Can making predictions boost learning?

Whether you are a professor or student, how do you think student learning may be enhanced?

Does it make sense to ask students questions about a concept they haven’t yet been introduced to?

Does it matter if questions are posed at the beginning, middle or end of a unit?

In his book, Small Teaching, English professor and learning specialist, James Lang, argues that teachers can enhance students’ learning and engagement by making “small but powerful modifications” to their teaching methods and course content. Based on the science of learning, Lang suggests various tips and techniques that teachers can deploy to promote students’ understanding and retention of concepts. Further, as these changes involve only minor tweaks, they can be easily incorporated by teachers without necessarily having to reconceive their curriculum or overhaul their teaching practices entirely. In this article, I elaborate on the technique of prediction.

The first involves asking students to perform predictive exercises even before they are introduced to new content. Lang cites one study where one group of students were exposed to pairs of related words like whale-mammal for 13 seconds each. The second group was shown only the first word, whale, and asked to guess the second one. Of course, answers varied from large to ocean and were usually incorrect. In the last five seconds, the second group was shown the right answer. On a subsequent test, those in the second group scored 67% on accuracy compared to the first group’s average of 55%. So, even if students guessed incorrectly, the act of predicting the answer promoted later recall.

In another study, students in a psychology class were given “short multiple-choice pretests” before some class lectures. When the professor compared the students’ performance on later tests, they scored around 10% more on topics on which they had been pretested.

A third study entailed online learning. Students in an introductory French class were shown brief film clips. One group was allowed to take notes as they watched. For a second group, the videos were paused every now and then and students were asked to predict what would happen next. The researchers named this sequence as pause-predict-ponder.

Which group do you think performed better? The note-taking group or the one that was asked to pause-predict-ponder?

The researchers found that students in the second group did better on “assessments of intercultural competence.” Further, the students in the second group, where the video was paused, posted more often on the class’s discussion board, exhibiting greater engagement.

Predictive exercises

Lang argues that when students engage in prediction, they become aware of “gaps and problems” with their current knowledge. As a result, they are motivated to “fill and repair” the lacunae in their understanding. When students predict answers, they also activate their prior knowledge related to the topic, and this activation leads to more robust learning. Additionally, when students are asked to justify their predictions, they glean insight into their own thinking.

Are there any downsides to justifying incorrect predictions? What precautions do teachers have to take when giving these types of exercises?

The evidence, so far, suggests that making incorrect predictions doesn’t impair student learning provided the correct answers are shared with students fairly soon. Likewise, when students are asked to explain why they made a particular prediction, you don’t want them to become too wedded to faulty rationales, especially, if their predictions are incorrect. So, Lang advises teachers to give the correct answers as soon as possible. Predictive exercises may also give students a leg-up on how they might be subsequently tested.

Researchers also believe that we are “emotionally invested” in knowing whether we are correct or wrong when we make predictions. And this emotional activation helps strengthens our memory of the content.

While you may begin every class with a prediction or brainstorming activity, you may inject predictive exercises both during and at the end of a session as well. When you showcase problems, case studies or experiments, ask students to predict the solutions or outcomes before divulging the end results. Likewise, a predictive question may segue into a homework activity that gets answered in the readings that students are assigned.

Besides prediction, are there other tweaks that teachers may deploy to enhance student understanding?