Slashdot Mirror
UCLA Professor Says Conventional Wisdom on Study Habits Is All Washed Up
An anonymous reader writes "Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? According to Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out, all are three are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning."
I do not want to hear about experts in learning from someone who non-ironically refers to one of them as a "massively renowned expert."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Thanks to the old system, it was easy.
God spoke to me
I majored in music in college. Throughout my life, I've gone through various phases of being out of practice, getting back into the practicing groove, falling out of it, getting back into it again, and so on. I've noticed every time I return to the instrument after having taken a long break, there is a short period of difficulty followed by a burst of learning and progress. Sounds just like what the prof is talking about.
Bjork should stick to making creepy pop music and leave education to the professionals.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Yes College CS is like serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in Java. where they mix in lot's of use less skills and stuff that is very far what you want learn.
Now for IT tech work CS is loaded with stuff that is far off from what is the basic of IT some stuff you can only pick up by doing real work.
Take CS and tech school.
Tech school Let's say you take a windows sever / desktop cores line they may Interleaving some cisco, some VB.
But CS has Lot's of theory with SOME (way less then a tech school) of the other stuff Interleaving in to the class plan.
Tech school should be Interleaving real work / on going education system.
... the taking notes just after a lecture idea does seem a really rather good idea.
>2012 >Traditional education >Taking notes >Lectures I seriously hope you guys don't do this
I gotta concede that Professor Bjork's brain is much better than mine.
Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during â" forcing yourself to recall a lectureâ(TM)s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard
That might work for him because his brain has the capacity to recall all the stuffs _after_ the class is over. Not me.
If I waited till the class is over and _then_ started to write down the notes based on what I recall, I probably can recall 15% to 20% of the total thing.
Granted, not every single word from the lecturer mouth is useful, but still, about 30% of the stuffs an average lecturer taught in an average college level class is relevant in _someway_ to the subject in hand.
My own ability to recall only 15% to 20% means that there will be essential stuffs that I would have missed.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Thanks for the great info. posicionamiento web
That was Robert Bork. This one is Robert A. Bjork. Not the same guy.
Heck, I'm not even American.
court is open book / open doc's and there is a lot of pre trail work done as well. No pop quiz's in court
I would have to agree with him on some things, though I personally find that these things were glaringly obvious.
Taking notes during class is not a good study habit because you are focusing on writing what is being said/done/written instead of on the lesson.
Consistent learning environments can also be bad for study because the brain tends to try and relate knowledge with other knowledge, be that information similar to what you are trying to learn, or what you see, smell, etc. By changing study locations even by a small amount the amount your brain reduces the amount it relies on information pertaining to the senses.
yet teachers got it wrong so frequently at my school. I have never been able to learn 'by rote'. I always had massive difficulty in school packing in equations and bite sized tid bits of crap without ever seeing the real picture, while everyone around me seemed to be perfectly happy with it but ended up never applying anything that they learnt. Case in point - math, which I hated at school and was notoriously bad at is now one of my strongest skills and something I really enjoy, and it's because I learnt it, properly, at University where I actually had to *apply* my skills through programming algorithms instead of just figuring out the 2nd order differential of yet another curve. It was through the use of what I had learnt and the application of every skill I had that finally made me 'get' math, and that happened over the course of a few months instead of 10 years suffering a horrendously bad curriculum. I can only hope that teachers continue to 'discover' the obvious so that one day entire cohorts of children won't be turned off 'hard' subjects like Math, and that the notion that Math is hard in the first place, and that it is therefore o.k. to suck at it to the point of not being able to use it for every day tasks, will be laid to rest.
Trying to recall the material AFTER the class means that you WILL forget things.
But it gets a bit worse. From TFA:
And how are you supposed to accomplish that? I'm sure that it really does work in the tests they've performed. But how would you implement that on your own?
How do you know that you're about to forget something if you don't recall it within the next 24 hours? Without recalling that you recall it right now?
Again as with the initial "notes after class". How do you KNOW that you have NOT forgotten something?
I can see how "discovering" this in a "memory experiment" testing situation would happen. But how to apply that information outside of such an experiment?
Traditional education = poor fit for today's world.
We need more apprenticeship like learning for lot's of fields.
Less need college for jobs that DON'T need it.
