Episode 5: Learning to Learn Flashcards
Know more! (Geoff Norman)
As Geoff Norman said, you improve by knowing more, just the accumulation of experiences.
Learn and listen experts
Read, learn from experts, to tell you what to read so you ‘re not going down blind alleys all the time. They can tell you exactly where to focus on!
Improving your Studying Skills
- Begin studying 3 weeks in advance so you can distribute your practice across time. So you can go over and over again the same material.
- Retrieval Practice!: Try to recall from memory the topics! Try flashcards ;) Instead of taking notes, make it in a way can you can use a retrieval practice better
Remember retrieving and rereading takes the same amount of time!
How the memory works? (Bob Bjork)
- Retrieving information is a dynamical process, it makes what you retrieve more retrievable in the future.
- We are always linking things. Scaffolding structure. The more you know, the more links you have.
- Try to link new things to things you already know from your daily life, make connections and make the scaffolding grow. (This is something I already try to do, specially when something don’t quite enter my head)
- Test yourself! Get together with a friend and ask questions.
!It’s not a video tape that you can just rewind!
Spacing Effect
If you’re going to reread something don’t do it immediately . Go onto other material, other courses, and then come back to it. It can doubling your recall capacity.
Active Learning
The struggle solidify in memory
Having that little struggle to remember “bonsoir”
Availability Heuristics
Heuristics is something you learn by doing, by discovering on your own, not leading to the optimal way.
Availability heuristics is the tendency to make judgments about the probability of events by the ease with which examples come to mind. (people find more dangerous to be eaten by a shark than a health condition) (people thinking there are more words starting with k than having the k as 3rd letter, just because the fist option is easier to recall)
Confirmation Bias
We tend to sharpen ideas that meet our own and level the ones that goes against.
Representativeness heuristics
Judging a situation based on how similar the prospects are to the prototypes the person holds in his or her mind. This is the Linda example from Tversky and Kahneman, the probability that she is a bak teller o feminist bank teller - people tend to say the second because her description would fit a feminist, but they disregard how many more bank tellers exist than feminist bank tellers - they didn’t pay attention to the statistics.
Desirable difficulties
You memorize better and for longer term when there is some kind of effort involved.
It refers to a set of manipulations that all have the property that they create challenges, a sense of difficulty, during the acquisition process.
e.g So therein the conditions of learning or practice examples, rather than keeping them constant and predictable, reducing using tests rather than presentations as learning, interleaving the separate things to be learned
rather than blocking practice on each at a time—there’s a whole set of these that.
If it’s too easy, it’s wrong
Strategies you can use to create desirable difficulties:
- Retrieval
- Spacing
- Interleaving: study different topics, switch between them
Getting fooled by the power of fluency
People prefer things that are easy to think about than the ones that aren’t.
When we think we are understanding everything just by reading and listening, but a few moments later we cannot rebuilt the process of thinking described.
What happens when you re-read something many times? For example the paper you wrote?
It creates a sense of fluency that isn’t there. The more you read the more natural it starts to sound, and it may not be the case for someone that is reading it for the first time.
