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wzwy's review
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Full of insights on learning. It’s definitely the best book you can find that gives scientifically-backed advice on learning.
forgottensecret's review
5.0
'Learning is deeper and more durable when it's effortful. Learning that's easy is like writing in the sand, here today and gone tomorrow.'
This review is going to be concerned with how you should alter the way you read biographies based on the principles of the science of learning. Based on the science of learning, how might one do that?
Firstly, 'Empirical research into how we learn and remember shows that much of what we take for gospel about how to learn turns out to be lastly wasted effort'. Let's begin there. Disregard previous methods, any notions of how to read a book should be seen as ineffective as painkillers for curing the blind. By learning, the authors mean: 'we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.' Thankfully, learning is a bit like swimming or bicycle riding, it 'is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.' Really prime yourself by seeing that the act of real life learning is contrary to what you knew before, and that it has a great deal of analogue to strenuous workouts. If you lifted 2 cans of Heinz baked beans or 2 cans of Coca Cola, and say you did that for 11 years, would you expect to see much change? No! Because it isn't the right amount of effort, it is far too easy. Similarly, with learning the mind has a similar signal to tell you that you're actually reading Teddy Roosevelt's biography correctly: it should feel effortful, as that 'is deeper and more durable'. In fact, like a person who blamed the thunder God for thunder, 'We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we're not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn't feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.' This whole book is about seeking out the uncomfortable, about viewing that signal of effort as a revelation, as the body's way of saying that this is how we fuse this into your long term memory, like a dentist who drills in a new tooth. 'When you space out practice.. retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning enables more versatile application of it in later settings.' One thing that is recurrent in my study of the science of learning is the idea of prior knowledge. Prior knowledge is the glue, the attractive force, the lorry that loads information from short term memory to long term memory. If you can imagine information as passengers at an airport, long term memory is the plane that gets you to where you want to go. A better analogy is the idea of a supermarket like Tesco or Walmart: there are thousands of items waiting in your LTM, like the items in a supermarket, categorised already. As a reader of Teddy Roosevelt, say, when you find out his mother and wife died on the same day: it is up to you to go into that Walmart and activate prior knowledge by asking who else do I know who lost a wife or a girlfriend? Who else has experienced heartbreak? Have I lost anyone close to me?
Does this remind me of any other US Presidents or men? Is this a surprising fact? How can I apply this to my life? What are the consequences of this? What have I dealt with similar in my own experience or those closest to me? Does this change a person, do I have an example of it changing a person? Are there movies or other books which explore heartbreak? So in all this, you are looking to link it to as many pieces of prior knowledge as possible, so that there are possible retrieval cues or roads to that same bit of information. Your mind should be like a city, with many different roads leading to the same destination. So, that you can tell a person that this shop is located 'East of...', 'North of...', 'Just down the road from...'. Another way to think about how the mind should be organised is that it's that you could publicise in a classroom all the connections you've made. It isn't arbitrary how you store information. It can be truly organised hierarchically, and connected and connected to other categories, other schemata.
Returning to MIS, it states: 'All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge... To learn trigonometry, you need to remember your algebra and geometry.' The question that naturally emerges, is there a limit? 'If you're just engaging in mechanical repetition, it's true, you quickly hit the limit of what you can keep in mind. However, if you practice elaboration, there's no known limit to how much you can learn. Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.' The authors go on to give examples:
'Evaporation has a cooling effect: you know this because a humid day at your uncle's in Atlanta feels hotter than a dry one at your cousin's in Phoenix, where your sweat disappears even before you skin feels damp. When you study the principles of heat transfer, you understand conduction from warming your hands around a hot cup of cocoa'.
We can take this further for reading about Teddy, 'Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example the more of the unfolding story of history you know the more of it you can learn. And the more ways you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to your understanding of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the better the story stays with you.' For maths, 'Likewise, if you're trying to learn an abstraction, like the principle of angular momentum, it's easier when you ground it in something concrete that you already know, like the way a figure skater's rotation speeds up as she draws her arms to her chest.'
For complex mastery: 'People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organise them into a mental model and connect thatmodel to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.'