Move to 3 year system (filler and other stuff is pushing a Traditional 4 year out to five years)
Cut down the theory overload / Make tech / voc schools stand out more.
"all are three are exactly opposite the best strategies" ? Really? WTF mate, are editors really lacking so much in basic English skills? Or are they just being lazy?
"all three are the exact opposite of the best strategies...".
There, fixed that for you.
I know this is Slashdot, but man... and I am not even a native speaker...
Damn... I was studying how to wash things.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
IT's also most like there are 2 extremes there.
one With the well rounded loaded with theory that trun out people who can come to a tech job and have no idea on what they are doing. I have seen storys where people with a CS BA thing that file extensions are some ones initials. (I thing it was a Help desk / QA job) and they where give javascript errors to some name how had the initials of JS. Now me that people who went to a tech school for 2 years or less as well no school at all (but did IT work on there own) can do much better then that?
Tech school may be missing humanities but it was real skills that you need on the job.
Now why can't we move the humanities to JR college / community colleges? Why does Tech learning have to shoehorned in to the old college system for stuff that moves fast and need lot's of on going learning. Why does college CS missing so many skills that you need to do a tech job.
Tell that to HR and the PHB boss who has no idea on that and tell him that the network is down do him not signing off on the funds to get new hardware and get backup / add Redundancy to the hardware setup.
If it works don't fix it does not = keeping useing old stuff right up to it dieing / saying we don't need Redundancy.
I'm sure I was the only one in lecture theatres of 180 people.
Nearly every lecture gave handouts, so that was my material for revision. If the lecturer said something else, I'd probably remember it because I was thinking about what was said instead of writing down information that's already in any textbook. Even if I didn't, the exams came from the notes not what the lecturer said - they don't want to have some undergrad whining that the exam had something not taught in class, so making the exam from the lecture handouts is good defensive education.
I understand other subjects are different, but for all undergrad science classes, I'd advise not taking notes. Everything you learn will be in textbooks and handouts, (or the Khan Academy) and you're better off sitting there listening, than you are exercising your hand and wasting paper. (Leave the hand exercises and paper wastage to some other time, a crowded lecture theatre isn't the place.)
I have had sub-par memory for as long as I can remember. I'm only 23 and things will probably only get worse in the future, so I spend a few minutes every day doing some memorization using Mnemosyne (free), which uses the SuperMemo algorithm, which seems to be similar to the concepts mention in TFA. It is quite amazing for remembering flash-card style items long-term, and a great memory exercise. Anyone interested in improving their own memory, I recommend checking this out.
"all are three are"
I don't know what is changing us, but , I feel dumber by the days passing.
The problem with this approach is that it assumes students are in class to learn.
But that's not the system we live in.
Increasingly, students are in class to memorize material so that they can quickly recall it on one of many tests.
Tests. Memory. That's what we're teaching to these days. Not learning. Key difference.
Indeed. Though your ability to know mounds of knowledge and apply it to the situation at hand is crucial.
Om, nomnomnom...
When I learn something new I like to give a presentation about it. The audience is never real, and I don't put PowerPoint slides together, but spending ten minutes pretending to explain what I just learned has been an invaluable technique for me.
As the newest math professor in the department, of course I was lowest of the low. I was informed that there was no classroom available in the classroom building and I had to choose between one in Animal Husbandry and Poultry Science. In a moment of true quantum stupidity I chose the one in Poultry Science because it was closer to my office.
The classroom sat adjacent to a room that contained hundreds of chickens, maybe more. You had to smell it to believe it. Of course the students complained but there was nothing I could do.
The class actually did quite well, that is, until the day of the final exam. When I got there to deliver the exam (which of course was being given at a different time) the door was locked and no key could be found. I was forced to walk the entire class over to the classroom building and give the exam in an empty classroom.
Checking the scores against the midterm, I found there had been a significant drop for almost every student. To this day I am convinced that the context change and the lack of that awful smell was as or more responsible for the difference than all the chaos leading up to taking the exam.
There's a lot of talk as to what you should do while an after the prof is speaking, but so far very little has been said about what to do *before* the professor speaks it. During my Physics undergrad, I would challenge myself to try to derive results and formulas before the prof finished. I was often wrong, and I usually had to have my notes at least nudged along at least a few times per lecture, but trying to derive on the fly is an awesome way to learn something. There's nothing quite like figuring out a problem by yourself to have it really gel with your overall understanding.
