Academic – Nerdery & Nostalgia

Overly Dense Article Draft

Originally written 20 June 2021; edited draft published to HeySoCal 24 June 2021.

A Review of New Research on Study Skills and Time Management Benefits

By Brianna Chu

Most parents, students, and teachers will recognise the terms “study skills” and “time management.” These nonacademic skills have often been touted as the keys to improved academic performance. However, not all study strategies are built alike, and there may be more benefits to time management than simply academic performance. This review of two studies published this year summarizes new insights to these familiar terms and may help students and parents use the summer time to prepare and plan for a more effective and balanced school year.

Meaningful study engagement, not total study time, garners better performance

Walck-Shannon, Rowell, & Frey (2021) refer to the “desirable difficulties framework” from Bjork and Bjork (2011), who propose that more challenging studying strategies promote improved long-term knowledge retention. In the past, the two researchers have differentiated between storage strength and retrieval strength; storage strength refers to how deeply entrenched the knowledge is, while retrieval strength refers to how quickly and easily accessible that information is. Bjork and Bjork consequently propose that greater storage strength delays the inevitable knowledge or information loss, and that some “desirable difficulties” in information storage strategies can better cement knowledge. Walck-Shannon et al. hypothesise that the use of more active studying methods, in which students do not repeat previous activities (such as simply reviewing notes or rewriting their original notes word for word) but instead engage with material in new ways, would result in higher performance on exams. The researchers emphasized a technique they refer to as “self-quizzing”, or self-explanation. This learning strategy involves students asking themselves “how” and “why” questions as they learn material, building their own connections between previously learned knowledge and the new information they have been presented.

Within Walck-Shannon’s et al.’s introductory Biology class, students used twelve strategies most frequently, of which six were classified as active, five were classified as passive, and one was mixed (both active and passive). Active strategies included activities such as completing old exams, self-quizzing, paraphrasing class notes, and creating diagrams. Passive strategies included rereading notes, watching lecture videos, and rereading the course textbook. Of the top five most frequently reported study strategies, four were active, while only one was passive.

This use of active strategies by this class is not necessarily typical of most students: overall, they found that their Biology students used self-quizzing more often than students in general (75% versus 10.7% who self-test or 40.1% who use flashcards). Students report preferences for study techniques differently for one specific course than they do for a nonspecific course/studying in general.

Walck-Shannon et al. received feedback on study techniques from 424 out of a total class size of 623, and compared their study habits with their exam results. Unsurprisingly, the most common study strategy was to read over their notes or the lecture slides, a passive strategy. Four main strategies stood out: completing problem sets, self-quizzing, explaining concepts, and attending review sessions or office hours. The latter was considered a mixed strategy, as student engagement can range from actively asking questions to passively taking notes on teacher responses to others’ questions.

Overall, they found that students who used all four of these strategies scored between 4-7.7% higher on average on both tests. While the rest of the most frequently used active strategies only correlated to higher performance on one of the two exams, Walck et al. found that the number of active strategies used by students positively predicted their exam scores. Students who used all six of the main active strategies scored anywhere from 11.1-16.1% higher than students who used no active strategies at all. In short, the more active strategies students employed, the higher their grades were.

Walck et al. also inspected Bjork and Bjork’s (2011) proposal that spacing out study sessions (as opposed to “cramming”) would improve storage strength, a commonly held concept. Interestingly, however, Walck et al. found no significant effect from the total amount of time students spent studying or any significantly better performance from students who started to study the furthest in advance of the exams. No student in their sample studied fewer than two days in the week leading up to the exams, and 64% of students began studying six or fewer days in advance of the exam.

Less surprisingly, Walck et al.’s study confirmed the hypothesis that the more time students studied while distracted—for example, study time in which students multitasked, like scrolling through social media—the worse students would perform. Their students reported distractions during 20% of their total studying time.

These findings suggest that practicing problems, quizzing yourself while learning, and explaining the concept to yourself or others are key study skills to hone for better exam performance, especially for math and science classes. These strategies may still be viable for English and language classes, especially with regard to grammar or vocabulary. Students could also use self-quizzing and explaining concepts for history or social science courses. Walck et al.’s results also reinforce the importance of asking further questions, taking full advantage of office hours or review sessions, or even taking the initiative to contact a teacher or professor directly to clarify challenging concepts.

