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Key points
- Repetition of writing assignments and other activities may help students develop skills, as well as feel more engaged and included.
- Repetition may help students process difficult course content.
- Recent research shows that viewing lectures at increased speeds more than once might facilitate learning.
Repetition is an amazing thing—in real life and in college classrooms.
I spent all day yesterday listening—over and over again—to the soundtrack of Hamilton, which I was fortunate enough to see over the weekend. Listening to music repeatedly is a rare event for me, so it got me thinking—which is also a rare event for me. Let’s consider a few aspects of the role of repetition in teaching.
I know that repetition, or practice, builds skills. Malcolm Gladwell recommends 10,000 hours, which might be a little much for a college course; students might complain. However, helping students learn how to write (and think) by repeating writing assignments and classroom exercises takes much less time. Some students still complain, of course—although I’ve noticed that their complaints to me are quite well-written by the end of the semester!
Listening to Hamilton made me feel closer to the play—the play became mine in a way. It was as if I became a participant rather than just an observer. (I think the dancing around my kitchen helped with that.) This makes me wonder whether repetition of experiences in the classroom—small group discussions, role-plays, think-pair-shares—might help students feel more welcomed, engaged, and included in the course.
Rereading information improves learning
As I listened to Hamilton for the third and fourth time, I could hear words that I couldn’t make out before. I also had the experience of hearing words, melodies, rhythms, and harmonies that I could swear I never heard before, even though I knew I had. This reminded me of a strategy I used many summers ago when teaching an undergraduate course on theories of psychotherapy. I had two problems to solve when designing the course. First, I wanted to use a graduate text which I knew would be very difficult for some of my undergraduate students—especially in a condensed semester. Second, I couldn’t decide the order of the chapters, because, for example, I wanted students to have read Rogers before the psychoanalytic chapter, but I also saw value in a chronological approach to the chapters. Here’s how I solved both problems: I had students read five chapters, in chronological order, during the first half of the semester, then I had them read the same chapters, in the same order, during the second half.
The repetition of reading assignments did help in both ways. Students read only the major theories and could learn the information more deeply. They also had all the background I wanted them to have when they read each chapter! But another thing happened that I wasn’t prepared for: Students (after initially questioning why they had to read something twice—a topic for another day) almost uniformly reported that they couldn’t believe they had read those same chapters before after the second reading. Like I needed repetition when listening to Hamilton’s raps, students needed the second reading to catch all the words—and the meanings!
Rewatching video lectures increases test scores
I had to take a break from Hamilton yesterday, so I read, by a wonderful coincidence, an article by Emma Young, who summarized some interesting research by Dillon Murphy and his colleagues at UCLA. In these pandemic times when many professors are making videos of their lectures, Murphy et al. were interested in students who listen to these lectures. They found that 85% of UCLA students watched them at fast speeds! Does such “speed-watching” decrease learning? As long as it’s not 2.5x, the answer is no—learning is not impaired. Young also discussed research that found those students who watched a video lecture at fast speeds, and then watched it again before a test, did better on a test than did students who watched the video just once at normal speeds.
It never occurred to me that I could have spent less time listening, or that I could have listened to the entire Hamilton soundtrack twice as many times had I listened at double speed! I can’t dance that fast in my kitchen, but now I will reconsider how to use videos and recorded lectures in my courses. It might be (pending replication of these findings) that high-speed viewing will be one of those things that survives the pandemic to make teaching and learning more effective—like flipping our classrooms, using Jamboards and other online tools to facilitate discussions, and wearing really nice shirts with really comfortable pants to class. It’s worth a shot….