That's my advice: rather than just trying to learn, as much as possible *do your own thinking* in class and you'll be amazed at how little you have to work later to recall it.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
As a current CS major at a school you've heard of, I don't take notes. Ever. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it helps, but I find that if I take notes, I lose the point of the lecture. Most of my professors were good enough that their lecture was a sort of a story, and if you paid attention and followed the story, you got more out of that than the the slides and the books. Of course, the books are usually quite helpful, more or less depending on the class, and most-to-all of my professors have posted slides online.
But the biggest help has been lecture recordings that they've started to do. You can watch the slideshow, synchronized with the lecture, and it's a huge help. If you miss something during lecture, you can go and watch that section with the book or reference materials open, pause, rewind, etc. It removes the time constraint, and seems to be making a big difference.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
For a more general set of suggestions on study skills based on cognitive science, see "How to Get the Most Out of Studying Video Series". This is by Steve Chew, who was recently named a "U.S. Professor of the Year" for his teaching ability. For something printed, but not as detailed, see his "Improving Classroom Performance by Challenging Student Misconceptions About Learning". I recommend the video to all my students (I'm a college economics professor).
Because CS!=IT, that all....
CS is someone using is knowledge of theory to suggest adding a bloom filter to a database before performing a membership test in a big set.
IT is the guy who manages, configure and deploy the servers...
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
I looked over half the thread of comments and glanced at the summary, and it seems that everyone is still missing the way I used to study.
1. Diagram/Map/Lay out the book chapter(s) before the class.
2. In class, just put little dots or something that's a repeat of the book.
3. Then when the Prof. goes off into some other topic, then take real notes, sometimes in a different color. A lot of times those notes are the ones that show up on exams when you get a mean Prof. who prides themselves on making exams "that you had to be in class to pass".
Even better, *Record* the lectures! What's with all this "try to recall it later?" On the couple times I tried it, I did better listening to the lecture *three times* and mapping that out on paper next to the book notes.
It was enough to get me B's and B+'s. (I didn't get A's because I'd always miss something, but overall, I didn't mind the half-grade slide once I left college.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
We need more apprenticeship like learning for lot's of fields.
Less need college for jobs that DON'T need it.
Er, judging by the above, I'd say:
No, son. You really should keep taking English courses. Really. Trust me on this one.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
What you've pointed out make a lot of sense, if we are talking about structured classroom setting - with textbooks and such
But what if the thing is in a symposium or convention of some sort - where you know they guy who is going to give the lecture is someone who knows what he/she is talking about but you have no textbook to help you to prepare in advance for that lecture?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
of the value of interleaving at least when it comes to learning an athletic skill like serving a tennis ball.
Suppose on Monday only had time to practice your serve twenty times. You'd put all your mental and physical resources into each attempt. Now suppose on Tuesday you had plenty of time, so you set out to do a *thousand* serves. Would your first twenty serves on Tuesday look anything like the twenty you did on Monday? Of course not. You know darn well you've got 980 more to go, so you *hold back*.
The net result of over-practicing any skill this way is that you end up drilling in lazy and sloppy habits. It always feel virtuous to put in a long session at something, but that's easy virtue that everybody can demonstrate under pressure. Consistent practice of moderate duration and extremely high quality has no substitute.
Interleaving a series of drills works better because you exploit fresh muscles and balance repetition with mental stimulation, which is also critical to learning.
Consistency is a virtue in academic study as well, although if you are being genuinely productive it doesn't hurt to keep working as long as it last. But being in the zone is nothing like forcing yourself to cram at the last minute. One is about exploiting an opportunity, another is about making up for lost opportunities.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Can't mod you up because I've posted
Thank you for the very informative links !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Writing things down has the effect of sticking them into my brain. I don't typically refer to the notes again, but I do remember better having written them down. I think it's a matter of whether or not people are applying their brains when they are writing things down. I think many people are on autopilot and anything that goes in their ears goes on paper. I try to see how things fit in the larger picture and organize my notes around that picture. It's possible I'm missing things in the lectures, but straight A's so far and I feel I have a good grasp of the subject matters.