With regards to saying reading the biography of Napoleon, what you should do is imagine an A4 piece of paper (mental model), organise the main points in that of Napoleon's life then imagine connecting that to the pieces of relevant prior knowledge in the Walmart like store of prior knowledge. To miss out that part of prior knowledge is to miss out on the glue, it's to put the Napoleon information in an empty parking spot far from Walmart, totally neglecting the utility of the thousands of things stored there. To connect to things is another way of saying that you are including more meaning.
So, when reading, head toward the pain, that is the signal you are searching for. Despite the overwhelming evidence of active retrieval, it is our own Judgement of Learning (JOL) which impedes us. We intuitively think that AR is hard, so it can't be working so we opt for massed practice or rereading, as it gives the illusion of knowing, of familiarity. The ease of performance in that moment doesn't correspond to deep learning. This is an example of poor metacognition. Just because something is 'a paragon of clarity', 'their fluency gives them the false sense that they're in possession of the underlying content.'
Retrieving learning has two profound benefits: 'One, it tells you what you know and don't know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens it connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future.' This is backed up by much evidence: 'The students average A- on the material that was quizzed and C+ on the material was not quizzed but reviewed.'
I would argue though that retrieval learning should be done directly in the way that you would retrieve it as Scott Young writes about it. So say you only want to remember that Napoleon was Corsican, then retrieve only that information. But if you want to remember that he was Corsican, sent love letters to Josephine, was a voracious leader, greatest battle was at Austerlitz etc, then you should organise that information, compress it and retrieve all of it. Additionally, you should treat each fact as its own tree, branching off to pieces of prior knowledge, like a map which has many adjacent cities.
As hopefully a future educator, the school system has to be reformed: 'For the most part we are going about learning in the wrong ways, and we are giving poor advice to those who are coming up behind us.' Instead 'learning is an iterative process that requires that you revist what you have learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with new knowledge'. So, when you are reading a new biography on Teddy, you have to look for the patterns, the ways that Napoleon and he contrast, how they are similar to other leaders. How are their countries different or their styles? Again, in your mind you should be guided by the idea of your mind being as dense as Tokyo. This is the aim with countless schemata activated.
Another strategy is reflection: 'Reflection can involve several cognitive activiteis that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualising and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.' This is illustrated through the story of a surgeon Ebbersold who described his process of reflection. He also noted that to 'make sure new learning is available when it's needed... you memorise the list of things that you need to worry about in a given situation (all the things you want to know about Teddy Roosevelt): steps A,B, C, and D, and you drill on them. Then there comes a time when you get into a tight situation and it's no longer a matter of thinking through the steps, it's a matter of reflexively taking the correct action. "Unless you keep recalling this maneuver, it will not become a reflex. Like a race car driver in a tight situation or a quarterback dodging a tackle you've got to act out of reflex before you've even had time to think. Recalling it over and over, practicing it over and over. That's just so important.'
I would caution though that just retrieval that isn't broad it pointless. It's analogous to recalling manger - to eat in French rather than a whole sentence which uses the verb. The sentence is directly how you want to remember it, as a bigger chunk. Similarly, always retrieve many steps (a bigger chunk), as it is that sort of mind you seek.
One example of retrieval is after reading a passage on slavery, to write down ten facts about it that you didn't know before reading.
To summarise retrieval: 'Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We're easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it's easier, but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work learning sticks better... Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily.' So, retrieve the biographies of Frederick Douglass and Napoleon often, knowing that if it is effortful that is just fantastic news. And also take pleasure in that most people will shirk from doing the effortful, and view that as a signal to stop. Be different in that way.
I've briefly mentioned that you need to retrieve many elements together. This is what is called conceptual knowledge: 'Conceptual knowledge requires an understanding of the interrelationships of the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together.' Like the 206 bones of the human body. You must 'practice like you play and you will play like you practice.' Do you always have to think of old books to recall them? YES. 'The underlying idea is simply that the better your mastery, the less frequent the practice, but if it's important to retain, it will never disappear completely from your set of practice boxes.'
A lot of the techniques that are talked about: spaced repetition, active retrieval, interleaving, elaboration, etc are all forms of desirable difficulties which are 'short-term impediments that make for stronger learning.
