Ultralearning Flashcards
What is a ‘meta-skill’ (refer to the example of public speaking)?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
“Public speaking is a metaskill,” he feels. It’s the kind of skill that assists with other skills: “confidence, storytelling, writing, creativity, interviewing skills, selling skills. It touches on so many different things.”
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Explain the prefix ‘meta’
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
The prefix meta comes from the Greek term μετά, meaning “beyond.” It typically signifies when something is “about” itself or deals with a higher layer of abstraction. In this case metalearning means learning about learning.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is ‘metalearning’?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
“Learning how knowledge within a discipline is structured and acquired ; in other words, learning how to learn it.”
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What metaphor does Young employ to explain metalearning?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Being able to see how a subject works, what kinds of skills and information must be mastered, and what methods are available to do so more effectively is at the heart of success of all ultralearning projects. Metalearning thus forms the map, showing you how to get to your destination without getting lost.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What do studies show about language learning? (It helps with m…l……c a……..)
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
“… those who also took Spanish classes ended up doing better when they later needed to learn French. The reason seems to be that taking classes assists with helping form what the study authors call metalinguistic awareness in a way that simply knowing a language informally does not.”
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Who is the ‘godfather of flow’ and how do you pronounce his name?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
The “Godfather” of Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Me-High Chick-Sent-Me-High). Csikszentmihalyi, is a Hungarian born psychology professor who moved to the United States when he was in his 20’s.
His early studies focused on happiness and creativity. It was through these studies thatCsikszentmihalyi started to look into what he would term Flow, the state of being where one’s performance was heightened and one really starts to come alive. Csikszentmihalyi defined flow as “being so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The ego falls away. Time Flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”
(A mother chicken explaining where she is and how she got there.)
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is ‘the Holy Grail of Education’?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
TRANSFER: EDUCATION’S DIRTY SECRET
Transfer has been called the “Holy Grail of education.” It happens when you learn something in one context, say in a classroom, and are able to use it in another context, say in real life. Although this may sound technical, transfer really embodies something we expect of almost all learning efforts—that we’ll be able to use something we study in one situation and apply it to a new situation. Anything less than this is hard to describe as learning at all.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What ‘scandal’ in education does a well known psychologist write about? (Clue: should be called non-……. .. …….. )
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
The psychologist Robert Haskell has said in his excellent coverage of the vast literature on transfer in learning, “Despite the importance of transfer of learning, research findings over the past nine decades clearly show that as individuals, and as educational institutions, we have failed to achieve transfer of learning on any significant level.” He later added, “Without exaggeration, it’s an education scandal.”
The situation is even more disturbing than it sounds. Haskell pointed out, “We expect that there will be transfer of learning, for example, from a high school course in introductory psychology to a college-level introduction to psychology course. It has been known for years, however, that students who enter college having taken a high school psychology course do no better than students who didn’t take psychology in high school. Some students who have taken a psychology course in high school do even worse in the college course.” In another study, college graduates were asked questions about economic issues and no difference in performance was found between those who had taken an economics class and those who had not.
(This sounds like it’s linked to the ‘knowing / doing’ gap. )
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is the problem with ‘brain training’ and its analogies and who first worked this out?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
The recognition of the failure of general transfer has a history as long as the study of the problem itself. The first attack on the problem came from the psychologists Edward Thorndike and Robert Woodworth in 1901, with their seminal paper “The Influence of Improvement in One Mental Function upon the Efficiency of Other Functions.” In it, they attacked the dominant theory of education at the time, so-called formal discipline theory. This theory suggested that the brain was analogous to a muscle, containing fairly general capacities of memory, attention, and reasoning, and that training those muscles, irrespective of the content, could result in general improvement. This was the predominant theory behind universal instruction in Latin and geometry, on the idea that it would help students think better. Thorndike was able to refute this idea by showing that the ability to transfer was much narrower than most people had assumed.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
My thoughts on the ‘failure of general transfer’?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Find contexts to use your knowledge that are close to the domain you are learning about - activate your knowledge by removing it from the context of the learning itself. If you just study flashcards about WW1 you will improve the skill of answering flashcards - you must take that learning into a new context (conversation / essay / daily work).
