What do the best learners do?

The new school year is just around the corner. So what do we know about why some students (and teachers) excel?

What do the best students do?

If you've got a kid going back to school, a few tips from research:

• Students who try to answer questions at the start of a lesson — and inevitably get them wrong, because they haven't learned anything yet — remember the lesson far longer. Early mistakes make us pay closer attention. (Which is why professors always open with 'Can anyone tell me why...")
• ​Finding new places to study helps. (Why? Because learning in different locations prevents your brain from relying on environmental cues, which helps it build new scaffolds for knowledge.)
• Telling a student 'you'll need to teach this later' increases how much they learn — even if they never teach anyone. (This is the 'protégé effect'.")

Study methods matter, too: Re-reading your notes helps a little, but 'effortful practice' helps a lot: Find a hard assignment and keep answering imagined questions until you can explain what's going on. (In one experiment, elite violin students didn't log more hours than their peers, but they spent nearly twice as long on the hardest material.)

Then there's Benjamin Franklin, who read essays, jotted down the main ideas, put the notes away for months, then rewrote the essay and compared it to the original to see where he could have been clearer. (Because nothing motivates a teenager like learning advice from a Founding Father. )

But what do the best teachers do?

They let students flounder. In one study, some physics students got complex, unstructured problems before the lecture. Predictably, they bombed and got frustrated. Then, the whole class sat through a lecture and took a test — and the floundering students vastly outscored everyone else.

Why? Maybe because of the second thing great teachers do: ask leading questions instead of giving answers. When teachers were limited to "What else?" and "OK, so describe to me how that works" — no explanations allowed — their students learned more than peers who attended traditional lectures.

Both tactics work because they force the student to teach themselves. Which is handy, because great teachers aren't necessarily experts. When skilled golfers were asked to teach their putting technique, they couldn't explain what they were doing — and their own putting got seriously worse.

Unskilled golfers with a background in teaching, on the other hand, helped students excel. Look for a great teacher, rather than a great do-er.

Can I actually learn as I get older?

Yes! Young adults can hold about seven digits in their memory; someone in their 60s can hold six. Less, but not much less.

Learning only feels slower with age because you spend less time screwing around. Kids explore more ('what if I stick the fork in the outlet?') which is how they absorb knowledge ('I guess electricity flows through metal!'). Adults chase the correct answer as fast as possible, and skip experiments that build the scaffolding that makes knowledge easy to recall.

And if you really want to learn better, take multiple random classes (physics for poets, anyone?). When adults, including 80-year-olds, learned three skills at once, their cognitive scores improved so much that researchers mistook them for people 30 years younger.

So go ahead, follow your kid to college. They'll love having you in lectures. (Mine starts next month. My wife has banned from campus more than once a semester.)

What's been the best thing you learned lately? Let me know in the comments!

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