How Learning Occurs is a section to explain why difficulties can be desirable:
Encoding, Consolidation and Retrieval.
In encoding, we convert sensory perceptions into meaningful representations in the ain, which are called memory traces. These can be thought of as notes jotted or sketched on the scratchpad of short term memory. Consolidation is the 'process of strengthening those mental representations for LTM.' In consolidation the brain reorganises and stabilises the traces. The time this can take can range from hours or longer. This is the stage where give it meaning. To give it meaning, the brain fills in blank spots, 'making connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Prior knowledge is a prerequisite for making sense of new learning, and forming those connections is an important task of consolidation.' So in the 3 step system for how learning occurs, how we create durable memories in stage 2 it is a non-negotiable requirement to active the Walmart of prior knowledge. For the final stage of learning, in retrieval: 'Durable, robust learning requires that we do two things. First, as we recode and consolidate new material from STM into LTM, we must anchor it there securely. Second, we must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later. Having effective retrieval cues is an aspect of learning that often goes overlooked. The task is more than committing knowledge to memory. Being able to retrieve it when we need it is just as important.'
Is there a limit to learning history? 'There's virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know. In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning' The number and vividness of the cues is important. Knowledge itself isn't forgotten but rather 'the cues that enable you to find and retrieve it' are.
Mental models are formed by repeated effortful recall, which can be the set of interrelated ideas.
I will end with a good analogy of memory and a few other things which I will include as a post:
This review is going to be concerned with how you should alter the way you read biographies based on the principles of the science of learning. Based on the science of learning, how might one do that?
Firstly, 'Empirical research into how we learn and remember shows that much of what we take for gospel about how to learn turns out to be lastly wasted effort'. Let's begin there. Disregard previous methods, any notions of how to read a book should be seen as ineffective as painkillers for curing the blind. By learning, the authors mean: 'we mean acquiring knowledge and skills and having them readily available from memory so you can make sense of future problems and opportunities.' Thankfully, learning is a bit like swimming or bicycle riding, it 'is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive.' Really prime yourself by seeing that the act of real life learning is contrary to what you knew before, and that it has a great deal of analogue to strenuous workouts. If you lifted 2 cans of Heinz baked beans or 2 cans of Coca Cola, and say you did that for 11 years, would you expect to see much change? No! Because it isn't the right amount of effort, it is far too easy. Similarly, with learning the mind has a similar signal to tell you that you're actually reading Teddy Roosevelt's biography correctly: it should feel effortful, as that 'is deeper and more durable'. In fact, like a person who blamed the thunder God for thunder, 'We are poor judges of when we are learning well and when we're not. When the going is harder and slower and it doesn't feel productive, we are drawn to strategies that feel more fruitful, unaware that the gains from these strategies are often temporary.' This whole book is about seeking out the uncomfortable, about viewing that signal of effort as a revelation, as the body's way of saying that this is how we fuse this into your long term memory, like a dentist who drills in a new tooth. 'When you space out practice.. retrieval is harder and feels less productive, but the effort produces longer lasting learning enables more versatile application of it in later settings.' One thing that is recurrent in my study of the science of learning is the idea of prior knowledge. Prior knowledge is the glue, the attractive force, the lorry that loads information from short term memory to long term memory. If you can imagine information as passengers at an airport, long term memory is the plane that gets you to where you want to go. A better analogy is the idea of a supermarket like Tesco or Walmart: there are thousands of items waiting in your LTM, like the items in a supermarket, categorised already. As a reader of Teddy Roosevelt, say, when you find out his mother and wife died on the same day: it is up to you to go into that Walmart and activate prior knowledge by asking who else do I know who lost a wife or a girlfriend? Who else has experienced heartbreak? Have I lost anyone close to me?
Does this remind me of any other US Presidents or men? Is this a surprising fact? How can I apply this to my life? What are the consequences of this? What have I dealt with similar in my own experience or those closest to me? Does this change a person, do I have an example of it changing a person? Are there movies or other books which explore heartbreak? So in all this, you are looking to link it to as many pieces of prior knowledge as possible, so that there are possible retrieval cues or roads to that same bit of information. Your mind should be like a city, with many different roads leading to the same destination. So, that you can tell a person that this shop is located 'East of...', 'North of...', 'Just down the road from...'. Another way to think about how the mind should be organised is that it's that you could publicise in a classroom all the connections you've made. It isn't arbitrary how you store information. It can be truly organised hierarchically, and connected and connected to other categories, other schemata.
