Chelsea Robertson
(Community College of Baltimore County)
Since beginning my formal teaching career in 2021, I have taught Introduction to Psychology more than any other course. It is also the one that I find most rewarding to teach. I am consistently drawn to working with students who are early in their college careers and, even more so, early in their exposure to the field of psychology. With this class comes plenty of reward, but also plenty of challenge. One of the most persistent challenges in teaching this course is that my students, who are often only a semester or two into college, haven’t developed effective study strategies. They rely on familiar habits – cramming, rereading, highlighting, making flashcards, and reviewing notes, often with a sense of confidence that doesn’t hold up during exams. In fact, research has found that the very habits my students embodied are overwhelmingly common (Dunlosky et al., 2013).
A few years ago, I attempted to address this problem by introducing a post-exam reflection assignment. After the first exam, students were asked to evaluate their performance, compare their score to their expectations, and identify three specific, actionable steps to improve or maintain their grade. I paired this assignment with resources on spacing study sessions, prioritizing retrieval over recognition, and understanding why passive review does not produce durable learning. Like many instructors, I would also offer study tips in passing and touch upon how our memories work throughout regular course content, but I wasn’t explicitly addressing the misconceptions students held about their own learning.
Despite these efforts, the results were underwhelming. Probably to no one’s surprise but my own, students would tell me that they quickly reverted back to their traditional, less efficient study methods. This pattern is understandable: these strategies had been sufficient to get them to college, and without a deeper understanding of how learning works, there was little reason to abandon them. Over time, I became increasingly dismayed and frustrated. My students were clearly investing effort, yet their approaches remained inefficient. What I came to recognize is that this gap between effort and effectiveness is fundamentally a metacognitive problem. Students were not necessarily struggling with what to study, but with accurately evaluating how learning works. In preparation for the Spring 2026 semester, I began searching for more explicit ways to address this issue. Psychology, after all, offers a rich evidence base not only on how we learn, but on how to make learning durable and transferable. The challenge was translating that research into something accessible and actionable for students early in their academic careers.
Through my digging, I found Regan Gurung’s Study Like a Champ video (Gurung, 2025). I took a heavy dose of inspiration from this video: I loved its short but powerful messaging, addressing of learning misconceptions, and presentation of empirical research. Rather than treating study strategies as an aside, I realized I needed to teach learning itself as core course content—just as explicitly as I teach development, research methods, or perception. At the same time, I began thinking more intentionally about the hidden curriculum—the implicit rules and expectations students are expected to navigate in college (Jackson, 1968). What is “hidden” is relative to who is looking – this curriculum may be hidden to some, but not to others (Oron Semper & Blasco, 2018). For example, first generation students, or students from otherwise marginalized or non-traditional backgrounds may be particularly impacted by the hidden curriculum (e.g., Minicozzi & Roda, 2020; White & Lowenthal, 2011). These can include understanding how to use office hours, communicate professionally with instructors, interpret academic terminology, and identify when and how to access campus resources. For many students, especially those early in their college experience, these expectations are not explicitly taught.
Taken together, these insights led me to redesign the opening of my PSYC 101 course around a dedicated “How to Learn” lesson delivered during the second class meeting of the semester. The lesson is structured in two parts: (1) how to succeed in college—focusing on the hidden curriculum—and (2) how learning works, with an emphasis on evidence-based study strategies.
In the first section, I make implicit expectations explicit. We discuss how to actively use the syllabus as a planning tool, the importance of maintaining an organizational system, and norms around communication, including how frequently to check email and how to contact instructors professionally. I open this topic by asking students a series of reflection questions: how often do you check your school email? How do you keep organized with all of your responsibilities and deadlines? Why do you think it is important to be professional in an email to a professor? I also highlight behavioral strategies that support success, such as consistent attendance, attending to verbal cues during lectures (e.g., “this would make a good test question”), and understanding office hours as a resource rather than a last resort.
