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August 28 - October 14, 2018
“the best results are obtained by introducing recitation after devoting about 40 percent of the time to reading. Introducing recitation too early or too late leads to poorer results,”
“The superiority of optimal reading and retention over reading alone is about 30 percent.”
Spitzer’s
In particular, he recognized Gates’s recitation as a form of self-examination. 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.
The groups that took pop quizzes soon after reading the passage—once or twice within the first week—did the best on a final exam given at the end of two months, getting about 50 percent of the questions correct.
Spitzer showed not only that testing is a powerful study technique, he showed it’s one that should be deployed sooner rather than later.
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. We know the facts or skills better because we retrieved them ourselves, we didn’t merely review them.
That is, guessing wrongly increases a person’s likelihood of nailing that question, or a related one, on a later test.
Pretesting is most helpful when people get prompt feedback
Answering does not only measure what you remember, it increases overall retention. Then, testing proved itself to be superior to additional study, in a broad variety of academic topics, and the same is likely true of things like music and dance, practicing from memory.
“Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack,” Poincaré had observed. “Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind.”
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.
The third stage of control is called illumination. This is the aha! moment, the moment when the clouds part and the solution appears all at once.
The fourth and final stage in the paradigm is verification, checking to make sure those results, indeed, work.
Perhaps unfinished jobs or goals linger in memory longer than finished ones.
Interestingly, being interrupted at the “worst” time seemed to extend memory the longest. “As everyone knows,” Zeigarnik wrote, “it is far more disturbing to be interrupted just before finishing a letter than when one has only begun.”
The first element of percolation, then, is that supposed enemy of learning—interruption.
Having a goal foremost in mind (in this case, a drink), tunes our perceptions to fulfilling it. And that tuning determines, to some extent, where we look and what we notice. “The results suggest that basic needs and motives cause a heightened perceptual readiness to register environmental cues that are instrumental to satisfying those needs,”
Chance feeds the tuned mind.
What does this mean for a learning strategy? It suggests that we should start work on large projects as soon as possible and stop when we get stuck, with the confidence that we are initiating percolation, not quitting.
Quitting before I’m ahead doesn’t put the project to sleep; it keeps it awake. That’s Phase 1, and it initiates Phase 2, the period of gathering string, of casual data collecting. Phase 3 is listening to what I think about all those incoming bits and pieces. Percolation depends on all three elements, and in that order.
Varied practice is more effective than the focused kind, because it forces us to internalize general rules of motor adjustment that apply to any hittable target.
Transfer is what learning is all about, really. It’s the ability to extract the essence of a skill or a formula or word problem and apply it in another context, to another problem that may not look the same, at least superficially. If you’ve truly mastered a skill, you “carry it with you,” so to speak.
In their Forget to Learn theory, Robert and Elizabeth Bjork called any technique that causes forgetting a “desirable difficulty,” in that it forces the brain to work harder to dig up a memory or skill—and that added work intensifies subsequent retrieval and storage strength (learning).
Interleaving. That’s a cognitive science word, and it simply means mixing related but distinct material during study.
This much is clear: The mixing of items, skills, or concepts during practice, over the longer term, seems to help us not only see the distinctions between them but also to achieve a clearer grasp of each one individually. The hardest part is abandoning our primal faith in repetition.
interleaving can improve math comprehension across the board, no matter our age.
those in the mixed-study—interleaved—group did better, and it wasn’t close: 77 to 38 percent.
Mixing problems during study forces us to identify each type of problem and match it to the appropriate kind of solution. We are not only discriminating between the locks to be cracked; we are connecting each lock with the right key.
The evidence so far suggests that interleaving is likely applicable not just to math, but to almost any topic or skill. Badminton. History (mix concepts from related periods). Basketball (practice around the free throw line, not repeatedly from the line). Biology. Piano. Chemistry. Skateboarding. Blindfolded beanbag throwing, for heaven’s sake. Certainly any material taught in a single semester, in any single course, is a ripe target for interleaving. You have to review the material anyway at some point.
Why not practice the necessary discrimination skills incrementally, every time you sit down, rather than all at once when ramping up for a final test?
Remember: Interleaving is not just about review but also discriminating between types of problems, moves, or concepts.
As I read it, the science suggests that interleaving is, essentially, about preparing the brain for the unexpected.
At bottom, interleaving is a way of building into our daily practice not only a dose of review but also an element of surprise.
Mixed-up practice doesn’t just build overall dexterity and prompt active discrimination. It helps prepare us for life’s curveballs, literal and figurative.
perceptual learning is automatic, and self-correcting. You’re learning without thinking.
“There is evidence, in fact, that REM is this creative memory domain when you build different associations, combine things in different ways and so on.”
Put it this way: I no longer think of naps or knocking off early as evidence of laziness, or a waste of time, or, worst of all, a failure of will. I think of sleep as learning with my eyes closed.
Let go of what you feel you should be doing, all that repetitive, overscheduled, driven, focused ritual. Let go, and watch how the presumed enemies of learning—ignorance, distraction, interruption, restlessness, even quitting—can work in your favor.
Breaking up study or practice time—dividing it into two or three sessions, instead of one—is far more effective than concentrating it. If you’ve allotted two hours to mastering a German lesson, for example, you’ll remember more if you do an hour today and an hour tomorrow, or—even better—an hour the next day. That split forces you to reengage the material, dig up what you already know, and re-store it—an active mental step that reliably improves memory. Three sessions is better still, as long as you’re giving yourself enough time to dive into the material or the skills each time.
spacing study time is the most powerful and reliable technique scientists know of to deepen and extend memory.
the brain can sharpen a memory only after some forgetting has occurred. In this way, memory is like a muscle: A little “breakdown” allows it to subsequently build greater strength.
Mixing or “interleaving” multiple skills in a practice session, by contrast, sharpens our grasp of all of them.
Mixed-problem sets—just adding one or two from earlier lessons—not only reminds you what you’ve learned but also trains you to match the problem types with the appropriate strategies.
