There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education".
This post is interesting, but it reads like a layperson (from a teaching point of view) coming up with some fairly good theories of learning (of which there are quite a few) and discussing how applying them makes concrete differences in knowledge acquisition.
If I was to make a guess, I'd say that the 'effortful' component the author discusses is most aligned with something commonly called the "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them. A silly but apt example would be watching a youtube video on solving a rubik's cube, then having to transform the state of a real rubik's cube using your new knowledge.
This idea, and related ones, continue to be discussed at length by those who develop curriculum for educational institutions, and at a more meta-level, those who develop lessons for students who will later write a curriculum! I see a few links in sibling comments to Aviation learning, Youtube, PBS, but not to documents produced by any university on theory of learning. Perhaps they need to better link their work for smart hn readers to find.
You mean Education Science? I'm currently studying it (besides my day job), probably writing my bachelor's thesis next semester.
Unfortunately, in my experience there are several shortcomings of the field (or at least typical bachelor's master's programs outside teachers's preparation, which is separate in Germany).
They love to talk about interdisciplinarity, and will even call out neuroscience and psychology often. In practice, it's mostly a social sciences field, and as such has been taken over by constructivism. Now, while learning is obviously (IMO) a constructive activity, they will "explain" everything with "handwave... social construction... handwave", while dismissing e.g. neuroscience aspects as "not a learning theory" and thus not worthy of discussion.
The statistical sophistication is very, very low. It's not all linear regression, but mostly, and even when it isn't there is no (even implicit) discussion of causality, just adding all variables (what McElreath calls "causal salad).
I do my PhD in management as part of organization studies, I know some good folk doing education. So don't be too disappointed in the beginning, it might be just your profs, or your uni. Just search quickly with Google Scholar, and there is this Fischer et al. (2010) that looks like a good summary responding to your comment. If my impression from my colleagues is correct, UK seems to be a good place for grad school in education. Just from an epistemological standpoint there is Mahadevan (2020) and Romani et al. (2018) where you can see where the field is going.
Fischer, K. W., Goswami, U., Geake, J., & Task Force on the Future of Educational Neuroscience. (2010). The future of educational neuroscience. Mind, Brain, and Education, 4(2), 68-80.
Mahadevan, J. (2020). Ethnographic studies in international human resource management: Types and usefulness. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(2), 228-251.
Romani, L., Barmeyer, C., Primecz, H., & Pilhofer, K. (2018). Cross-cultural management studies: state of the field in the four research paradigms. International Studies of Management & Organization, 48(3), 247-263.
I agree with most of everything you have said. That is common in many places, but exceptions are also regular enough to give good hope, and moreso in the post-graduate arena from what I have seen. Most of the people I know in this field work on or with theories that are more socio- than neuro-, but the balance is different at each institution.
Fortunately I see some very high quality and rigorous research techniques applied (with much less handwaving away of neuroscience) among my friends, but I don't need to look far for contrast. I don't work directly in this area, but am present for the pub discussions as it were.
However, I would say that statistical sophistication often seems to rely on the happenstance of cross-domain expertise. People only have so much time, knowledge, etc -- just the usual faults of humanity and organisations.
Check out programs and communities of practice in the field of “learning engineering.” Strong attention to controlled experiments, data mining, human-centered design, among other things. Carnegie Mellon is one center.
Education is one area where individual departments vary wildly across the US.
Some programs have really embraced neuroscience etc, but there’s minimal incentives for schools to keep up to date. Teachers going back for a masters don’t actually need anything more than a degree in hand to get a higher wage at their existing job. Which then feeds back into how these programs are setup and managed.
I guess you're studying "Erziehungswissenschaften"? You might find that educational psychology ("Pädagogische Psychologie") has a lot of the depth you would expect. One nice example is cognitive load theory.
