Hi, Aralakh!

I’m responding to you here, but really I wanted to talk about something you asked about in another thread. That other thread got shut down, but I learned that before I typed out my response.

You asked how to learn for understanding instead of for coverage. Here’s my response:

Sure. It helps to know what learning is: a change in long term memory. In particular, you’re structuring your memory so that you can think in a structured way.

So, how do you change your long term memory? First, start by paying attention to what you want to learn. If it’s a hard topic, pay attention to a small part of it. Read just a chapter, or just a page, or just a paragraph.

How much should you chew? Just a page? Just a paragraph? The whole book? Your experience will tell you. Try something and see how it goes.

Once you have read something small enough, put it aside and try to recall it. Write it out or talk out loud. Try to explain it. Try to interpret it. Try to get a sense of how much you understand of it.

Then go back to the text and compare what you said to it. See if you got the main ideas.

This is the basic understanding procedure.

Here are some ways of enhancing the procedure.

• Establish goals for yourself. This is very, very important. Do you want to understand the main ideas? What are those main ideas? Do you want to develop a skill? What is it? Without goals, it’s hard to self-regulate as a learner. Check out the research on this self-regulation: Metacognitive Judgments and Control of Study and * Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner: An Overview*
  • A method that I like to establish goals is to have a constantly-changing, bottom-up list of Knowledge, Skills, Understandings, and Transfers I want to learn. Knowledge are just facts. Skills are basic things you learn to do. Understandings integrate and make sense of isolated facts. Understandings are developed over time. Your Understandings will probably change over time, which is why the list is bottom-up: you build is as you go. Transfers are authentic and complex applications of Skills, and they require Knowledge and Understandings. So before study session, I try to make a list of K, S, U, and T, to compare my actual recall to those. These ideas come from Understanding by Design for this, as well as Embedding Formative Assessment’s short section on Big Ideas.
• Learn about cognitive load theory. This will help you learn how much to chew. In particular, learning about the generation effect, element interactivity, the expertise reversal effect, and the spacing effect will help you loads. Going into learning without cognitive load theory is tough. Going into learning with cognitive load theory is powerful. There’s talks by Sweller, the originator of CLT, and there’s nice chapters on the implications of CLT for learning: Schmoker’s Just Tell Them and Rosenshine’s Principles In Action.
• Structure your recall sessions through Visible Thinking Routines. Practice the Core Thinking Routines. The books on VTR are good. Just know that VTR were developed in constructivist land, but constructivism is inefficient in learning, compared to Explicit Instruction (Archer and Schmoker) and Direct Instruction. In other words, if you want to learn efficiently then have clear goals, take small steps, generate evidence of where you are, and compare where you are to where you want to be so that you can know how to get there! VTR are amazing in both constructivist and direct instruction lands. They work for both (1) novices who are chewing very little and (2) experts who are innovating with entirely new thoughts.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have questions :)