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August 6, 2019 - April 10, 2022
Drills require the learner not only to think deeply about what is being learned but also figure out what is most difficult and attack that weakness directly rather than focus on what is the most fun or what has already been
This requires strong motivation and a comfort with learning aggressively.
Testing yourself—trying to retrieve information without looking at the text—clearly outperformed all other conditions.
Another possible explanation for why self-testing works is feedback. When you review something passively, you don’t get any feedback about what you know and don’t know.
The act of trying to summon up knowledge from memory is a powerful learning tool on its own, beyond its connection to direct practice or feedback.
If retrieval practice—trying to recall facts and concepts from memory—is
Whether you are ready or not, retrieval practice works better.
More difficult retrieval leads to better learning, provided the act of retrieval is itself successful.
Cued recall tests, in turn, are better than recognition tests, such as multiple-choice answers, where the correct answer needs to be recognized but not generated.
Pushing difficulty higher and opting for testing oneself well before you are “ready” is more efficient.
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.
The concept of retrieval flips this view on its head, suggesting that the act of taking a test not only is a source of learning but results in more learning than a similar amount of time spent in review.
retrieval not only helps enhance what you’ve learned previously but can even help prepare you to learn better.
8 Regular testing of previously studied information can make it easier to learn new information.
if you need to recall something later, you’re best off practicing retrieving
If you’re learning a language and need to recall a word, you’ll practice it. If you never need a word, you won’t memorize it.
The problem with relying on direct practice exclusively is that knowledge that isn’t in your head can’t be used to help you solve problems.
Yet despite this incredible advance, it is not as if the average person is thousands as times as smart as people were was a generation ago. Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn’t help you solve hard problems.
separating mediocre programmers from great ones isn’t the range of problems they can solve but that the latter often know dozens of ways to solve problems and can select the best one for each situation.
Most books and resources don’t have a handy list of questions at the end to test you to see if you remember what they contain.
way to learn paired associations between questions and answers.
vocabulary, this works perfectly. Similarly, maps, anatomical diagrams, definitions, and equations can often be memorized via flash cards.
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.
By forcing yourself to recall the main points and arguments, you’ll be able to remember them better later.
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.
By taking notes as questions instead of answers, you generate the material to practice retrieval on later.
What’s harder and more useful is to restate the big idea of a chapter or section as a question.
One rule I’ve found helpful for this is to restrict myself to one question per section of a text,
thus forcing myself to acknowledge and rephrase the main point
However, if you’re trying to practice a skill, not merely remember information, they might not be enough.
You may encounter a new technique and then write a note to demonstrate that technique in an actual example.
Stick notes mind maps notebook design
Nearly any learning activity can become an opportunity for retrieval if you cut off the ability to search for hints.
Any practice, whether direct or a drill, can be cut off from the ability to look things up. By preventing yourself from consulting the source, the information becomes knowledge stored inside your head instead of inside a reference manual.
two hallmarks of the ultralearner’s tool kit: obsessive intensity and retrieval practice.
Retrieval is not a sufficient tool to create genius, but it may be a necessary one.
Trying to produce the answer rather than merely reviewing it is only half of a bigger cycle, however. To make retrieval really effective, it helps to know whether the answer you dredged up from your mind was correct.
When everything you do is funny, how do you know what really makes a joke good?
he’s going to perform comedy with the precision of an experiment.
What often separated the ultralearning strategy from more conventional approaches was the immediacy, accuracy, and intensity of the feedback being provided.
Ericsson has found that the ability to gain immediate feedback on one’s performance is an essential ingredient in reaching expert levels of performance.
No feedback, and the result is often stagnation—long periods of time when you continue to use a skill but don’t get any better at it. Sometimes the lack of feedback can even result in declining abilities.
Crucially, what matters is the type of feedback being given.
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.
Further, even feedback that includes useful information needs to be correctly processed as a motivator and tool for learning.
The researchers note that who is giving the feedback can matter, as feedback coming from a peer or teacher has important social dynamics beyond mere information on how to improve one’s abilities.
In many cases he ignored them, when the feedback conflicted with his vision.
Second, when it is incorrectly applied, feedback can have a negative impact on motivation.
