Barbara Fenesi had already completed an undergraduate degree and a masters degree when, in the 2nd year of her PhD program, she thought to herself, “What if someone notices that I have no idea what I’m doing?”
Barbara—now Dr.Fenesi—is a researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. She works in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour studying how people learn. She gave a public lecture last month about her research and her journey through academia. Much of Barbara’s research is specific to learning in a university setting, examining how undergraduate students learn and how they think about learning. Over her career, her research questions have taken different forms. From “Is too much text on screen bad for learning?” to “Are different lecture formats better for different students?”, but most importantly, “Can the results found in the lab translate to real life learning?”
As an undergraduate student, she had the zeal of a budding researcher; hungry for answers to these burning questions. But, the harder she fought for the answers to these questions, the more she felt like everything was slipping through her fingers.
Her undergraduate thesis was focused on computer-based lectures—an increasingly common phenomenon in university courses. Students were brought into the lab and shown one of three presentations. There was a control, which was audio only. A ‘redundant text’ condition in which the script from the audio appeared on screen., and a ‘complementary’ condition, in which there were images on the slides, with only a few keywords of text supplementing the audio. Students then completed a quiz to test their knowledge.
Lecture slides with less redundant text may be less taxing on students’ working memory. Working memory (WM) is considered to be the bottleneck of human learning. Information we receive from the outside world needs to be processed and integrated into our pre-existing knowledge. If a piece of information from a lecture doesn’t make it through working memory, it will never make it to long-term memory—which is what a student needs in order to build knowledge and do well on examinations. As Dr. Fenesi puts it,“Our system is not set up to take in an endless stream of information.”
What works for students in a controlled lab setting, may not reflect what is necessary for success in real classrooms. Classrooms have other students, buzzing phones, and longer presentation times. Did this mean that her findings didn’t matter?
Her undergraduate thesis, while exciting, was not providing new insights in the way that she had expected. The effects were small, and Barbara began feeling like it wasn’t enough: that she wasn’t enough. In her words, she felt that she was “not scientist enough”. In academia, researchers are expected to be continuously generating new findings in order to secure funding and uphold the reputation of their institutions. Barbara was stuck between wanting to promote her research and being honest about the deductions that could be made from her data.
Every time Barbara thought she was getting closer to an answer, she ended up with twenty more questions. Barb had been excited about moving the field of educational psychology forward, but she came to realize that ‘Eureka’ moments are rare and that good science, more often than not, is slow.
Moving into her graduate work Barb decided to focus on the working memory component of multi-media learning. As she began to delve deeper into working memory, and study how working memory and redundant lecture material are related, she came to a realization. “Oh my God, nobody knows anything!” This was her ‘Eureka’ moment after all. The people Barb was looking up to as experts were just as lost as she was! No, she hadn’t discovered some brand new paradigm of learning, but she did discover that different researchers had different ideas on what working memory really was. Barb could have backed away from this messy, confusing area of cognitive psychology, but she didn’t. She decided to dive in, amalgamate all of these different theories, and create a universal definition of working memory that was the most representative of how human learning works.
Equipped with this new knowledge, and newfound confidence in finally being ‘an expert’, Barb returned to her research on multimedia and its association with working memory. Knowing that working memory varies greatly among students, she set out to see how different types of students responded to different lecture styles. What she found was that multimedia lectures with complementary visuals, rather than redundant text, can bring those students with lower WM abilities up to the level of students with higher WM abilities—essentially ‘leveling the playing field’ for students. Eureka, right?
Well…sort of.
As Dr. Fenesi mentioned throughout her lecture, research isn’t the polished final product we see in journals. It’s messy, and it’s slow, and it’s confusing. Even as a published author and so-called expert, she still felt inadequate as a researcher. Afraid to ask for help, she struggled with programming her tasks (she ended up resorting to pen and paper) and with choosing the best way to measure working memory. This resulted in her studies needing to be replicated; a process which took six months. Eventually, her research was published, she obtained her PhD, and continued asking questions about cognitive psychology. But had she been able to reach-out, admit her short-comings, and ask for help, she could have saved herself a lot of time and stress.
“Failing does not make you a failure.”
Dr. Fenesi’s plea to the audience was, “please, don’t be afraid to ask for help”. While the lesson she learned was valuable, no one wants to lose six months of their life to shoddy research methods. From looking at Dr. Fenesi’s resume, one wouldn’t be able to see all of the mistakes she made along the way.
So if you ever feel like you have no idea what you’re doing, relax; you’re doing better than you think.
Dr. Fenesi is now a post-doctorate fellow in the NeuroFit Lab in the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University, where she studies how exercise affects cognitive functioning.
You can watch Dr. Fenesi’s full talk here