When I teach, I prepare a set of lecture notes, mostly an outline with key details. I leave room for notes. Then I give the students a copy of those at the start of the class. That way, they can listen and focus on understanding the information during the lecture. If they need to make some additional notes, they can add to the pre-printed lecture notes I handed out, but since the key points and details are already there, they don't need to add many notes. My experience is that students who spend too much time taking notes don't understand the material and don't remember it, so I make is easy for them to not spend time taking notes.
My classroom time is spent expanding upon the material, having discussions with the students, making sure the students understand it and how to apply it, doing hands on or thought experiments as appropriate, and refining my notes for the next class.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
and The best candidates are those that have done both is nice but college is not setup to trun people out like that.
And that is why lettering in smaller blocks with real skills mixed in as well on going classes is a better way to it and that is why Tech schools with DROP IN classes / apprenticeships is needed.
Also databases, programming, networks, parallelism, etc. may good for all IT people to take on a basic level (in each area) but some areas hare so much in depth that it takes someone to know a whole lot about a specific topic to be able to work with it.
But what does help is all the far off base filler classes now how does ART history, underwater basket weaving, European capitals, swimming (yes some colleges still have the swim test) help you be a better IT guy?
That is one of the by-products of the need to test students for competency. And that is something that needs to happen regardless of how the details of injecting the knowledge into students is going to happen.
For me, a lot of what I got from college was the knowledge that different subjects existed, that I was competent in using the techniques in that class and what those techniques are. This way whenever I hit those topics again or a subject that looks like it will benefit from the application of one of those techniques, I know that the technique exists and what the technique is called. I can then go and look it up for myself. Because I am relearning rather than learning, the learning is much quicker the next time.
The point of university education IMO is not to remember the material long term in order to be able to apply it without a refresher. Wasting brain space hard wiring your undergrad major into your brain is silly IMO and could possibly even have negative consequences. Only remembering a few key points I think potentially allows you to learn and apply a lot more than you otherwise would.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Now show me "Paint The Fence"
I studied very effectively by skipping the lectures and reading the excellent course books. Even now, 25 years after graduating, I can't get anything from lecture-based training. It's either some online material or intensive one-on-one, hands-on interaction.
The key is flow control. When I'm reading, I automatically set the pace to match the rate my brain can absorb information, backtracking if necessary. In a one-on-one session, I can similarly force the knowledgeable person to slow down or speed up.
That said, I have heard some excellent lecture-type presentations on the radio. The key is slow pace, repetition and focusing on only a handful of points.
FTFA: "Do you remember your childhood best friend’s phone number? No?"
Yes, I do. I don't like when articles make assumptions like these, makes them condescending.
If you don't take any notes, you'll be in trouble if there something detail-oriented that's not in the book, unless you're really smart.
I wonder if the recommendations depend on how detail-oriented and textbook-centered a course is. I teach philosophy. It certainly happen when I teach more advanced classes that I come up with new arguments and proofs right on the spot. They aren't in the assigned books, they aren't in the assigned articles, and because I came up with them on the spot (e.g., in response to a student question), there is no handout with it. But few students will correctly remember an eight step metaphysics argument or a hard logic proof without notes, or at least without taking a photo of the board.
Last week we had an American guy come in and give us a two hour lecture on the topic of Tort. I was surprised when he said that in the US you don't have a tutorial system (true?).
The way undergraduate uni is taught here (UK) is that you get issued about 2-3 hours of reading for the lecture, and then you attend it. Then you get issued more reading + questions and a week later you meet in your allocated tutorial group (10-15 students + lecturer/someone from the dept that is in charge of taking the tutorials for that course) for an hour and discuss the questions. So there are essentially three stages to it. I think it works quite well. I have found that particularly having done reading before the lecture makes you able to take in a lot more since you already have an idea of what is going on, and then the tutorials solidify the material and gives you a deeper understanding. Another pro is that I really don't take very much notes during the lectures since a) i already have notes from my readings, so i just scribble additions to those where necessary and b) i'll have to write more notes for the tutorial, so its more helpful to have paid attention in the lecture than to have tried to take notes furiously for two hours.
..but I honestly did get a first class honours in electronic eng. by skipping all (well, a lot ;-) of lectures, and studying at home with a keen interest and a bucket load of strong weed... (posted anonymously as I work for a large well known tech company, haha). Just sayin'...
