The framing which drove me was: isn’t it odd that even readers who are quite motivated to read a book still often absorb fairly little?
That's not quite what I mean by motivation. To be more specific I should say 'intrinsic motivation'. I'm assuming the book is actually read in either case, motivated or unmotivated.
Let's take the case of Selfish Gene. You can be strongly motivated to read it because it's something educated people are supposed to have read. This is not 'intrinsic motivation' and will be inadequate—and you're likely to just relay some disconnected facts or partially incoherent babble if asked to e.g. summarize it later.
However, if you were previously interested in genetics and concerned by altruistic behavior in animals as a potential weakness in the evolutionary model—then you're going to easily absorb some important principles from the book which relate to this problem: if you consider genes as what's being preserved, as opposed to organisms, then altruistic behavior makes perfect sense—especially given the way it attenuates based on proportion of shared genetic material (or perception thereof).
Being in that state of already having something that needs to be sorted out by the material you're reading is what I mean by 'intrinsic motivation'.
Research stemming from Piaget suggests the need to introduce information not authoritatively but rather in response to "disequilibria"—authentic intellectual needs in the listener/reader. Of course, good authors can also work to create these disequilibria.
Do you think that the presence/lack of this intellectual need is the highest-order bit? That is: if you really have questions you want answers to, you're not going to have any trouble absorbing what you need, no matter the medium's shape? I guess I see it as a both-and situation!
That's a nice way of putting it—matches my view perfectly.
> Do you think that the presence/lack of this intellectual need is the highest-order bit?
I do (with an important caveat[0]). My view is that without it, you pretty much just get more or less effective ways of 'going through the motions'. I think updating schemas to take account of new information is something brains have developed to do with extreme refinement, even just in response to speech streams. We are probably not more 'sponge-like'—in the sense of just incorporating all new knowledge we're presented with—because there are costs to overhauling existing schemas, or even to adding new ones. So we have some built-in heuristics for when it makes to sense to actually incorporate new info.
My guess is that the most effective route to improving learning will relate to hacking those heuristics.
A basic form of that is something you pointed out:
> Of course, good authors can also work to create these disequilibria.
I think that should be taken more seriously than it typically is. It's also interesting, however, that if you start considering how to do it in a more serious way, you often end up confronted with the question of whether the student should really be learning the material or not... (Kinda vague but I don't want to bog you down with too much text—I know you've got plenty accumulating in this thread already ;)
[0] I see 'intrinsic motivation' basically as an ideal, but not always practically exploitable. For situations where we just need people to learn some things even though they aren't yet in a position to appreciate why—you may have to do without. Then again, maybe with radical enough revision to instruction, even those seemingly intractable cases could be sorted out.
P.S. Hi Andy! We met briefly at a conference in Sebastapol last year.