions when studying (something that will be discuss more extensively in another post), and have the answers open before or as they do the question. Again, this gives the student a false sense of confidence as they then believe they have “learned” how to do the question because they now know the answer. Because they do not understand any of the underlying concepts behind the answers, they will be stumped by exam questions that are worded slightly differently — or forget how to do the same question completely.

Another variation is in Mathematics textbooks, where they begin a skill with an example of how the concept might apply to a question. This is super useful, but many students often fall into a trap with this textbook design. This will be discussed in more depth in further posts, but often students have the example answer open, and just adapt the answer to the next question based off the example, without covering up.

This means minimal learning taking place, and often results in students “forgetting” how to do a certain maths problem in an exam.

Other ways we can fall into illusions of learning are numerous but include the following:

– Listening to lectures (seriously, whoever sitting and listening to someone talk at them for 50 minutes must not have ever attended a sermon before!)

– Watching YouTube videos again and again

– Reading your textbook again and again

– Highlighting (this was proven to be ineffective through a 2013 study undertaken by the American Psychological Association — more on this in another post)

– Doing the same question, or type of question, again and again.

Unfortunately, avoiding illusions of learning is difficult.

If illusions of learning are so disadvantageous to the learning process, then why do we keep using methods that lead to illusions of learning?

Authentic Learning is Supposed to Be Hard

One reason is that students don’t know better; they simply do not know any strategies to study that help to avoid illusions of learning.

The other possible reason though, is that authentic learning is actually supposed to be difficult.

An easy analogy to explain is that using your brain is like building muscle — the more pain, the more gain. So, in fact, authentic learning is supposed to be difficult, as you bypass the illusion of learning and come to the cold hard truth that sometimes it may take repeated deliberate practice before complete mastery of a concept is achieved.

Many of the studies based around effective learning techniques (covered in another post) show that the participants using these techniques often feel like the techniques don’t work and they feel less confident about the learning process. Much like someone lifting weights for the first time feels useless after doing a few sets of dumbbell curls. However, when the participants underwent testing, these study techniques always produced better results.

Unfortunately many children have been conditioned by the school system to have poor, “fixed”, mindsets towards their learning, which then makes them more fearful of failure. In turn, this makes them feel much more comfortable with using ineffective learning techniques which create illusions of learning.

Bringing it back to the exercise analogy, it is much like someone who does push ups on their knees. It may make you feel stronger because you can do multiple push ups, but in the long run, there is not really much benefit because it doesn’t actually make you stronger.

It’s exactly the same with study strategies like rereading.

What Can you do to Counter Illusions of Learning in your Children?

There are many ways, which will be covered in the next posts “Strategies to avoid illusions of learning” and “Why embracing failure may be the surprising strategy to rapid learning”, but in general we need strategies that promote deep processing of information.

Your brain is intricate, with many different levels of processing that can take place. Strategies such as rereading notes again and again, only cause shallow processing by the brain, which means the brain either sends it into hard to access storage, or filters out, meaning that the memory is lost. Memories are an extremely important of the learning process, as cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham explains when he mentions that “memory is the residue of thought”. Thus, we need strategies that enhance memory by helping your brain to deeply process information.

A simple technique you can apply almost immediately is “the test effect”, which is simply, trying to test your children on what they’ve learned (or getting them to test themselves) without any aid.

For example, if they were reading a chapter of a textbook, they could use the testing effect in a number of ways. They could read a section, then cover it up and then write or say a summary of what they’ve just read. At the end of the chapter, they could make a summary or draw a mind map of what they’ve learned in that chapter (without looking at the book), and then reread the chapter again to check if they have everything. They could place key phrases, definitions and concepts onto flashcards, or an online flashcard tool such as Brainscape, then get you to test them. Note that the testing aspect is the most important part of the exercise, not making the flashcards!

This helps them to deeply process information and retain that in their memory. Varying the place you test them (e.g. in the car and at home), and giving them time for their brain to consolidate and process information in between each testing session can enhance their brain’s processing abilities.

Try it at home and promote a culture/habit of testing your children, or getting them to test themselves, whenever they learn something.

Over time, you’ll really see the difference.

However, as discussed earlier, merely using different study/learning techniques by itself like testing may not actually change anything.

Why?

Because avoiding illusions of learning is a mindset issue as well. Students have to be comfortable with being able to see failure or difficulty as an acceptable and natural part of the learning process, rather than any measure of their self-worth. Unfortunately the school system conditions children to be afraid of failure, which means this mindset is difficult to change.

In future posts, we’ll delve into how to help your children develop their mindset, as well as providing them with study techniques that actually work and don’t just give them an illusion of learning.