Week 2 Flashcards
What is chunks and chunking?
Chunks are compact packages of information that your mind can easily access.
Chunking is the mental leap that helps
you unite bits of information together
through meaning.
Creating a chunk involves three steps, which are they?
- Focus your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk
- Understand the basic idea you’re trying to chunk
- Gaining context
Why is it important to have focused attention on what we try to learn?
When you first begin to learn something, you’re making new neural patterns and connecting them with preexisting patterns
that are spread through many areas of the brain.
Learning something new takes a lot of effort and it is recommended to have all working memory capacity dedicated to it.
Can you create a chunk if you don’t understand what you are chunking?
Yes, but it’s often a useless chunk that won’t fit in with, or relate to other material of your learning.
Learning takes place in two ways, which?
- A bottom-up chunking process
- A top-down big picture process
What is a better, more simple, alternative to re-reading material for better learning?
Recall
After you’ve read the material, simply look away and see what you can recall from the material you’ve just read.
Why is concept-mapping (drawing connections and relationships between the concepts you try to learn) not a really good learning technique?
If you’re trying to build connections between chunks before the basic chunks are embedded in the brain, it doesn’t work as well.
It’s like trying to learn advanced strategy in chess before you even understand the basic concepts of how the pieces move.
Rereading can be good in some occations. When is it useful?
Rereading text seems to be effective if you let time pass between the readings, so that it becomes more of an exercise in spaced repetition.
What is one of the most common “illusions of competence”?
Merely glancing at a given solution and thinking you truly know it yourself.
You must have the information persisting in your memory if you’re to master the material well enough to do well on tests and to think creatively with it.
How can we make sure that we are not fooled into an illusion of competence?
By testing ourselves on what we want to learn.
Describe the idea of transfer of chunks
When you grasp one chunk, you’ll find that that chunk can be related in surprising ways to similar chunks, not only
in that field, but also in very different fields.
What is the law of serendipity?
Luck favors the one who tries
What is overlearning?
Continuing to study or practice after you’ve mastered what you can in one session is called overlearning.
When can overlearning be useful?
Overlearning can help produce an automaticity that can be important when there is a risk of choking.
For example when executing a serve in tennis, playing a perfect piano concerto or performing a speech in front of an audience.
To avoid overlearning, we can perform deliberate practice.
Describe deliberate practice.
Repeating something you already know perfectly well is easy and can bring the illusion of competence that you’ve mastered the full range of material, when you’ve actually only mastered the easy stuff.
Instead, you want to balance your studies by deliberately focusing on what you find more difficult.
