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 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.
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.
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 !
... unless you have another class right afterwards, or you forget one of the 10 points he outlined in class.
Helping memory recall is a secondary reason to take notes. The primary is to have a complete reference for when you forget.
That's what I was thinking, as well. Some teachers will post notes after class, though, and that's where his advice would be relevant. In those classes, focus on the material and how you're going to remember it. Then try and reproduce it all after class, on paper. Then compare it against the actual notes that were posted online and pay extra time learning the stuff that you forgot.
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?
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.
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
Since you seem to know Dr. Bjork.... TFA mentions using interleaving for learning physical skills like tennis and ballroom dancing. As a former dance instructor I have witnessed numerous students trying to do too much at once (taking classes with multiple teachers, working on numerous skills at the same time). Dance students trying to learn this way become hopelessly confused, suck horribly, and usually quit in frustration. On the other hand, dance students that take the time to master fundamental skills before moving on to more complex ones find it much easier to master new skills. In fact, they eventually reach a level where they can analyze a movement by another dancer, figure it out on their own without an instructor, and master it with some practice.
I would assert that any complex physical skill like dancing, tennis, martial arts, etc. is a learning process, you can not interleave. The student must become proficient at the fundamental physical skills before moving on to more complex ones. There are no shortcuts. In fact, in dance instruction, the instructors claiming to have shortcuts to becoming a great dancer - fast, are the unscrupulous ones that have no clue what they are doing and produce horrible dancers. I suspect the same is true of the field of martial arts based on stories from friends who have studied martial arts for decades.
PhDs in psychology aren't hard to get. Actually, psychology is what we commonly call the trash can of higher education. If you want to get a degree and are useless for everything else then you're ready for studying psychology. 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.
I agree with the physical skills subject. Having done martial arts for 8 years, I can say that if you want to really learn, at first you need to learn the very basic moves, and repeat them till your mind explodes from boredom. In the meanwhile your also learn from the instructor the philosophy, the logic why it makes sense, some story behind each move, and so on. As time goes by, repetition-till-boredom has actually produced some conditioned instincts for the basic moves which now can just happen without you thinking of moving that way. And here comes the next step: combine them, like lego bricks to form a building. And so on. On the other hand, I have studied engineering. I never took notes in class. That's what the books are for. In class one listens and understands the logic, and asks some question for things that don't feel right. You follow the professor during the lecture. One can't have a rest (take notes) mentally while the professor is bombarding with new information (lecturing). Then the lecture is over, one goes home and opens the book, and finds himself in the situation: Yes, I remember this. This too. And this too. And let me follow now closely this mathematical trick which didn't quite convince me. ...
At least this how these things have worked for me.
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.
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?)
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.
I have a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering. I was inducted as a member of Pi Tau Sigma (the ME Honor Society) I rarely took notes. I found that taking notes forced me to concentrate on writing down what the lecturer said. Listening let me focus on understanding what he said. There were exceptions of course, and I wouldn't presume to tell others that my study methods are for them, but they worked for me.
-- QED