A Quiet Place The Benefits of Solitary Learning

A Quiet Place: The Benefits of Solitary Learning Ashley Waggoner Denton Department of Psychology U of T Annual Teaching & Learning Symposium, May 2019

“Educators widely recognize that students do not learn well when they are isolated "receivers" of knowledge. Indeed, students must overcome isolation in order to learn to write. ” - Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

“Unless one learns to tolerate and even enjoy being alone, it is difficult to accomplish any task that requires undivided concentration. ” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Talk Roadmap • Importance of deliberate, solitary practice • Using writing as an example • Challenges of achieving isolation & sustained attention • Solutions: What can instructors do to help?

Practice Makes “Perfect” • But the type of practice matters • Deliberate practice involves: • Identification of specific skills/knowledge you want to improve; • Engagement in intentional, sustained practice; • Careful monitoring of performance (receiving feedback); • Appropriate revision E. g. , Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993

Importance of Solitude • Example: Benjamin Franklin “Only when you’re alone, can you go directly to the part that’s challenging to you. If you want to improve what you’re doing, you have to be the one who generates the move. ” - Anders Ericsson from Cain, 2011, p. 81

Writing is Cognitively Demanding PLANNING IDEAS GENERATING TEXT (What do I want to say? ) (What does it actually say? ) REVIEWING (How might someone else interpret this? ) Kellogg & Whiteford, 2009

Importance of working memory & allocation of attention • Working memory capacity is positively correlated with writing ability in college students (Ransdell & Levy, 1996) • Placing additional demands on working memory (remembering a 6 -digit number) reduces writing fluency and quality (Ransdell, Levy, & Kellogg, 2002) • Of course, working memory is important to other types of tasks as well (e. g. , mathematics, music, programming, etc. )

Distractions and interruptions abound • 18 -24 year olds sent and received about 128 text messages per day (Pew Research Centre and other survey data from 2012 -2015) • A typical university student unlocks their phone 50 times a day and spends about 5 minutes on their phone each time (Rosen, 2017) • Interruptions are estimated to consume 28% of the knowledge worker’s day (Basex, 2011) • Even after excluding “non-significant” disruptions, workers spent an average of 12 minutes on a task (González & Mark, 2004)

• Students were asked to spend 15 minutes studying “something very important” • Same results with both observational & self-reported data • Vast majority of distractions are “communication technologies” Rosen, Carrier, & Cheever, 2013; Rosen et al. , 2016

What can we do?

Students often don’t realize how distracted they are • Or the effect the distraction is having on their learning and performance outcomes • Solution: Empower with knowledge • Studies showing the effects of: • Multitasking peers (Sana, Weston, & Cepeda, 2013) • Smartphone use during class (Glass & Kang, 2018) • The mere presence of one’s phone (Ward et al. , 2017) • Strategies for attention management: • E. g. , The “ 20 second rule” (passwords, apps)

Students want quiet places “Many of my own high-school students regularly request extended sessions of silent reading…. Some admit to enjoying the opportunity to work in a quiet room and are eager to write about certain prompts for as long as I let them. I used to think their ubiquitous earbuds were feeding their need for stimulation; now I wonder if they’re sometimes blocking out the noise. ” • Excerpt from When Schools Overlook Introverts, by Michael Godsey, Sept 28 2015, The Atlantic

Students want quiet places • Solution: What if in addition to active learning classrooms, we also had quiet learning classrooms? • • Restricted internet usage No phones allowed No talking allowed Instructors/TAs/librarians available in connecting rooms for feedback and consultation

Summary • Collaborative and interactive learning strategies are important, but are not all-important • Solitary, deliberate practice is crucial to the development of many important skills • Students generally lack the motivation and ability to engage in such practice • We can and should be doing more to help our students reduce distraction, sustain attention, and engage in deliberate and reflective practice

Thanks! Questions, comments? Ashley Waggoner Denton waggonerdenton@psych. utoronto. ca