Because their grammar is atrocious.
"all are three are the exact opposite..."
If I'm just sitting in a chair listening to a lecture, my focus will inevitably waver at some point, and I will almost immediately start daydreaming and nod off. Taking extensive notes keeps my mind from wandering off on some tangent, and it's not too difficult to process what's being said while I'm writing. However, I know I'm somewhat of an outlier when I'm one of the only ones in the room constantly writing. I actually get annoyed in classes where the lecture notes take the form of incomplete Powerpoint slides that the professor fills in during class. I'd rather not print out large stacks of slides, but there's never enough time to write down all the important information otherwise.
I think the general rule about how people learn best is: There is no general rule. Everyone is different and everyone learns in a different way. What may be great approach to studying for someone will be terrible for someone else.
I am blessed (?) with a limited, almost perfect visual memory, 3-5 days, every dot, comma and footnote, so while I got 100% in all set book literature classes, and got investigated twice for potential cheating, I also read very quickly, eg Tom Clancy (700p) 2 hours.
Now I do Math/Science/IT/Financial_Risk and I can tell you that remembering it is only 20% of the game, understanding, which implies structured memory is much more important and difficult. Mathematicians are taught to 'skip-foreward' when they get stuck, and to revisit often too. This is what thinking is all about, and why sharp questions help youngsters learn so much. Thinking, imaginative critical thinking is very, very hard and that is why most people don't do it.
Learning is usually either boring, unnecessary or dangerous or more likely all three. Teaching is worse than learning but down this road you get all the nonsense of child-certred-education.
One size/solution does not fit all, Mental arithmetic requires you KNOW your tables and must learn them, speaking German does not require you to know the future subjunctive of all strong verbs, just to know what people normally say. Tensor calculus and the theory of differentiable manifolds helps understand General Relativity but not how to ask for a beer in Brazil.
Math, and Probability Theory, Chaos Theory and statistics help avoid all the Media promoted stupid meme of the week eg Global Warming, vaxination scams ...
To Understand is to be, we learn to understand
MFG, omb
Suppose in the near future (starting a couple years ago), rather than attending the lecture, you view the recorded lecture. And every five or ten minutes there's a built-in place to pause (analogous to a section in a written book). If you want to take notes, you pause the lecture there and do so. If not, you just continue. That avoids the "can't recall after an hour's lecture" problem.
Of course if the lecture is pre-recorded, you could in principle just listen to it again and again. But I think notes are better, because they force you to think about what you heard.
I am no longer in school, but often attend meetings (ok, that's another topic...) where we discuss technical topics. I need to pay attention to the train of thought, and occasionally participate in the discussion. If I took notes, I wouldn't be able to follow as well, nor formulate my thoughts for what is hopefully a useful contribution. So we take along someone who is reasonably well-versed in what we're talking about, whose responsibility is to take notes. (I do occasionally jot down something I want to comment on later.) That method can be ported over to the school situation, in fact it was done at U of Illinois in classes I took forty years ago: a grad student took notes in the professors' lectures, and sold them to us undergrads, leaving us free to think about what we were hearing.
The examples in the article all seem to be about learning that is at a low intellectual level, such as memorization of facts (recalling information from a lecture) and muscle memory (improving your tennis serve). Fine for learning to play my scales on the violin, memorizing words in Swahili. But what if I need to figure out that my violin vibrato is out of character for the baroque piece I'm working on, or what if I need to do a better job of speaking Swahili with idiomatic word order rather than translating word-for-word from English?
Find free books.
This! Lecture time is best spent on understanding the material, but you can't be sure you caught everything to write down after the lecture. Professor's notes solve this problem. I found it to be the best of both worlds. Unfortunately, very few professors did this at my college. Some thought that "forcing" student to take notes improved learning; some were just unorganized or lazy. Professors should be required to give out accurate class notes just like they are required to give out a syllabus.
Interesting, what I do know is that http://www.earthsquotes.com is one of the best quote sites on the internet to find quotes.
Right ON! now tell that to HR.
...although it was mainly because I couldn't write quickly enough to keep up. And my writing was so sloppy, that trying to write faster made them incomprehensible to me later. I just learned to soak in as much as I could and refer to my textbook for help.
