The Power of Mindful Learning by Ellen J. Langer Page A

told half of each of these two groups that they
would be tested after the reading period. We thought that the
inclination to memorize would be so strong that the belief that
a test would follow would cause even the group instructed to
make the material relevant to memorize the material and thus
make the learning less effective and less fun than if they had
engaged with the material.
    After a twenty-minute reading period, a test was given to
all students. The test asked students to recall a number of facts from the story and to write a creative essay using the material
in the story in their own way.

    For homework, students were assigned another reading
with the same instructions they received for the first. They
were all tested again four days later.
    The essays were judged by raters who were unaware of the
groups' instructions. Students who learned the material in the
traditional manner and were told of an impending test performed worse than all other groups. They tended to recall less
information, and they showed less improvement from the first
test to the second. The students instructed to make the material relevant, regardless of whether they expected to be tested,
showed improvement in the intelligence and creativity of
their essays.
    Although we encouraged half of the subjects not to memorize the information, they did not necessarily follow our
instructions. After each test we asked the students how they
went about learning the material. Twelve of the twenty-eight
students asked to make the material relevant nonetheless used
only memorization to learn it. When we compared these students with the students who did follow the instruction, we
found that the students who did not rely on memorization outperformed the others on every measure: they recalled more
information from both readings; the essays they wrote were
judged to be more creative and intelligent; and their scores
improved from the first to the second test.
    In a second experiment, Matt Lieberman and I tested this
idea with tenth graders.13 The students were assigned a chapter from a high school history book about the passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act presented by Senator Stephen Douglas.
To make the episode meaningful to them, students in one
group were asked, in addition to reading from their own perspective, to read the passage from the perspective of the main
character, asking what they would think or feel in his place, or
from the perspective of his grandchild, asking what he or she
might think or feel. We asked a control group simply to learn
the passage. We tested all students at the end of the class
period. One week later we surprised all the students with a second test on the chapter.

    The group who read the material from more than one perspective, that is, mindfully, outperformed the control group on
recall of the information, improvement from the first to the
second test, creativity in the essays, and intelligence, or insight,
of the essays. Again, essays were judged by outside raters.
    Since memorizing is the standard approach students take to
learning material, it is encouraging to see that after so many
years of learning this way, so many of them are willing to learn
the material in a new way. Students in our studies not only
made the material meaningful to themselves, but they used different perspectives and thus were introduced to the contextdependent nature of information. Approaching information in
this way invites further distinction drawing, further interpretation. Because the information is not all tied up in a nice, neat
package, there is reason to get involved with it.
    In other work, Claudia Mueller and I assessed memory as a
function of conditional learning." We showed ninth-to-twelfth grade students pictures of ten ambiguous drawings (for example, one that could be described as a ball on the ground or a
balloon tied to the middle of a stick). We presented the pictures
either conditionally