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January 31 - February 9, 2025
Drill 5: Prerequisite Chaining
start with a skill that they don’t have all the prerequisites for. Then, when they inevitably do poorly, they go back a step, learn one of the foundational topics, and repeat the exercise.
Mindful Drilling
Drills are hard to do, which is why many of us would rather avoid them.
The difficulty and usefulness of drills repeat a pattern that will recur throughout the ultralearning principles: that something mentally strenuous provides a greater benefit to learning than something easy.
Retrieval Test to Learn
It pays better to wait and recollect by an effort from within, than to look at the book again.
The Testing Effect
Imagine you’re a student preparing for an exam. You have three choices about how you can allocate your limited studying time. First, you can review the material. You can look over your notes and book and study everything until you’re sure you’ll remember it. Second, you can test yourself. You can keep the book shut and try to remember what was in it. Finally, you can create a concept map. You can write out the main concepts in a diagram, showing how they’re organized and related to other items you need to study. If you can pick only one, which one should you choose to do best on the final
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The actual results, however, weren’t even close. Testing yourself—trying to retrieve information without looking at the text—clearly outperformed all other conditions.
When you review
something passively, you don’t get any feedback about what you know and don’t know.
The Paradox of Studying
Human beings don’t have the ability to know with certainty how well they’ve learned something.
If the
learning task feels easy and smooth, we are more likely to believe we’ve learned it. If the task feels like a struggle, we’ll feel we haven’t learned it yet.
Immediately after spending some time studying, these JOLs may even be accurate. Minutes after studying something using a strategy of passive review, students perform better ...
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Is Difficulty Desirable?
Difficulty can become undesirable if it gets so hard that retrieval becomes impossible. Delaying the first test of a newly learned fact has some benefits over testing immediately.6 However, if you delay the test too long, the information may be forgotten entirely.7 The idea, therefore, is to find the right midpoint: far enough away to make whatever is retrieved remembered deeply, not so far away that you’ve forgotten everything.
Should You Take the Final Exam Before the Class Even Begins?
Regular testing of previously studied information can make it easier to learn new information. This means that retrieval works to enhance future
learning, even when there is nothing to retrieve yet!
retrieve an answer that doesn’t yet exist in your mind is like laying down a road leading to a building that hasn’t been constructed yet.
What Should Be Retrieved?
if you need to recall something later, you’re best off practicing retrieving it.
What kinds of things should you invest the time in to remember in the first place? Retrieval may take less time than review to get the same learning impact, but not learning something
at all is faste...
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How to Practice Retrieval
Retrieval works, but it isn’t always easy.
Tactic 1: Flash Cards
Flash cards are an amazingly simple, yet effective, way to learn paired associations between questions and answers.
The major drawback of flash cards is that they work really well for a specific type of retrieval—when
when there’s a pairing between a specific cue and a particular response.
Tactic 2: Free Recall
A simple tactic for applying retrieval is, after reading a section from a book or sitting through a lecture, to try to write down everything you can remember on a blank piece of paper. Free recall like this is often very difficult, and there will be many
things missed, even if you just finished reading the ...
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Tactic 3: The Question-Book Method
Most students take notes by copying the main points as they encounter them. However, another strategy for taking notes is to rephrase what you’ve recorded as questions to be answered later.
with a reference
to where to find the answer in case you forget.
Tactic 4: Self-Generated Challenges
Tactic 5: Closed-Book Learning
Nearly any learning activity can become an opportunity for retrieval if you cut off the ability to search for hints.
By preventing yourself from consulting the source, the information becomes knowledge stored inside your head instead of inside a reference manual.
obsessive intensity and retrieval practice.
Feedback Don’t Dodge the Punches
What often separated the ultralearning strategy from more conventional approaches was the immediacy, accuracy, and intensity of the feedback being provided.
Feedback works well when it provides useful information that can guide future learning. If feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong or how to fix it, it can be a potent tool. But feedback often backfires when it is aimed at a person’s ego. Praise, a common type of feedback that teachers often use (and students enjoy), is usually harmful to further learning.
the ultralearner needs to be on guard for two possibilities. The first is overreacting to feedback (both positive and negative) that doesn’t offer specific information that leads to improvement.
Second, when it is incorrectly applied, feedback can have a negative impact on motivation. Not only can overly negative feedback lower your motivation, but so can overly positive feedback.