One professor actually commented to the rest of the class about "...that guy that is so smart he doesn't even bother to take notes!" I decided not to tell him the real reason why I didn't take notes ;-)
"English is just badly pronounced French..."
I'm sorry, I'm just too curious not to ask. Is English your first language? If so, is there a reason for your... creative... dialect?
My technique was quite different:
I read the books the first week of the term, and then did the last / most difficult problem in each chapter. If I got stuck, I put a tab on the page for that chapter.
Then at lecture, I ignored the teacher completely unless and until he came to a spot I had marked, in which case I raised my hand. So almost all the time, I was either reading novels and magazines, or helping other students. I never took a note - my note books had drawings of pretty girls, or if graphing paper, useless exercises like manually calculating more digits to pi and e.
How did this work out? Well, my grades were in the 1.0-1.5 range (this in a time and country that hadn't adopted the US/UK grade system, but used a bell curved grading scale from 1.0 to 6.0. So 1.0-2.0 would all be similar to a US "A").
In one case, a teacher gave me a 3.5 grade (average), but I volunteered for an exam, and scored a blank 1.0, showing it was plain teacher bias against someone ignoring her lectures. Most teachers were OK with it, and often welcoming my helping other students.
In short, what works for one student might not be ideal for another. There is no "one true way" of learning. Try multiple approaches, and find what works best for you. But taking notes because it's expected seems like a waste of good paper. If it helps you, by all means, but if it doesn't, save a tree (or these days, a B+ tree).
In that case, using only 10% of it shouldn't be a problem! :)
Joking aside, most of the suggestions in the article make sense.
After years and years of classes, some years off, and going back to taking classes (and doing much better in them), this is the advice I have. It is not free -- you are required to give me $5 if you ever find me in real life:
0) Understand the material. Keep a laptop connected to the Internet open during class. Google whatever you don't understand immediately, fill the gaps in your knowledge, and get back to the lecture. Bookmark or transcribe the info down if necessary (this helps me with definitions, acronyms, etc.). This will keep you from getting bored, since boredom generally results from not understanding. If you understand the material and the instructor is truly being boring, the tangential information you discover during this process may be more useful than the class itself!
1) Understand the material! I mean really -- even if you're behind. Do reading before class if you can. Check Wikipedia. Consult the Khan Academy. Do the homework, and spread it over multiple days, making sure you get some sleep in between the days. All-nighters, while they make for great stories, are not as helpful as you think. (My record was 36 hours straight -- I got the A -- but I wouldn't do it again if I had the chance!)
2) Avoid early morning classes, if possible. Unless you're a morning person -- in which case you probably don't need the advice.
3) Take notes during class. On paper, with indelible pen, in a bound notebook, writing/drawing only the points which seem relevant to you. The point of doing this is to help you focus and summarize, not to record the lecturers words for posterity. I've found that typing, while faster and more legible, does not aid my recall as well. Recording the lecture may be helpful if it's an exam review, but is pointless if you're not paying attention while there.
4) Teach someone the material right afterward, if you can. Tutor someone, or bore your significant other to tears...
5) Find a way to extend what you learned. Right down your ideas. Implement them if practical. Post them on Halfbakery if not...
Optimal learning strategies changes from person to person. The particular class I'm in is one where I learn by doing. Others can memorise things as if by magic. For myself, I need the repeated recall that usage demands to stop it from fading.
"Because humans have unlimited storage capacity, having total recall would be a mess,"
Humans do not have unlimited storage. Because human storage capacity is hard to quantify and people find it hard to come to terms with the notion that their memory capacity is limited they like to propagate this fallacy and convince themselves of it. This is proof of the pudding. He is no expert.
Some of you guys probably know the Pimsleur language learning courses. The idea is that small building blocks (words, phrases) are interleaved while the difficulty level is slowly increased.
You're first taught simply how to say "hello" and then just say it once. Then you are guided to say "how are you doing?". Then we again go back a bit and are told to say "hello". Then we add in the mix something like "I'm fine", etc.
So, this all is really effective and even fun. We are not disassembling long sentences or repeating them three times consequently. And we are constantly challenging the student in the process. This makes me wonder if a similar method could be used in teaching other topics. Of course not everything breaks to that small pieces easily, but it could still be useful. What do you think?
