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April 5 - June 3, 2018
For now, though, this is a memorization strategy.
fluency, the belief that because facts or formulas or arguments are easy to remember right now, they’ll remain that way tomorrow or the next day. The fluency illusion is so strong that, once we feel we’ve nailed some topic or assignment, we assume that further study won’t help. We forget that we forget.
Fluency misperceptions are automatic. They form subconsciously and make us poor judges of what we need to restudy, or practice again.
So it is that we end up attributing our poor test results to “test anxiety” or—too often—stupidity.
Bjorks’ “desirable difficulty” principle: The harder your brain has to work to dig out a memory, the greater the increase in learning (retrieval and storage strength). Fluency, then, is the flipside of that equation. The easier it is to call a fact to mind, the smaller the increase in learning. Repeating facts right after you’ve studied them gives you nothing, no added memory benefit. The fluency illusion is the primary culprit in below-average test performances. Not anxiety. Not stupidity. Not unfairness or bad luck.
“If you read a piece of text through twenty times, you will not learn it by heart so easily as if you read it ten times while attempting to recite it from time to time and consulting the text when your memory fails.”
curious peculiarity of our memory is that things are impressed better by active than by passive repetition. I mean that in learning—by heart, for example—when we almost know the piece, it pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again. If we recover the words in the former way, we shall probably know them the next time; if in the latter way, we shall very likely need the book once more.”
better testing through testing. Don’t be fooled. There’s more to self-examination than you know. A test is not only a measurement tool, it alters what we remember and changes how we subsequently organize that knowledge in our minds. And it does so in ways that greatly improve later performance.
how many of those minutes should you spend studying the verse on the page, and how many should you spend trying to recite from memory?
spend the first third of your time memorizing it, and the remaining two thirds reciting from memory.
when testing is most effective. Is it best to give one big exam at the end of a course? Or do periodic tests given earlier in the term make more sense?
Studying a prose passage for five or ten minutes, then turning the page over to recite what you can without looking, isn’t only practice. It’s a test, and Gates had shown that that self-exam had a profound effect on final performance. That is to say: Testing is studying, of a different and powerful kind.
should be deployed sooner rather than later. “Immediate recall in the form of a test is an effective method of aiding the retention of learning and should, therefore, be employed more frequently,” he concluded. “Achievement tests or examinations are learning devices and should not be considered only as tools for measuring achievement of pupils.”
In short, testing does not = studying, after all. In fact, testing > studying, and by a country mile, on delayed tests.
researchers have begun to call testing “retrieval practice.”
One follows directly from the Bjorks’ desirable difficulty principle. When the brain is retrieving studied text, names, formulas, skills, or anything else, it’s doing something different, and harder, than when it sees the information again, or restudies. That extra effort deepens the resulting storage and retrieval strength.
Using our memory changes our memory in ways we don’t anticipate.
in some circumstances, unsuccessful retrieval attempts—i.e., wrong answers—aren’t merely random failures. Rather, the attempts themselves alter how we think about, and store, the information contained in the questions. On some kinds of tests, particularly multiple-choice, we learn from answering incorrectly—especially when given the correct answer soon afterward.
guessing wrongly increases a person’s likelihood of nailing that question, or a related one, on a later test.
One possible explanation is that pretesting is another manifestation of desirable difficulty. You work a little harder by guessing first than by studying directly. A second possibility is that the wrong guesses eliminate the fluency illusion, the false impression that you knew the capital of Eritrea because you just saw or studied it. A third is that, in simply memorizing, you saw only the correct answer and weren’t thrown off by the other four alternatives—the way you would be on a test.
Taking a practice test provides us something else as well—a glimpse of the teacher’s hand. “Even when you get wrong answers, it seems to improve subsequent study,” Robert Bjork added, “because the test adjusts our thinking in some way to the kind of material we need to know.”
what’s most important in the end is how students think about that material—how they organize it, mentally, and use it to make judgments about what’s important and what’s less so.
a pretest would promote more effective subsequent studying—it primes students to notice important concepts later on.
giving students a pretest on topics to be covered in a lecture improves their ability to answer related questions about those topics on a later final exam.”
A prefinal for an intro class in Arabic or Chinese might be a wash, just because the notations and symbols and alphabet are entirely alien. My guess is that prefinals are likely to be much more useful in humanities courses and the social sciences, because in those courses our minds have some scaffolding of language to work with, before making a guess. “At this point, we don’t know what the ideal applications of pretesting are,” Robert Bjork told me. “It’s still a very new area.”
