Better studying habits experiment. MakerEd assignment
These last couple of years I have been teaching English asynchronously through microlearning. It means that my students do 15-minute tasks six days a week. Of course, studying that often is not easy. Many students struggle with getting themselves in the mood and starting to work on their tasks. However, I really need them to do it regularly because studies show that this is the most effective way (1).
One argument is that dividing the cognitive load into shorter pieces significantly increases the chances that the new information will actually get stored in the long-term memory (2). Another argument is that studying at regular intervals brings more results compared to studying on an on-and-off basis (3). So I have decided to create a GIM-based (4) project that would help my students make their regular studying a habit and beat the forgetting curve.
So my idea is to give my students a few tasks based on videos or articles about habit formation to make them familiar with the concept of building a healthy habit and its importance. That would be the Familiarize stage. Their next task will be to choose a few habit formation strategies that seem more appealing to them personally. And after that they will be required to conduct an experiment: implement the strategies they chose one at a time, record the results and decide which strategy helped them study regularly the most. During the experiment, students are required to log in their experience in a graph showing the number of study sessions they have had during the periods of implementation of every new strategy. That would be the Create stage. We will then have a lesson where they will present the results of their experiment using a poster with all the graphs they have created. That would be the Exhibit stage.
Hopefully, as a result of this experiment, my students will find a working way to form a new habit that will make it easier for them to complete my tasks almost every day and get the most results out of the studying process. An additional bonus is that all the preparation activities will be done in English, which is the point of our work together. Besides, this little experiment is a way to engage my students and bring English closer to their everyday lives. Maybe, they will decide to transfer these newly-learned strategies to some other areas of their lives.
References:
(1) Perry, M. (2017). Learning Trend: Microlearning. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/openview/de94722d2c4881c11ea7407ebf86781a/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=32671
(2) Salas, A. (2017). Microlearning: What It Is Not and What It Should Be. Learning Solutions. Retrieved from https://learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/2255/microlearning-what-it-is-not-and-what-it-should-be
(3) Gona, S. M., Karzan W., Sarkhell S. N. (2018). The Effectiveness of Microlearning to Improve Students’ Learning Ability. Retrieved from https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/458672
(4) Sanabria, J.S., (2015). The Gradual Immersion Method (GIM): Pedagogical Transformation into Mixed Reality. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050915037205
