Category: learning
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Rules of Formulating Knowledge
Back in 2009, I posted about the SuperMemo learning algorithm, based on the tried-and-true learning principle of spaced repetition (see also). I see now that, around that time, Piotr Woźniak, developer of the SuperMemo algorithm, wrote about his twenty rules of formulating knowledge. The below seven really stuck out to me, with all of them…
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Studying and Learning: What Works, What Doesn’t
Self-testing and spaced repetition are the “two clear winners” in how to study and learn better. That’s from an informal meta study conducted by six professors (from fields such as psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience) when they reviewed over 700 scientific articles to identify the ten most common learning techniques and which are the most…
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Mister Rogers’ Nine Rules for Talking to Children
Having not grown up in the US, I only became aware of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as an adult. However, this is entirely due to Fred Rogers himself: his kindness, his humanity, and his ability to draw children into his safe world. In the lead-up to the publishing of The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work…
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Big History: A History Course Covering 13.8 Billion Years
Big History is an academic course covering “our complete 13.8 billion years of shared history”. From the Big Bang to modern-day society, the course is structured around eight “threshold” moments of increasing complexity, synthesising aspects of cosmology, physics, chemistry, geology, and anthropology to weave a unified story of history so far. The eight thresholds: I…
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The Intricacies and Joys of Arabic
I imagine that most people with a passing interest in linguistics read Maciej Cegłowski’s short essay in praise of the Arabic language when it was ‘rediscovered’ by popular social networks a few months ago. As one who has studied Arabic (albeit MSA and only for nine months or so), the essay brought back fond memories of struggling…
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Infants Quickly Learn to Ignore Unreliable and Silly People
Children learn a lot from imitating the actions of adults, with recent research suggesting that infants as young as 14 months are selective imitators — taking cues from our behaviour in order to decide which of us adults to learn from and which to ignore. In a study where researchers expressed delight before either presenting an…
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Hard-to-Read Fonts Improve Learning
Much has been written on the positive aspects of cognitive fluency (in terms of typography, accents, and almost everything else), but a recent study (pdf, doi) suggests that the opposite (cognitive disfluency) could lead to better learning. The theory is that harder-to-process material requires “deeper processing” and that this deeper processing leads to superior memory performance. Earlier…
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Timed Exposure Can Be As Good As Practice
We know that deliberate practice is an important part of learning (and mastering) new skills–but what role, if any, does mere passive exposure play? Can relevant background stimulation help us to reduce the amount of effort and practice necessary to master a skill? To answer these questions Jonah Lehrer contacted the authors of a recent paper studying exactly…
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Evidence-Based Study Tips
A recent issue of The Psychologist included a “rough guide to studying psychology” by the editor of the excellent Research Digest blog, Christian Jarrett. In his guide, Jarrett provided nine evidence-based study tips: Adopt a growth mindset: [Students] who see intelligence as malleable, react to adversity by working harder and trying out new strategies. […] Research…
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Understanding Wisdom
In a review of Stephen Hall’s Wisdom, Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin asks ‘Can we understand wisdom?’ and looks at the evidence for and against. Wisdom is not the same as knowledge, and so it seems odd it has attracted the attention of science. There is such a thing as “wisdom studies” now, and in his book…