Returning to MIS, it states: 'All new learning requires a foundation of prior knowledge... To learn trigonometry, you need to remember your algebra and geometry.' The question that naturally emerges, is there a limit? 'If you're just engaging in mechanical repetition, it's true, you quickly hit the limit of what you can keep in mind. However, if you practice elaboration, there's no known limit to how much you can learn. Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.' The authors go on to give examples:
'Evaporation has a cooling effect: you know this because a humid day at your uncle's in Atlanta feels hotter than a dry one at your cousin's in Phoenix, where your sweat disappears even before you skin feels damp. When you study the principles of heat transfer, you understand conduction from warming your hands around a hot cup of cocoa'.
We can take this further for reading about Teddy, 'Putting new knowledge into a larger context helps learning. For example the more of the unfolding story of history you know the more of it you can learn. And the more ways you give that story meaning, say by connecting it to your understanding of human ambition and the untidiness of fate, the better the story stays with you.' For maths, 'Likewise, if you're trying to learn an abstraction, like the principle of angular momentum, it's easier when you ground it in something concrete that you already know, like the way a figure skater's rotation speeds up as she draws her arms to her chest.'
For complex mastery: 'People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organise them into a mental model and connect thatmodel to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.'
With regards to saying reading the biography of Napoleon, what you should do is imagine an A4 piece of paper (mental model), organise the main points in that of Napoleon's life then imagine connecting that to the pieces of relevant prior knowledge in the Walmart like store of prior knowledge. To miss out that part of prior knowledge is to miss out on the glue, it's to put the Napoleon information in an empty parking spot far from Walmart, totally neglecting the utility of the thousands of things stored there. To connect to things is another way of saying that you are including more meaning.
So, when reading, head toward the pain, that is the signal you are searching for. Despite the overwhelming evidence of active retrieval, it is our own Judgement of Learning (JOL) which impedes us. We intuitively think that AR is hard, so it can't be working so we opt for massed practice or rereading, as it gives the illusion of knowing, of familiarity. The ease of performance in that moment doesn't correspond to deep learning. This is an example of poor metacognition. Just because something is 'a paragon of clarity', 'their fluency gives them the false sense that they're in possession of the underlying content.'
Retrieving learning has two profound benefits: 'One, it tells you what you know and don't know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you’re weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens it connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future.' This is backed up by much evidence: 'The students average A- on the material that was quizzed and C+ on the material was not quizzed but reviewed.'
I would argue though that retrieval learning should be done directly in the way that you would retrieve it as Scott Young writes about it. So say you only want to remember that Napoleon was Corsican, then retrieve only that information. But if you want to remember that he was Corsican, sent love letters to Josephine, was a voracious leader, greatest battle was at Austerlitz etc, then you should organise that information, compress it and retrieve all of it. Additionally, you should treat each fact as its own tree, branching off to pieces of prior knowledge, like a map which has many adjacent cities.
As hopefully a future educator, the school system has to be reformed: 'For the most part we are going about learning in the wrong ways, and we are giving poor advice to those who are coming up behind us.' Instead 'learning is an iterative process that requires that you revist what you have learned earlier and continually update it and connect it with new knowledge'. So, when you are reading a new biography on Teddy, you have to look for the patterns, the ways that Napoleon and he contrast, how they are similar to other leaders. How are their countries different or their styles? Again, in your mind you should be guided by the idea of your mind being as dense as Tokyo. This is the aim with countless schemata activated.
Another strategy is reflection: 'Reflection can involve several cognitive activiteis that lead to stronger learning: retrieving knowledge and earlier training from memory, connecting these to new experiences, and visualising and mentally rehearsing what you might do differently next time.' This is illustrated through the story of a surgeon Ebbersold who described his process of reflection. He also noted that to 'make sure new learning is available when it's needed... you memorise the list of things that you need to worry about in a given situation (all the things you want to know about Teddy Roosevelt): steps A,B, C, and D, and you drill on them. Then there comes a time when you get into a tight situation and it's no longer a matter of thinking through the steps, it's a matter of reflexively taking the correct action. "Unless you keep recalling this maneuver, it will not become a reflex. Like a race car driver in a tight situation or a quarterback dodging a tackle you've got to act out of reflex before you've even had time to think. Recalling it over and over, practicing it over and over. That's just so important.'
