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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."
Welcome to academia. If you don't tell people you are important, they won't know and won't care. There is a saying that a PhD is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. An academic career is 10% inspiration, 40% perspiration and 50% marketing.
Thanks to the old system, it was easy.
Not to me.
Endless rote memorization: writing, flash cards, drills, ugh!
Humans naturally want to learn. It's innate in our being and yet, we get to school and hate it - at least 90% of us do. (The other 10% are the A students. )
When we're left to our own devices and learning something that we're interested in, do we learn like we do in school? I don't. It's all one big discovery. And the wonderful thing about the internet, it makes following curiosities even easier - until you tired and head over to Fark.
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.
That might be true, right now. How about after a little bit of practice? You might be surprised to find out that it won't take too long for you to be able to improve your after-class recall ability.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Thanks to the old system, it was easy.
Not to me.
Endless rote memorization: writing, flash cards, drills, ugh!
Humans naturally want to learn. It's innate in our being and yet, we get to school and hate it - at least 90% of us do. (The other 10% are the A students. )
When we're left to our own devices and learning something that we're interested in, do we learn like we do in school? I don't. It's all one big discovery. And the wonderful thing about the internet, it makes following curiosities even easier - until you tired and head over to Fark.
This is easily the most insightful yet commonsense comment in the entire discussion. Modern schooling sucks the life and soul out of learning and produces factory-style people who have forgotten what curiosity and the joy of discovery is all about.
I believe that's by design. It results in people who can't or won't educate themselves, who were raised to believe that education is something another person must give to you. They're simply easier to rule, especially when propaganda (particularly framing) and soundbites are your major tools.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
One of my father's lecturers said that information was transferred from him to his students notes without going through their brains. I never took notes in lectures when I went to university and I generally did better than people who did. If you don't understand something, go and read a book about it after the lecture. Distracting yourself from the lecturer while you're trying to understand what he's saying isn't going to help.
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Again as with the initial "notes after class". How do you KNOW that you have NOT forgotten something?
Because instead of being a stenographer, you were paying attention and learning. If you listen to the lecture knowing that you will have to summarize it right after, you will remember what needs to be remembered. It's the difference between learning something and memorizing something.
I can't speak to how true that is generally, but it's not true here. As a grad student in psychology and cognitive science, I can tell you that Bob Bjork is sufficiently well-established in the field that he doesn't need to tell anyone else he's important - they know it already. I was fortunate enough to hear him give a talk on this topic a couple of weeks ago, and he cited a number of his studies in the memory and learning literature that I'd heard of before without remembering that he was a coauthor on all of them. (It was a bit like that moment where you suddenly realize that a bunch of songs you like are all written by the same band.) In this case, at least, his renown is attributable primarily to the hard work he's put in over the last several decades.
His methods all sound nice, "don't take notes!". Well, he should go and try that in engineering. Lets see how long he'll last.
Sounds reasonable to me. Your engineering textbooks contain all the equations, formula, and methodologies you need to learn to get a degree, so why do you go to class? The classes teach you the background of why those methods are used, and when is the proper occasion to use them. When you take extensive notes, half your attention is spent recording the lecture verbatim, and you're not actually taking an active part in learning it.
He's saying don't do that. Pay attention. Think about what is actually being said. At some point in the short term after the class, while all that stuff is still fresh in your mind, replay through the class and write as much of it as you can down. The forced recollection will leave a far better imprint. If there are things you missed, ask a classmate, review the text, go meet the teacher in their office. You've got more than one chance to acquire all this information.