But learning that is very close WILL directly transfer - learning about flying a plane through using a simulator WILL help you to fly a plane.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is a ‘rate-determining step’?
How do we approach them?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
A ‘prerequisite’ for being able to quickly learn material (like times tables in maths). You can learn them through drills.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
How do you resolve the tension between working memory overload ‘practising direct skill’ necessity and isolating components to improve?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Alternate - identify necessary components for drill by practising direct skill. Then go back to direct skill and repeat.
This feels like a better model for self-study where you have strong motivation and are not trying to take a whole class along with you.
The Direct Instruction model does raise a serious question about transfer of knowledge, however: how frequently should we practise skill when using direct instruction approach.?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What does Karpicke show about our JOLs?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Our ‘judgements of learning’ are not a good guide to long term learning because we ‘feel’ like we’re mastering material if we passively review it (as opposed to retrieval practice). ‘Illusion of knowing’.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is Bjork’s hierarchy of desirable difficulty?
F… ……
C… …..
Re……. te…
(Which is this..?)
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Free recall - best
Cued recall (clues or questions) - better than recognition tests (MC)
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What do K and DN argue about feedback in their metastudy?
Ego..?
Processing..?
Giver..?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Kluger and DeNisi (1996)
If it’s focused on ego - laziness or effort - it has a negative impact (including praise!).
It needs to be correctly processed - used constructively - not just recorded.
The giver of feedback is important.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is the problem with ‘outcome feedback’? (Not just outcomes like school work)
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Like applause or sales figures, it’s highly unspecific and hard to use.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is ‘informational feedback’?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
It tells you what you are doing wrong, but not how to fix it.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is corrective feedback?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
The best kind - it tells you what you’re doing wrong and how to fix it.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What do K and K point out about feedback timing? (Clue: 🕊️👅)
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Kulik and Kulik point out that immediate feedback is best - classroom quizzes are better than waiting days for marking.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What factor should teachers pay close attention to when managing feedback? (M)
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Motivation - it can kill usefulness
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What is meta feedback?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Tracing your success with learning strategies - examining test scores, considering test criteria and assessment objectives - and using this information to plan your next step
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What are the three dominant ‘theories of forgetting’?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Over the intervening years, psychologists have identified at least three dominant theories to help explain why our brains forget much of what we initially learn: decay, interference, and forgotten cues.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Explain the ‘decay’ theory of forgetting.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Decay: Forgetting with Time The first theory of forgetting is that memories simply decay with time. This idea does seem to match common sense. We remember events, news, and things learned in the past week much more clearly than things from last month. Things learned this year are recalled with much greater accuracy than events from a decade ago. By this understanding, forgetting is simply an inevitable erosion by time. Like sands in an hourglass, our memories inexorably slip away from us as we become more distant from them.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Explain the ‘interference’ theory of forgetting. Two types called..?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Interference: Overwriting Old Memories with New Ones Interference suggests a different idea: that our memories, unlike the files of a computer, overlap one another in how they are stored in the brain. In this way, memories that are similar but distinct can compete with one another.
There are at least two flavors of this: proactive interference and retroactive interference. Proactive interference occurs when previously learned information makes acquiring new knowledge harder. Think of this as if the “space” where that information wants to be stored is already occupied, so forming the new memory becomes harder.