I would caution though that just retrieval that isn't broad it pointless. It's analogous to recalling manger - to eat in French rather than a whole sentence which uses the verb. The sentence is directly how you want to remember it, as a bigger chunk. Similarly, always retrieve many steps (a bigger chunk), as it is that sort of mind you seek.
One example of retrieval is after reading a passage on slavery, to write down ten facts about it that you didn't know before reading.
To summarise retrieval: 'Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We're easily seduced into believing that learning is better when it's easier, but the research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work learning sticks better... Repeated retrieval not only makes memories more durable but produces knowledge that can be retrieved more readily.' So, retrieve the biographies of Frederick Douglass and Napoleon often, knowing that if it is effortful that is just fantastic news. And also take pleasure in that most people will shirk from doing the effortful, and view that as a signal to stop. Be different in that way.
I've briefly mentioned that you need to retrieve many elements together. This is what is called conceptual knowledge: 'Conceptual knowledge requires an understanding of the interrelationships of the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together.' Like the 206 bones of the human body. You must 'practice like you play and you will play like you practice.' Do you always have to think of old books to recall them? YES. 'The underlying idea is simply that the better your mastery, the less frequent the practice, but if it's important to retain, it will never disappear completely from your set of practice boxes.'
A lot of the techniques that are talked about: spaced repetition, active retrieval, interleaving, elaboration, etc are all forms of desirable difficulties which are 'short-term impediments that make for stronger learning.
How Learning Occurs is a section to explain why difficulties can be desirable:
Encoding, Consolidation and Retrieval.
In encoding, we convert sensory perceptions into meaningful representations in the ain, which are called memory traces. These can be thought of as notes jotted or sketched on the scratchpad of short term memory. Consolidation is the 'process of strengthening those mental representations for LTM.' In consolidation the brain reorganises and stabilises the traces. The time this can take can range from hours or longer. This is the stage where give it meaning. To give it meaning, the brain fills in blank spots, 'making connections to past experiences and to other knowledge already stored in long-term memory. Prior knowledge is a prerequisite for making sense of new learning, and forming those connections is an important task of consolidation.' So in the 3 step system for how learning occurs, how we create durable memories in stage 2 it is a non-negotiable requirement to active the Walmart of prior knowledge. For the final stage of learning, in retrieval: 'Durable, robust learning requires that we do two things. First, as we recode and consolidate new material from STM into LTM, we must anchor it there securely. Second, we must associate the material with a diverse set of cues that will make us adept at recalling the knowledge later. Having effective retrieval cues is an aspect of learning that often goes overlooked. The task is more than committing knowledge to memory. Being able to retrieve it when we need it is just as important.'
Is there a limit to learning history? 'There's virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know. In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning' The number and vividness of the cues is important. Knowledge itself isn't forgotten but rather 'the cues that enable you to find and retrieve it' are.
Mental models are formed by repeated effortful recall, which can be the set of interrelated ideas.
I will end with a good analogy of memory and a few other things which I will include as a post:
tealedfleet's review
4.0
An important book, I feel. Something that I really could have used when starting university (or even high school). I never learned how to learn, and this book delivers some key insights based on cognitive & educational psychology that can be broadly applicable to your life.
Don't go looking in this book for concrete practical tips, however - the content is very general out of neccessity of learning different topics. I do wish there were some more guidelines on how to translate the findings to concrete and handy study methods that we can develop for ourselves.
Don't go looking in this book for concrete practical tips, however - the content is very general out of neccessity of learning different topics. I do wish there were some more guidelines on how to translate the findings to concrete and handy study methods that we can develop for ourselves.
xabij's review
3.0
I already knew most of what was written, so it wasn't that helpful for me. But I can imagine it'd be very helpful for people who are new to the science behind learning.