Learning 101: The untaught basics [pdf]

I'm not sure who is the audience for this, but if it is students then it is not going to be very helpful, IMHO. For students to get it the authors must give concrete examples.

Let me pick on B, on spaced learning and interleaving. In those two paragraphs there are no concrete examples. If a student asks, "OK, I'm at the library and I have my book open. What do I do?" then the answer is not there.

I'll talk about college math because that's what I teach.

If you want students to learn what to do, you have to tell them. Maybe, "Set your timer to a half hour, pick out five problems, three from the current section and two from sections you did last week, and do them. If you get stuck take a peek at the answer, but don't peek until you are stuck. If you get really stuck, mark the question in your notebook and ask about it at the start of the next class. But under no circumstances just read the book." Then you have told them how to practice recall and to interleave in a way that they can actually do it.

Four half hours remembering how to do both current problems and also some from before for every hour spent in class is a good whack at learning the class's material, at least in the first two years.

Just using the two words recall and interleave is not enough.

Pithy summary: The paper "Learning 101: The Untaught Basics" by Junaid Qadir and Muhammad Ali Imran highlights that many students fail to learn effectively due to flawed intuitive learning methods and a lack of knowledge about optimal learning strategies. It identifies seven common impediments, such as fixed mindsets, lack of engagement, and poor metacognitive skills, and offers remedies for each. The authors emphasize the importance of effortful learning techniques like retrieval practice, spaced repetition, and interleaving to achieve deeper, long-lasting learning outcomes.

Readers might also be interested in this:

A Learning Map — https://hyponymo.us/2018/09/30/learning-map/

Original link: https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/147253/7/147253.pdf

mmm this is interesting, so strongly agree, I've felt and seen others feel the real-world cost of wasted effort. I would sometimes get so indignant, witnessing how an institution was allowing the time of the learners to be so poorly spent, when I'd realize retroactively things about my own experience learning.

A big piece clicked in my mind when I encountered this piece about 'tacit knowledge': [0]

That piece was rattling around my brain when I encountered "Bloom's 2-sigma problem", which I ended up writing a little explainer on, bc it was coming up in conversation often.[1]

I was confused by the title at first, until I read the paper (it's short) and realized it could be re-phrased as "[random person]'s two standard deviation problem", or "Dude's 98th percentile problem".

The "problem" was "there exists a reliable way to give 98th percentile results to an arbitrary student, it's simply too laborious for mass instruction".

this expensive, non-scalable labor was the 'problem' part.

Interesting to me, though, was that the 98th percentile result/effect was fully achieved by mastery-based learning and 1:1 tutoring. (dang, expensive, doesn't 'scale well')

But one can still sorta drag those principles into your own learning efforts, one can try to see clearly why it's desirable to have those two things and then adjust one's own learning journey accordingly. (I.E. focus on less that isn't just those two things, or Anki SRS)

The two interventions made intuitive sense to me, and I eventually tried to approximate both. [2]

In that series i'm trying to capture and make visible the pattern seeking behavior of an expert solving a real problem with me following along and following/making visible the decision making/intuition-following that's being done, in a way that you could do the exact same in a practicable way, if so inclined.

It happens to be a kind of resource I wish existed for me, years ago. Not an active project of mine right now.

[0]: https://commoncog.com/tacit-knowledge-is-a-real-thing/ [1]: https://josh.works/2-sigma-problem [2]: https://www.intermediateruby.com/make-oss-contributions-part...

edit: add commoncog url, formatting