Retroactive interference is the opposite—where learning something new “erases” or suppresses an old memory. Anyone who has learned Spanish and later tried to learn French knows how tricky retroactive interference can be, as French words pop out when you want to speak Spanish again.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Explain the ‘forgotten cues’ theory of forgetting.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Forgotten Cues: A Locked Box with No Key The third theory of forgetting says that many memories we have aren’t actually forgotten but simply inaccessible. The idea here is that in order to say that one has remembered something, it needs to be retrieved from memory. Since we aren’t constantly experiencing the entirety of our long-term memories simultaneously, this means there must be some process for dredging up the information, given an appropriate cue.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Explain ‘spacing’
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Memory Mechanism 1—Spacing: Repeat to Remember One of the pieces of studying advice that is best supported by research is that if you care about long-term retention, don’t cram. Spreading learning sessions over more intervals over longer periods of time tends to cause somewhat lower performance in the short run (because there is a chance for forgetting between intervals) but much better performance in the long run.
Note: different from interleaving
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Explain ‘proceduralisation’
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Memory Mechanism 2—Proceduralization: Automatic Will Endure Why do people say it’s “like riding a bicycle” and not “like remembering trigonometry?” This common expression may be rooted in deeper neurological realities than it first appears. There’s evidence that procedural skills, such as riding a bicycle, are stored in a different way from declarative knowledge, such as knowing the Pythagorean Theorem or the Sine Rule for triangles. This difference between knowing how and knowing that may also have different implications for long-term memory. Procedural skills, such as the ever-remembered bicycling, are much less susceptible to being forgotten than knowledge that requires explicit recall to retrieve.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Explain ‘overlearning’
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Memory Mechanism 3—Overlearning: Practice Beyond Perfect Overlearning is a well-studied psychological phenomenon that’s fairly easy to understand: additional practice, beyond what is required to perform adequately, can increase the length of time that memories are stored. The typical experimental setup is to give subjects a task, such as assembling a rifle or going through an emergency checklist, allowing them enough time to practice that they can do it correctly once. The time from zero to this point is considered the “learning” phase. Next, allow the subjects different amounts of “overlearning,” or practice that continues after the first correct application. Since subjects are already doing the skill correctly, performance doesn’t improve past this point. However, the overlearning can extend the durability of the skill.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is the speed issue with mnemonics?
(Clue foreign language context)
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Knowing a mnemonic for a foreign-language word is better than failing to remember it entirely, but it’s still too slow to allow you to fluently form sentences out of mnemonically remembered words. Thus mnemonics can act as a bridge for difficult-to-remember information, but it’s usually not the final step in creating memories that will endure forever. Mnemonics, therefore, are an incredibly powerful if somewhat brittle tool.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
How many ‘mental chunks’ do we need to be an expert?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Psychologists theorize that the difference between grand masters and novices is not that grand masters can compute many more moves ahead but that they have built up huge libraries of mental representations that come from playing actual games. Researchers have estimated that having around 50,000 of these mental “chunks” stored in long-term memory is necessary to reach expert status. These representations allow them to take a complex chess setup and reduce it to a few key patterns that can be worked with intuitively. Beginners, who lack this ability, have to resort to representing each piece as a single unit and are therefore much slower.*
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What was the ‘deep processing’ memory experiment? Who and when?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Half were asked to notice whether or not the words contained the letter e, a relatively shallow level of processing, while the others were asked if the word was pleasant or not, a deeper processing of the meaning of the word, not merely its spelling. The result was that motivation played no difference; telling students to study for a test didn’t impact how much they retained. However, the orienting technique did make a large difference. Those who processed the words deeply remembered almost twice as much as those who simply scanned their spelling.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Why can copying be beneficial?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
In attempting to emulate or copy an example you appreciate, you must deconstruct it to understand why it works. This can often highlight things that the other person does exceptionally well that weren’t obvious from the beginning. It may also dispel illusions you may have had about an aspect of the work you thought was important but upon emulating the other person’s work you realize was not.
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
What is ‘meta-learning’?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
Metalearning. Have I done research into what are the typical ways of learning this subject or skill? Have I interviewed successful learners to see what resources and advice they can recommend? Have I spent about 10 percent of the total time on preparing my project?
Ultralearning - Scott H Young