One of the more complex mathematical treatments of learning are "knowledge and learning spaces". But it seems they get bogged down a lot in implementation details (= conflating implementation with interface behaviour). And: It's a bit to simplistic. For example, talking about things like the "expertise reversal effect" in this framework is not straightforward.
There's a free course in Coursera called "Learning How to Learn" and it radically changed how I view learning and education in general. I wish I knew about this when I was a teen.
If I take a valuable nugget of information about it, is that real learning comes through experience: using the information, recalling it fron memory and manipulating it in some way. This goes from just writing what you hear to a personal project. Anything behavioral, more than just receiving and thinking, helps to actually learn.
With no qualifications at all, I occasionally fantasize about starting my own school. One of the rules of my imaginary school is that a full 33% of the time, K through 12, is to be spent on meta-cognition. Not simply “study habits”. Mindfulness, physical education, anything that helps bring focus and motivation counts.
I find it crazy that the educational system expects children to develop in this axis on their own almost entirely because they are simply expected to do so. I went to well-regarded schools and it’s generous to say they put a minimal amount of effort into teaching us how and why to learn. A frank assessment would be that they hardly seemed aware of the topic…
Right because applying it to a real problem means you have to go though the effort of solving that problem. Solving a problem always takes effort, else it would not be a "problem". Again the effort seems to be the key here.
Well, regarding this, I can’t speak to the theory behind it. But as a general rule, specifically when it comes to programming, I’ve always advocated that when presented with an example, someone should type the code in and not copy paste it. That the act of typing gives you time to briefly consider each element of the text and their relationships to each other, rather than as an opaque blob pasted all at once.
Sure, folks could just read the code, but inevitably people scan rather than read in detail. We all do that, and the cryptic nature of programming languages can just exacerbate it.
Typing naturally slows people down. It also provides a natural opportunity to make simple changes if they so desire.
Beginner programmers are also often uncomfortable with the sheer amount of typing required to do anything. They might try to use copy and paste as a shortcut. So practicing just the typing, rather than both thinking and typing at the same time and feeling like the slow typing is limiting your thinking, is probably a good idea for that reason too.
I use to teach my computer science students to touchtype in Dvorak, despite of our mother language does not even use Latin letters. Usually it takes 6 to 10 hours if there is no a strong QWERTY habit. I am sure they are gonna game these few hours in their first year of actively using keyboard.
Yeah, that was painful. How does memory work? Me, teacher who took graduate school classes on educational psychology: he’s going to talk about short-term memory, etc. now. Him: NEURONS!
Also, the article never mentioned the one absolutely knock down, finding that has been confirmed over and over again as effective for learning (or at least remembering): spaced repetition.
Spaced repetition takes effort, and causes pain. It is tedious. So it still fits in with the idea proposed.
I believe you need to be conscious of what you are trying to learn and if it is tedious, then you are conscious of it because tedious means you experience some strain.
You will remember it better because it was painful. Just speculating but it makes sense to my layman brain.
> There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education".
Yes, people know. Education schools aren’t held in low esteem by social scientists or the educated public by reason of lack of familiarity. They can’t even manage a detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Note I did not say large. The effect of an education degree on teacher effectiveness is not reliably distinguishable from zero.
> It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness
> Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.
For what it’s worth, the Gates Foundation spent many tens of millions attempting to quantify ‘teacher effectiveness’ and basically concluded that it’s not measurable. Instead, they produced a holistic set of observable behaviors that are generally correlated with ‘great teaching’ - which may be useful, but isn’t the same thing. This is not to say I really disagree with you about the quality of education schools, but knocking them for failing to produce a measurable impact on teacher effectiveness doesn’t resonate with me when we don’t have robust tools for measuring teacher effectiveness in the first place.
I'm skeptical of how the results of the educational field apply to the individual.
They deal with very specific constraints because of classroom economy.
If your stated goal is to get every child in this room to read, then you're wildly out of alignment with the needs of the child who could be reading the classics by the end of the year.