A central goal of the second part of the lesson is not simply to introduce effective study strategies, but to improve students’ metacognitive calibration—their ability to accurately judge what they do and do not know. Many of the strategies students rely on, such as rereading or highlighting, create a sense of familiarity that can be mistaken for mastery. In contrast, evidence-based strategies are often more effortful, but provide more diagnostic feedback about learning. For example, I introduce retrieval practice as a way to shift students away from recognition-based studying toward recall. When students attempt to retrieve information from memory—through practice tests, self-quizzing, or free recall—they receive immediate feedback about what they can actually produce without support. This makes gaps in knowledge visible, helping to recalibrate overconfidence and align their judgments with their actual level of understanding. Similarly, spaced practice is framed not only as a way to improve long-term retention, but as a way to disrupt illusions of competence. When study sessions are distributed over time, some forgetting naturally occurs between sessions. While students often interpret this forgetting as a sign that learning is not “working,” it actually creates opportunities for more effortful retrieval. These repeated retrieval attempts provide more accurate feedback about learning over time, improving metacognitive monitoring.
I also discuss interleaving, or mixing different topics or problem types within a single study session. Although students often prefer blocked practice because it feels more fluent, interleaving makes learning more challenging and less predictable. This difficulty reduces unwarranted confidence and forces students to continually assess which strategies or concepts apply in a given context, strengthening both learning and metacognitive awareness. Finally, we address the limitations of passive strategies such as rereading and highlighting. I emphasize that these strategies are not inherently ineffective, but that they often fail to provide meaningful feedback about learning. Because they increase familiarity without requiring retrieval, they can inflate students’ judgments of understanding without improving actual performance. Framing these strategies in terms of metacognitive calibration helps students understand why they feel effective, even when they are not. While I don’t yet hear students use the key language from this lesson later in the semester, students will often say that they use these strategies even if they don’t refer to them by name. They may not say that they are using interleaving, for example, but they’ll say that they “mix up” their studying. I’ll take that as a success!
To this point, I have described a shift in how I approach the beginning of my course, but the larger change is conceptual. I no longer assume that students arrive knowing how to learn effectively or how to navigate the expectations of college. Instead, I treat both as essential content that must be taught explicitly. Integrating metacognitive instruction with the hidden curriculum has reshaped how my students approach their work. Rather than relying on habits that feel productive, they are better equipped to evaluate whether their strategies are actually working. Just as importantly, they are given clearer access to the structures and expectations that support success in college. I have anecdotally heard from students that they have used this lesson to change their own learning habits in my class and, more surprisingly, in other courses, although I have not yet collected data on this “How to Learn” lesson. Additionally, I have witnessed my students referring back to this lesson in written assignments and in class discussions. I plan to revise this lesson over the summer months so that it even better serves the needs of my students.
This approach does not eliminate all challenges as students still default to familiar habits, and developing new strategies takes time. However, it creates a shared language around learning that we can return to throughout the semester. When students struggle, the conversation shifts from “study more” to “study differently,” grounded in both evidence and self-awareness. More broadly, this experience has reinforced a simple but important idea: if we want students to become effective learners, we have to teach them how learning works. When we make both the mechanics of learning and the expectations of college explicit, we move closer to aligning students’ effort with their outcomes, and that alignment is where meaningful learning begins.
References
Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest : a Journal of the American Psychological Society, 14(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266
Jackson, P. (1968). Life in Classrooms. Rinehart and Winston: New York.
Minicozzi, L., & Roda, A. (2020). Unveiling the hidden assets that first-generation students bring to college. Journal for Leadership and Instruction, 19(1), 43-46.
Semper, J. V. O., & Blasco, M. (2018). Revealing the hidden curriculum in higher education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 37(5), 481-498. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9608-5
White, J. W., & Lowenthal, P.R. (2011). Academic discourse and the formation of an academic identity: Minority college students and the hidden curriculum. Review of Higher Education, 34(2).
Resources
Gurung, R. A.., & Dunlosky, J. (2023). Study like a champ: The psychology-based guide to "grade A" study habits. American Psychological Association.
Regan A. R. Gurung. (2025, September 4). Regan A. R. Gurung – Study Like a Champ [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GcIAzbmofc
