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Comment by kang | Hacker News Reader

Recalling information is not necessarily learning. That 'drawing-relation-diagrams' method contributes more towards understanding in my view.

Also this is very limited in domain. As an example, here in India students learn English for an year or two before appearing in MBA examinations. One common observation is that many students do thousands of comprehensions and unseen passages but still stand nowhere in the 'reading between the lines' part, which is essentially, understanding. They spend all the time testing themselves, whereas 'testing' should follow after 'acquiring the knowledge'.

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Recalling information is not necessarily learning. That 'drawing-relation-diagrams' method contributes more towards understanding in my view.

As far as I know, all definitions of learning include the ability to recall. As the article points out, the students that drew concept maps "felt" they understood the material, but later were actually worse at demonstrating it with the follow-up test on understanding of the material (ie, both recall of the previous facts and the ability to draw inferences from them).

It's true that rote memorization is not the same as learning, but that's not what was being tested in the study. They specifically tested to determine both recall and understanding.

That's how it works in Japan too. Kids study English for 8 years and aren't able to speak a word or make basic linguistic connections.

And it's all based on study and test taking.

Sadly, that's most of second language 'learning' in public schools in most places around the world.

Almost everyone I've met from the Netherlands is fluent in English, and has a better grasp of English grammar than many Americans. I wonder why their result is so much better than the Japanese. There could be many reasons for this, including that English and Dutch are much closer than English and Japanese, that the Dutch have more contact with English-speaking people and media, or that the Dutch schools have a better way of teaching language than the Japanese schools. I've also found this to be the case with younger Germans.

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