Gifted and accelerated programs only alleviate the problem by a fixed amount by adding one additional more intense tier, which every child competes for to improve their university application profile.
Any person who tried to teach a child one to one for a short period of time learns how unfit school is. The only limit to their learning is the adult's energy and skill. While school is the product of several rounds of the lowest slowest denominator.
Kings and princes used to be taught by tutors they form long term relationships with. This is still the best way. School is the equivalent of feeding the masses dog food to keep them compliant.
This is not just for "elite" children, also. A good mentor-mentee relationship is how you get the best out of students in non-academic fields, too. It's why apprenticeship systems developed.
One of the earlier posts decried "constructivism" in research, but I don't know how you get around the fact that most students are not, even cannot even be allowed to reach their full potential in whatever way that applies to them, because society requires us to fill certain roles, which that potential may not apply to. Educational outcomes are socially-constructed; I'd even go so far as to say that this social need is more predictive than inborn potential and even effort.
When it comes to reading I believe the best way to help a child learn is simply for parents (or as you also suggest, teachers, if its smaller group / 1 to 1) to (1) take the time and effort to read to kids, and (2) find high quality children's fiction that's interesting and motivating for the child to read themselves. Usually can be found at the library. or second-hand children's classics. So free or cheap. Our daughter is an excellent reader because she's a "bookworm", and her younger brother looks to be going the same way. She is hooked on fantasy fiction, he more on non-fiction about animals, space, dinosaurs. Some people wonder how they're such good readers. My answer is always. - give them books that make reading a joy and fun, then people want to, then they learn. To be honest, its incredible how schools manage to demotivate kids and they end up as "slow readers". Barring some kind of disability, I don't think that's a natural state for a child.
My first job was as one of the programmers in an interdisciplinary team that was mostly made of field experts (healthcare) and cognitive psychologists that designed games to make learning more effective.
I was probably one of the handful people who were actually paid to program Apple IIs in Brazil.
It was a remarkable experience to work at a applied research centre early in my career (I was in my second year in college) that had a lasting impact on everyone involved.
There's a book called "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" that is an excellent read on the science behind learning for lay-people (like myself) who want practical tips based in actual science.
It also argues that easier/faster learning is often worse. Harder learning lasts longer, and a big part of it is what they refer to as finding ways to "interrupt the natural process of forgetting". With this in mind, interleaved/ varied practice, spaced repetition, reflection, are all techniques that both lead to deeper understanding and better retention.
Schools of education have a very poor reputation for a reason.
There's analysis done on the "teacher quality" (based on student results) and the amount of teacher training (at these schools). There's basically zero difference between an emergency qualified teacher with no education qualifications, and someone with a masters or PhD of education.
> Our results suggest that
only two of the forms of teacher training we study influence productivity. First,
content-focused teacher professional development is positively associated with
productivity in middle and high school math. Second, more experienced teachers
appear more effective in teaching elementary math and reading and middle school
math. There is no evidence that either pre-service (undergraduate) training or the
scholastic aptitude of teachers influences their ability to increase student
achievement.
The evidence is that teachers learn literally nothing (or overall nothing - maybe they learn some good things and some harmful myths) in teacher college. They might learn a bit of math, which helps them teach math. IIRC it's also found that doing a PhD in education can be helpful in teaching classes with a heavy essay writing focus.
It's not surprising, since a lot of what gets taught in teacher college is junk psychology from the 1930s, and the essays of the kind of people who do a PhD in education. Here's a few of the biases that they tend to have (IMO):
* Education experts did OK at school, and think that the fundamentals are boring because their white upper-middle-class parents helped them learn phonics and the times tables.
* Education experts are often not actually good at much other than essay writing and year 10 math, and don't see the point of hard sciences like pyschology.
* There's plenty of smart people who go into education, but they do it because they want to teach, not be a researcher.