The only consistent factor in how people learn is that everyone is different. Modern teaching recognises this, though whether it teaches while "believing" it is another matter entirely. Some learn by doing, some by seeing others do, some by turning something into a narrative, some just by hearing, etc. and the technique used vastly depends on the things you're trying to learn.
Learning a physical skill? Best to watch an expert and then try it yourself, or maybe just struggle along on your own starting from scratch depending on what makes the best brain-links for yourself, or maybe read up on the subject beforehand so you go in prepared, or maybe you have to imagine yourself doing it first, or maybe... ?
Learning a language? Probably best to hear it and speak it. Might be helpful to tie it in to other languages you know. Maybe the grammar can be learned from a book or you can just struggle through being corrected all the time by a native speaker. Or maybe you just absorb it if you immerse yourself in the language and rely on the reward of successfully catching a word you know in their babble to help you reinforce your knowledge of that success?
The point is that everything you do is wholly reliant on what you want to learn, who's teaching you and how you want to learn it. I have an ATROCIOUS memory. It really is awful. But I can tell you pi to 32 decimal places off the top of my head and know 50-60 strong passwords without hesitation. My memory is actually pretty damn good and near-perfect but I have to WANT to remember something and have a trigger GIVEN to me to recall it (don't ask why I wanted to know pi to 32 decimal places!).
The automatic cruft-filters on my brain will mean that I won't remember what I had for lunch - it's trivia, it doesn't matter and it's not useful to recall it later. But if you told me it was important to remember it, I would be able to produce that data on demand 30 years later. I still know the number plate of a hire car that my ex-father-in-law rented for a week ten years ago. Because there was a need to remember it at one point, and ever since it won't leave my brain.
Equally, if you *never* asked me to produce that data, I would never remember to do it myself (i.e. "Meet me on the top of the Eiffel Tower in 2020" - not a chance that I'll remember to actually DO SO, but will always be able to remember being asked to do so!). Memory: perfect, when put into a specific training mode when the information needs to be memorised, and requires SOMETHING ELSE to trigger it to recall. Otherwise, forget it. Write things in a diary? I'd never remember to look inside it to find them (I'm not joking, either!)
How do you even understand that without being me? I can remember hundred of random facts if necessary, but I can't learn through association with weird images like some people can, so that form of memory technique doesn't work at all for me.
I'm struggling to learn Italian at the moment but the bits I *do* learn, I learn by tying to a word of Latin origin that has an equivalent in English (i.e. to eat, is "mangiare", from the Latin "mandere", but I only link it to "mandible" which is your lower jaw). I have no knowledge of Latin at all, but weird links like that make me learn the Italian and a tiny bit of Latin at the same time - it's easier for me to do a "harder" mental task than necessary!
Other words I learn by daft association - the Italian for "Where" is "dove" (with an accent on the E that I can't type), but to me it sounds more like a combination between the English words dove and "duvet". Where's the dove? Under the duvet. Bang, I have learned it and won't forget it.
Some people do learn by intense study. Some people do learn by repetition. To me, repeating things endlessly in a class environment is the worst way to learn. I spent months in school learning how to solve simultaneous equations. Literally months. I had it after the first week, and the intellectual leaps to apply the principles to more difficult
"Stuff" is a singular noun that means "a lot of things" -- "...looking at the stuff I write on the paper..." is correct, or are you writing more than one group of stuff at once?
I see already a pattern familiar from when I taught in learning labs as a graduate student. I taught writing. I would diagnose a troubled student, using what I'd learned in classes in which we studied composition researchers. I would then tell the student, "What you're doing is a partially effective strategy. But, as you've noticed, it has these negative side-effects. If you do ______, you'll struggle at first, until you get used to it, and then writing will become much easier." The student with then reply, "Oh, no, I've heard about that/tried that, I'm an exception to the rule. I only write well when ________." And the blank would be "it's the night before," "music is blaring," "I've waited until the pressure motivates me," "I do it all in one inspired go," or something like that. What Bjork is talking about is old, old news. Like the article says, most of this stuff has been around since Ebbinghaus. It's very unlikely that anyone who is reading that advice is an exception to these well-studied facts about how human adults learn. But most people who read the advice will go on doing what they do, each assuming that he/she is exceptional. I'd suggest that instead that people who still study (and all technical/professional people should) give interleaving and delayed review a shot.