Less-considered benefits to time management practices

In their 2021 meta-analysis, Aeon, Faber, and Panaccio review the results of 158 studies on time management—from the 1980’s to 2019—to discern not just whether or not time management works, but also whether these techniques are productive and helpful. Concerns that time management mindsets can emphasize a “profit-oriented view of time that perpetuates social [and global] inequalities” and “an inability to enjoy the moment” have been raised by more than just academics, especially in the past decade.

Aeon et al. found that time management had a moderate impact on both academic and work performance, though it seemed to be slightly more effective in academic settings. In an academic setting, time management had a greater impact on behaviour-based performance than results-based performance. In other words, time management skills more strongly affect productive behaviors like motivation and procrastination reduction rather than directly improving GPA. Good use of time management can help students organize their time to better study and complete tasks to better perform on homework and exams, for instance.

The most unexpected result from the meta-analysis found that time management had a more significant effect on wellbeing than performance, either academic or professional. Aeon et al. record that the effect of time management on life satisfaction is more statistically significant than that of job satisfaction. From their review, the researchers have found that time management has most significantly affected previous studies’ participants’ sense of positive mental health and sense of purpose. These findings suggest that time management skills—like setting work-life boundaries, breaking up tasks into smaller goals, scheduling time to complete certain tasks, and deliberately integrating breaks and downtime into one’s schedule—can alleviate stress and improve mental health overall, not just improve work efficacy.

A possible interpretation of the meta-analysis results could be that the purpose for which one utilizes time management strategies matters, especially when used for improving wellbeing as opposed to maximizing profit or optimizing the “grind.” However, concerns about a societal trend towards viewing time as money, and thus using time management as a tool for greater profit or its use to balance an increasingly (and even unfairly) complex workload in the digital world, are still founded and deserving of further evaluation.

Takeaways

From Walck-Shannon et al.’s results, students might take the summer to consider what study strategies they currently rely on most and replace passive strategies with more active ones, like self-quizzing and explaining concepts to themselves and others. Distractions and use of social media while studying produce clearly detrimental effects on academic performance: thus, summer poses a practical time to find ways to minimize distractions while studying, like scheduling study sessions only for as long as students can remain focused or including dedicated breaks, before the school year begins anew.

Based on Aeon et al.’s review, encouraging students to decide on time management strategies that will help them organize their time—balancing academic and extracurricular activities to allow ample opportunities to complete assignments as well as enjoy some deserved downtime—could improve their mental wellbeing during the hectic school year. These time management strategies could include: buying a planner, setting and keeping to a consistent sleep schedule, strategizing the removal of study distractions, and setting goals for the academic school year and strategies to help achieve them in advance (perhaps making a note to set aside more time to study for more challenging subjects, and/or looking into a tutor for that specific subject, for instance).

However, please do not spend all summer planning! Use those time management skills to also set aside time to enjoy being outdoors, spend time with loved ones, and relax before the fall semester.

Works Cited:

Aeon B, Faber A, & Panaccio A. (2021). “Does time management work? A meta-analysis.” Public Library of Science ONE, 16(1). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0245066

Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. In Gernsbacher, M. A., Pew, R. W., Hough, L. M., & Pomerantz, J. R. (Eds.) & FABBS Foun- dation, Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 56–64). New York, NY: Worth Publishers.

Walck-Shannon EM, Rowell SF, & Frey RF (2021). “To What Extent Do Study Habits Relate to Performance?” Life Sciences Education, 20(1). DOI: 10.1187/cbe.20-05-0091.

Sample Psychology Essay

Originally written in April 2016 for a Psychology tutorial.

Discuss how (a) one area of social psychology and (b) one area of cognitive psychology can help us to understand everyday life and/or current affairs

Introduction

The Internet and the advent of social media have provided psychologists even more arenas in which to conduct study on human behaviour in the past few decades. Today, social media plays a large role in people’s everyday lives. The study of psychology can be used to better understand why people choose to engage themselves online and how social media captures their attention. Particularly, I will focus on the topics of social identity and visual attention as fields of psychological research whose research can be applied to the topic of social media usage and the insights these fields may reveal about social media usage.

