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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Robson
Read between
April 1 - July 27, 2019
the reward was always in the discovery of new knowledge itself,
Itsellä ongelma että löydön haluaa aina myös jakaa, ja mitä suuremmalle yleisölle sen parempi. Miksi? Päteäkseen?
‘Successful bright people rarely experience failure, and so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure,’ he added. ‘They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved . . .
For this reason, some researchers have shown that the best predictor of how much new material you will learn – better than your IQ – is how much you already know about a subject.
In many ways it is the Western system of education – particularly in the USA and UK – that stifles flexible, independent thinking, while also failing to teach the factual basics.
The latest neuroscience, however, shows that we learn best when we are confused;
And a failure to recognise this fact is another primary reason that many people – including those with high IQs – often fail to learn well.
On average, a person with the ‘spaced’ approach mastered the basics within thirty-five hours, compared to fifty hours for the intensive learners – a 30 per cent difference. Individually, even the slowest person in the one-hour-a-day group had mastered the skill in less time than the quickest learner among those devoting four hours a day to the test.
That process – of forgetting, and then forcing ourselves to relearn the material – strengthens the memory trace, leading us to remember more in the long term.
People who learn in longer blocks miss out on those crucial steps – the intermediate forgetting and relearning – that would promote long-term recall precisely because it is harder.
The Bjorks have shown that, in reality, learning is more effective if the student solves just enough problems to refresh their mind, before moving on to a new (perhaps related) subject, and only later should they return to the initial topic.
Like the spacing effect, this process of switching between tasks – known as interleaving – can lead the student to feel confused and overburdened, compared to lessons in which they are allowed to focus solely on one subject. But when they are tested later, they have learnt much more.4
Enemmän stressiä mutta oppii paremmin!
Productive failure seems to be particularly fruitful for disciplines like maths, in which teachers may ask students to solve problems before they’ve been explicitly taught the correct methods. Studies suggest they’ll learn more and understand the underlying concepts better in the long run, and they will also be better able to translate their learning to new, unfamiliar problems.6
Muista tämä elektroniikan opetuksessa!
Textbooks that condense concepts and present them in the most coherent and fluent way possible, with slick diagrams and bullet point lists, actually reduce long-term recall.
The evidence is now unarguable: introducing desirable difficulties into the classroom – through strategies such as spacing, interleaving and productive failure – would ensure that everyone learns more effectively.
‘We have all these results showing that people prefer the poorer ways of learning,’ Robert added.
It’s as if we went to the gym hoping to build our muscles, but then only ever decided to lift the lightest weights.
If anything, the students in these cultures are concerned if the work isn’t hard enough.
‘It’s not that the Japanese don’t believe in individual differences,’ Stigler told me. ‘It’s just that they don’t view them as limitations to the extent that we do.’
When tackling a new topic in maths or science, for instance, it’s quite common for Japanese teachers to begin their lessons by asking students to solve a problem before they’ve been told the exact method to apply – the use of ‘productive failure’ that we discussed a few pages ago. The next couple of hours are then devoted to working their way through those challenges – and although the teacher offers some guidance, the bulk of the work is expected to come from the students.
British or American schools, in contrast, often discourage that exploration, for fear that it might cause extra confusion; for each type of maths or science problem, say, we are only taught one potential strategy to find a solution.
But the scientific research shows that comparing and contrasting different approaches gives a better understanding of the underlying principles – even if it does result in more confusion at the beginning.
Whereas we’re very focused on [simply] getting the answer – and if you want the students to get the right answer, you then make it as easy as possible.’
Muistan kun keskityin matematiikkaan, fysiikkaan ja kemiaan koska niissä arviointi oli selkeää. Vältin epävarmuutta.
The boy didn’t cry, as Stigler had initially expected, because in that cultural context there simply wasn’t any reason to feel the same level of personal shame that we would expect.
It is true that some lessons do involve elements of rote learning, to ensure that the basic facts are memorised and easily recalled, but this research shows that Japanese classrooms provide far more room for independent thinking than many Western commentators have assumed.
the top-performing schools all encourage students to go through those periods of confusion.
Productive struggle: Long periods of confusion as students wrestle with complex concepts beyond their current understanding. Making connections: When undergoing that intellectual struggle, students are encouraged to use comparisons and analogies, helping them to see underlying patterns between different concepts. This ensures that the confusion leads to a useful lesson – rather than simply ending in frustration. Deliberate practice: Once the initial concepts have been taught, teachers should ensure that students practise those skills in the most productive way possible. Crucially, this
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Vähän niin kuin TKK:n matikka: muutama tehtävä jossa joutui oikeasti sykkimään. Ei miljoonaa helppoa.
If you consider classrooms in the UK and USA, for instance, our mental worth is often judged by who can put their hand up quickest – giving us the subtle signal that it’s better to go with an immediate intuitive response without reflecting on the finer details.
Particularly in earlier education, this also involves glossing over potential nuances, such as the alternative interpretations of evidence in history or the evolution of ideas in science, for instance – with facts presented as absolute certainties to be learnt and memorised.12
Tässä voisi mainita että tiede ei tue mitenkään näitä ”oppimistyylejä” ylipäätään.
The Japanese education system, in contrast, is more of an assault course than a race course; it requires you to consider alternative routes to steer your way around obstacles and persevere even when you face rough terrain.
Even a simple strategic pause can be a powerful thing.
Having asked the class a question, the average American teacher typically waits less than a second before picking a child to provide an answer – sending out a strong message that speed is valued over complex thinking.
But a study from the University of Florida has found that something magical happens when the teacher takes a little more time – just three seconds – to wait to pick a child, and...
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would do? In reality, Langer has found that subtly changing the phrasing of a lesson to introduce those ambiguities encourages deeper learning. In one high-school physics lesson, the children were presented with a thirty-minute video demonstrating some basic principles and asked to answer some questions using the information.
Thanks to a change in a single word, children told that this was just ‘one way to solve this equation’ performed better than those told it was ‘the way to solve this equation’ – they were about 50 per cent more likely to get the correct answer.
studies, using shorter chunks
Beware of fluent material.
Give yourself a pre-test.
Vary your environment.
In one experiment, simply switching rooms during studying resulted in 21 per cent better recall on a subsequent test.
Learn by teaching.
Test yourself regularly.
yourself, you should make sure you combine questions from different topics rather than only focusing on one subject.
try to perform tasks that will be too difficult for your current level
When you are wrong, try to explain the source of the confusion.
Beware the foresight bias. As Robert and Elizabeth Bjork have shown, we are bad at judging the level of our learning, based on our current performance – with some studies showing that the more confident we are in our memory of a fact, the less likely we are to remember it later.
Intellectual Virtues Academy
Tutustu!
Curiosity: a disposition to wonder, ponder, and ask why. A thirst for understanding and a desire to explore. Intellectual humility: a willingness to own up to one’s intellectual limitations and mistakes, unconcerned with intellectual status or prestige. Intellectual autonomy: a capacity for active, self-directed thinking. An ability to think and reason for oneself. Executing well Attentiveness: a readiness to be ‘personally present’ in the learning process. Keeps distractions at bay. Strives to be mindful and engaged. Intellectual carefulness: a disposition to notice and avoid intellectual
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Heh, tästä tuli mieleen googlata Sonera-kirja 😹.
‘functional stupidity’
