None of this is especially news to cognitive researchers: the basic point about changing where you study was established in 1978.

One of the cognitive psychologists quoted by the Times, Robert Bjork, has a fabulous online article gleaned from responses to a final exam question asking students what they would tell a sibling starting college about studying after taking his course.

My favorite student quote, the one that resonated most, puts the challenge at its starkest:

"First of all, I would explain to my sister that people are not, in general, good judges of what's best for them in studying and learning. So, she should listen to me very carefully, since some recommendations may seem counterintuitive."

And that is the problem. As the Bjork lab website puts it:

Most people are inaccurate in measuring their own knowledge, through judgments of learning, because they mistakenly rely on the immediate access to knowledge in order to determine the long-term memory retention and the transfer of such knowledge to different contexts.

The Times offers a memorable metaphor to translate this:

Hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn -- it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out.

When the neural suitcase is packed carefully and gradually, it holds its contents for far, far longer.

So how can we shift a cultural orthodoxy, which is what beliefs about studying and learning have become?

Many anthropologists in the last thirty years have developed renewed interest in pragmatics, in understanding culture less as a series of symbolic concepts and more as a way of doing things.

This includes the insight that unquestioned assumptions about what is right to do are reproduced in action. When traditional practices are transformed or even questioned, the response can be reflection on formerly unquestioned assumptions. These may be transformed into new ideals that eventually become new unquestioned assumptions. Or, there may be retrenchment of existing assumptions, now raised to the level of conscious orthodoxy.

When I first began to restructure my teaching to build on cognitive research, my concern was how to ensure that students, asked to put up with more complex approaches to material that would take them longer to master, would understand that what Bjork and his colleagues call "desireable difficulties" would benefit them in the long run.

Today, my concern is how we can possibly get this message out beyond college classrooms.

For my students, the solution was simple. Students entering my classroom cannot rely on existing practices of learning because I have changed every practice that they expect. I explicitly discuss the assumptions underwriting the traditional classroom and the reconfigured one they are joining. My students form new, heterodox understandings of learning through participating in new practices.

Not so easy to affect the primary and secondary education system that increasingly sends to college students who know that they need to have a stable study location, that drill is virtuous and that cramming works.

What we see in current educational policy (and current here means for most of my life) is classic orthodoxy: calls for a return to "basics", imposition of precisely the kind of short-term testing that offers no promise of long-term retention, and nostalgia for days gone by.

This isn't a problem of science; it's a problem of culture. And in this case, only practice can make perfect.