Social Media and Social Identity

The social identity theory or approach was developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner as a method by which intergroup behaviour could be explained. Tajfel defines social identity as “the individual’s knowledge that he belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional and value significance to him of the group membership” (Abrams & Hogg, 1998: 7). Crucial to this definition is the significance group belongingness has for the individual. Group membership needs to be significant enough to the individual that it forms a part of the individual’s self-evaluation or sense of identity. Groups vary from racial or gender groups to religious or political groups. Social identity theory examines the “group in the individual” (Abrams & Hogg, 1998: 3), or the influence of group membership upon the individual. There are several different kinds of social influence; for instance, normative influence, which “creates conformity which is merely public compliance with, rather than private acceptance or internalization of, the group’s attitudes, beliefs, opinions, or behaviour” (Abrams & Hogg, 1998: 146). Furthermore, the social identity approach maintains the position that every individual’s perspective of reality is socially structured – that an individual socially derives knowledge of the world through social comparisons of his- or herself to others (Abrams & Hogg, 1998: 20).

Oliviera, Huertas, and Lin (2015) surveyed Brazilian Facebook users from an age range of 16-24 in hoped in determining which of their nine hypothesised factors – subjective norm, group norm, social identity, purposive value, self-discovery, maintaining interpersonal interconnectivity, social enhancement, entertainment value, and social presence – users felt best aligned with their purposes for Facebook usage. Subjective norm, social identity, maintaining interpersonal interconnectivity, and entertainment were found to be significant factors for their social media usage. Age group may be a pertinent factor of subjective norm, as it seems studies investigating behaviour regarding social media usually focus on an age group in the late teens through the twenties. Social identity theory can suggest that subjective norm, being one of the influencing factors for social media usage, demonstrates the normative influence of social media – that social media usage may “[result] from the individual’s need for social approval and acceptance” (Abrams & Hogg, 1998: 146). Social media is another group in which one may be a member, and both membership and lack of membership make a statement about oneself.

Oliviera, Huertas, and Lin’s study (along with others, e.g. Mazur & Li, 2016) also illustrates that social media is not only a way in which to communicate, but also is another method of establishing groups and expressing or displaying identity. Social media then also becomes another means of social comparison. Indeed, Mazur & Li’s study (2016) quite literally compared the online profiles of Chinese and American young adults on their native, popular social media sites. Among other conclusions, they found differences in the users’ attitudes towards themselves as generally reflective of the collectivist and individualist societies in which they lived, in that Chinese users were generally more negative in their views of themselves, while Americans where usually more positive. If one remembers that the social identity approach posits that individuals build their knowledge of the world through social comparisons, the usage of social media poses another avenue by which social comparison between individuals or groups may take place. This may contribute to the pervasive use of social media.

The social identity approach is just one example of an excellent lens and theory of social psychology with which to analyse individuals’ social media usage. By applying a few brief concepts of the social identity theory on Oliviera, Huertas, and Lin’s findings, I have demonstrated some insights that may be made using social psychology. However, there are doubtless more studies concerning social media whose findings may be interpreted with the help of social identity theory.

Facebook and Visual Attention

Visual attention is a field of cognitive psychology that is pertinent to the social media, given the frequent usage of social media websites to share photos. Corbetta and Shulman (2002) proposed two major attentional systems: a top-down process and a bottom-up process. After analysis of brain-imaging studies, they further proposed that the top-down (goal-directed) system comprised of a dorsal fronto-parietal network, and the bottom-up (stimulus-driven) system comprised of a ventral network. These two systems influence and interact with each other to process visual information (Corbetta and Shulman 2002; Vossel, Geng, & Fink 2014). Thus, one study that will be discussed focuses on top-down factors, and the other, bottom-up factors, affecting the visual attention of social media users.