Many teachers have said that you don’t really know a topic until you have to teach it, until you have to make it clear to someone else. Exactly right. One very effective way to think of self-examination is to say, “Okay, I’ve studied this stuff; now it’s time to tell my brother, or spouse, or teenage daughter what it all means.” If necessary, I write it down from memory. As coherently, succinctly, and clearly as I can.
These apparently simple attempts to communicate what you’ve learned, to yourself or others, are not merely a form of self-testing, in the conventional sense, but studying—the high-octane kind, 20 to 30 percent more powerful than if you continued sitting on your butt, staring at that outline. Better yet, those exercises will dispel the fluency illusion. They’ll expose what you don’t know, where you’re confused, what you’ve forgotten—and fast. That’s ignorance of the best kind.
An insight problem, by definition, is one that requires a person to shift his or her perspective and view the problem in a novel way.
“stages of control.” The first is preparation: the hours or days—or longer—that a person spends wrestling with whatever logical or creative knot he or she faces.
Preparation includes not only understanding the specific problem that needs solving and the clues or instructions at hand; it means working to a point where you’ve exhausted all your ideas. You’re not stalled, in other words. You’re stuck—ending preparation.
The second stage is incubation, which begins when you put aside a problem.
deliberately not thinking about work.
the mind works on the problem off-line, moving around the pieces it has in hand and adding one or two it has in reserve but didn’t think to use at first.
incubation has several components. One is that it’s subconscious. We’re not aware it’s happening. Another is that the elements of the problem
are being assembled, taken apart, and reassembled. At some point “past information,” perhaps knowledge about the properties of triangles we hadn’t initially recalled, is braided in.
The third stage of control is called illumination. This is the aha! moment, the moment when the clouds part and t...
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The fourth and final stage in the paradigm is verification, checking to make sure those results, indeed, work.
the letting go allows people to get out of their own way, giving the subconscious a chance to toil on its own, without the conscious brain telling it where to go or what to do.
“The hint was not experienced because the sudden experience of the solution dominated consciousness.
incubation is often—perhaps entirely—subconscious. The brain is scanning the environment, outside of conscious awareness, looking for clues. It
“mental representations”—could block people from seeing solutions.
You’re shipwrecked. You swim and swim until finally you wash up on a desert island, a spit of sand no more than a mile around. As you stagger to your feet and scan the coastline, you realize: You’ve read about this place. It’s the Isle of Pukool, famous for its strange caste system. Members of the highest caste never tell the truth; members of the lowest always do; and those in the middle are sometimes honest and sometimes not. Outwardly, the castes are indistinguishable. Your only chance of survival is to reach the hundred-foot Tower of Insight, a holy site of refuge where you can see for
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Longer breaks are better than shorter ones; playing a videogame is as good as reading; writing may help incubation for certain kinds of problems, such as spatial ones like the Pencil Problem.
Maybe it’s selective forgetting. Maybe it’s a reimagining of the problem. Maybe it’s simple free-associating, the mind having had time to wander in search of ideas. No one knows for sure which process is the most crucial one, and it’s likely that no one ever will. Our best guess? They all kick in at some level.
Taking a step back and looking around—seeing if we’ve used all the available information; attempting to shake our initial assumptions and start from scratch; doing a mental inventory—is a fitting metaphor for what we have to do to make sense of the recent work on incubation. Looking at each study individually is like engaging the Pukoolians one-on-one, or staring so closely at a stereogram that the third dimension never emerges. You can’t see the forest for the trees.
“pool” all the findings, positive and negative, and determine what the bulk of the evidence is saying. It’s called meta-analysis, and it sometimes tells a clearer story than any single study, no matter how well done.
Sio and Ormerod divided incubation breaks into three categories. One was relaxing, like lying on the couch listening to music. Another was mildly active, like surfing the Internet. The third was highly engaging, like writing a short essay or digging into other homework. For math or spatial problems, like the Pencil Problem, people benefit from any of these three; it doesn’t seem to matter which you choose. For linguistic problems like RAT puzzles or anagrams, on the other hand, breaks consisting of mild activity—videogames, solitaire, TV—seem to work best.
Sio and Ormerod found that longer incubation periods were better than short ones, although “long” in this world means about twenty minutes and “short” closer to five minutes—a narrow range determined by nothing more than the arbitrary choices of researchers. They also emphasized that people don’t benefit from an incubation break unless they have reached an impasse. Their definition of “impasse” is not precise, but most of us know the difference between a speed bump and a brick wall. Here’s what matters: Knock off and play a videogame too soon and you get nothing.
We can figure out how incubation works for ourselves by trying out different lengths of time and activities.