The most important problem I had in university was bad teaching. 2 out of 3 professor, just come in the room, start writing on a board and explain almost nothing. so the stenographers generally had better scores also because at the exam they tell the professors what they wanted to hear. I remember that to pass some exam I had to learn two different way of saying the same things with different professors. That's simply silly ! Learning should not be (at some point) a search for scarcity resources. You should spend the time in classroom to understand, not to be a stenographer. So sometime the problem is not the learning process but the teaching process
It's a well-known fact, that schools are not designed for learning. Bismarck specifically requested a "military-like" system for children, when our current system was invented. Because back then, sitting still and obeying was seen as the ideal.
They are designed to train as much stuff into you by heart as possible. It is very wrong to call this "learning", since the pupils don't actually understand the concepts. They can perfectly recite the formulas, rules and textbook paragraphs, and follow them like a computer. But they could never come up with a new way based on the core concepts of an idea. They become mere drones. NPCs.
If you observe, how animals learn naturally, you see that with smart animals, it is always through playing. Dogs, raven, dolphins, primates... they all show this behavior. This playing is a simulation of real-life situations. In a non-dangerous and at the start easier environment.
This is the root of games. True games. Not that EA shit. Not Crap of Duty.
See, games are what you get, when you combine storytelling, art, learning and sports. They are the mother of them all. (Yes, the discussion about if games are art is very very silly. Art itself is only a mere subset of games.)
And there even is a indicator for how good that learning is: Fun! (And inspiration.)
Yes. That's the purpose of fun. To show us that. Every good game designer, who studied the psychology behind this, knows this.
Plus, fun is the key motivator.
So any sane person would go and let our kids play games. Good games. Games that give us all the useful experiences and knowledge we need in life. Games that are insanely fun.
Notice how children naturally want this? They think they hate learning, but actually, it's the thing they love the most. It's just that the word "learning" is tainted by that torturous drill we call "schools".
So this whole pseudo-intelligent discussion is mere "oil lamp improvement", and as silly as questioning whether games are art.
Let's make some games! Now!
(I'm already on it. What about you?)
At the very least, your posting style suggests that you are more likely to succeed if you learn a little social psychology. As for the other stuff, you might just want to consider the basis on which Facebook, Apple and (perhaps strangely) the auto industry have built up their multibillion turnover. Because if you think it was done by engineers telling anyone who would listen that human factors were useless, and the people who did the usability testing and designed the user interfaces, and then created the demand for them, were from the trash can of higher education - you're wrong.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
You can't make generalizations like this. What I found in college is that each class and professor needed a different strategy in order for me to succeed in consuming the information. Sometimes that meant not going to class at all, sometimes you have to write down verbatim notes, sometimes you don't take notes (usually because the prof provides lots of prepped material and the book is good). Also, what the fuck is a massively renowned expert?
PhD's in Stanford are easy to get? I am surprised by that. His work looks fairly rigourous and he's had a few papers published. The methodology he employs in his PhD seems reasonable enough - which aspects of his thesis ("Learning and short-term retention of paired associates in relation to specific sequences of interpresentation intervals") do you have an issue with?
I also note he has a first degree in Maths, so I guess he's probably ok on this knowledge. Probably he could get by undergraduate level engineering.
You note "Let's see how long he'll last": reading his curriculum vitae I'd say probably a little while longer, seeing as he completed his PhD in 1966 and has been producing papers and been employed since then, that's about 45 years so far...
It really depends on how you define learning. Some subjects focus on memorization, others require comprehension and understanding. In both cases, familiarity is the deciding factor. For instance, being a native Chinese speaker with a business background, I found it’s easier to learn if the subjects are in Chinese because of the language familiarity. Further, if the subjects are business related, it’s easier to apply Dr. Bjork’s interleaving process again. As a matter of fact, it’s more effective to apply interleaving because I already have an initial framework (i.e. big picture) stored. However, I am currently studying information science – a new subject for me – and I found myself needing to set aside a lengthy amount of time to focus and concentrate, and I also need to take notes in the classroom. But some of my friends and classmates – who have previous information science background - can study anywhere while multitasking while achieving success. I would like to know if others have experienced something similar to what I described.