Much research on visual attention utilises eye-tracking software to follow participants’ gaze and measure the amount of time spent attending a particular stimulus. The two particular studies that will be discussed both utilised this technique to different ends. One, conducted by Ulloa et al. (2015) examined in their study the time-to-click and time spent viewing information of the same links but with differing link image size – including a control without a link image. Their findings, from testing a group of Spanish university-age students, found that greater image size correlated to longer looking time and higher likelihood of users clicking the link. This aligns with the proposals of Corbetta and Shulman’s attentional system, as the larger images appeal to the bottom-up processing system by being more eye-catching or colourful (Reiger, Bartz, & Bente, 2014). Ulloa et al’s study presents an example of the bottom-up factors that may arrest Facebook users’ visual attention. Distracting, eye-catching stimuli may prompt users to spend more time examining such stimuli.

Another study, conducted by Reiger, Bartz, and Bente (2014), focussed on top-down factors of visual attention: context congruence. They found that text and image congruency with the content of the website had positive effects on visual awareness, memory of advertisement content, and attitudes. Though this study did not directly study Facebook usage, Facebook itself is user-specific, as social media tends to be a medium to tailor content to particular interests of the user. Thus, stimuli like advertisements, for instance, can be better tailored to each user based on their previously indicated ‘Liked’ subject matters. In fact, removing ads on one’s personal Facebook feed results in a query from the page as to why the user wished not to see it, and informs the user that the information is being used to customise advertisements (Facebook, 2016). If the advertisements appeal to the content to which the user subscribes, then it is more likely that ads will be attended to, as they become more relevant to the user. I propose that context congruence, if applied to all social media content, may also contribute to the user’s sustained visual attention. If all information on a social media page is related to the user and their goals or interests, then this congruence may contribute to a user’s sustained attention.

Corbetta and Shulman introduced models of attention that are both goal-directed and stimulus-driven. Reiger, Bartz, and Bente’s as well as Ulloa et al.’s studies exemplify the ways in which social media, and especially Facebook, can target different systems of visual attention. Reiger, Bartz, and Bente looked particularly how social media can capture users’ attention by targeting top-down processing, by applying context congruence to advertisements. Ulloa et al. demonstrated through their study of differing link image size the effects of bottom-down factors on catching users’ attention. These studies are just two of many that can provide insight into how Facebook captures its users’ visual attention.

Conclusion

Through discussing social identity and visual attention, I have offered two subjects of psychological research through which explanations for continued social media usage may be made. This by no means implies that social identity and visual attention are the only fields of psychological study that are relevant to understanding why people continue to use social media. However, applying social identity and visual attention to the topic of social media exemplifies the relevance and utility of psychological research in the understanding of everyday life and behaviour.

References:

Abrams, D., & Hogg, M.A. (1998). Social identifications: a social psychology of intergroup relations and group processes. London: Routledge.

Corbetta, M., & Shulman, G.L. (2002). Control of goal-directed and stimulus-driven attention in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 3, 201-215.

De Oliviera, M.J., Huertas, M.K.Z., & Lin, Z. (2015). Factors driving young users’ engagement with Facebook: Evidence from Brazil. Computers in Human Behaviour, 54, 54-61. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.038

Facebook. (2016). “About Advertising on Facebook.” Available at: https://www.facebook.com/about/ads. Accessed 7 April 2016.

Mazur, E. & Li, Y. (2016). Identity and self-presentation on social networking web sites: A comparison of online profiles of Chinese and American emerging adults. Psychology of Popular Media Culture, 5(2), 101-118. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000054.

Rieger, D., Bartz, F., & Bente G. (2014). Reintegrating the ad: Effects of context congruency banner advertising in hybrid media. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 27(2), 64-77. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000131.

Ulloa, L.C., Mora, M-C.M., Pros, R.C, & Tarrida, A.C. (2015). News photography for Facebook: effects of images on the visual behaviour of readers in three simulated newspaper formats. Information Research – An International Electronic Journal, 20(1).

Vossel, S., Geng, J.J., & Fink, G.R. (2014). Dorsal and Ventral Attention Systems: Distinct Neural Circuits but Collaborative Roles. The Neuroscientist, 20(2), 150-159.

(As a postscript: I was very nervous being in this tutorial group as it was lead by Professor Steve Reicher. The first essay I turned in to him received abysmal marks, and this one received a near-perfect score; that semester was definitely one heck of an emotional rollercoaster!)