I could go through some of the poor content in education degrees (like the hero of education experts Vygotsky, who I'm not convinced many have even read other than through n-th hand sources where people write "the student is thus about to construct knowledge through scaffolded tasks in the zone of proximal development (Vygoskly, 1930something)", but you'd be lucky to find many teachers who agree on what any of that means (other than be common sense "don't make it too hard to follow").
Is it really a wonder that Cletus, who got a job in rural school in Alabama with no more qualifications than being able to write his name correctly teaches just as well (according to research) as someone with a PhD in education?
The good research is in psychology departments - people who study the science of learning are generally pretty well informed on it.
> "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them.
Hear and forget, see and remember, do and understand.
> In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education".
Hah -- nope, although the other person replying to you is a funny example, and it's true for at least one university near me. It was more of an indirect comment about forgetting to search for fields of expertise outside your own, despite potential proximity.
I don't really understand it either, but in my alma mater, a random small public liberal arts college, it is the case that the building closest to the CS building was the education building.
From the surprisingly good Aviation Instructor's Handbook [0]:
Learning Is an Active Process
Learners do not soak up knowledge like a sponge absorbs water. The instructor cannot assume that learners remember something just
because they were in the classroom, shop, or aircraft when the instructor presented the material. Neither can the instructor assume the
learners can apply what they know because they can quote the correct answer verbatim. For effective knowledge transfer, learners
need to react and respond, perhaps outwardly, perhaps only inwardly, emotionally, or intellectually.
This comes up often, and every time I have to disagree- there are things you can only learn actively, sure, but past that your brain is constantly analyzing and extracting the relevant features from all information you process. Personal anecdote: I've learned a good chunk of a language just by consuming a lot of subtitled media in it.
As a child, I was able to simply read through things (history books, forum discussions about motors and cars, wiki.c2.com...) barely understanding them - but half way words would begin making sense. I could then reread the same things with understanding and keep reading through until bored - which seemingly implied understanding.
Nowadays, I need comprehensible input the whole time, hooks to actually understand what's going on. I'm not sure if it's an issue with brain plasticity or growing impatience, perhaps a learned discomfort of not understanding things. Perhaps the internet has since trained me to google things instead of stopping to think or just soldier through, learned helplessness resorting to the hivemind's omniscience if you will.
I suspect this refusal to engage with the material and just flee to the search is this very lack of effort, which has caused me to stagnate. Alas...
I feel the same. I think it's mostly "impatience" or the fear of losing time. We get older and busier and the "price" we pay to spend hours on a book gets more and more expensive.
Learning is an investment, and as my salary increases and life gets more comfortable, my brain doesn't feel the urge to learn and prefers leisure.
I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out. When I have kids I hope they will be curious and I'll learn with them.
That's super annoying, because while I procrastinate on reading papers or even articles on the things I want to learn (as in, I feel - at least occasionally - motivated and positive about learning), works of fiction, like novels or short stories, can instantly suck me in for days. Somehow, when it comes to fiction, the beancounter in my head just packs up and goes on a leave.
> I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out
Please share anything you've found. For me:
- discovering Obsidian a year ago was a great boon. It led me to comb through millions of words of old person notes, remembering many different me's interest in different topics etc. When approaching a new topic, I now compulsively take detailed notes and then reform them into "evergreen notes" (google this term) although it's not the same effortless joy of my childhood.
- recently refinding old sites like wiki.c2.com has rekindled a great passion. The style of discussions, without marketing, status seeking, linking to blogs, medium articles etc. is also extremely pleasant and lets the content float up much better. Even modern communities which don't suffer from these problems still seem to have jaded userbases, who are just... Tired and not willing to really revel in their knowledge, but protectedly proactively avoid things.
- really calming myself down before engaging, e.g. closing my eyes for 10 mins in quiet, or just doodling on a paper, maybe stacking some 9 volt batteries into a tower and calmly approaching the topic, reading or such. In this way, reading can almost be like a reverse stream of consciousness. However life quickly knocks, taking me out of this (flow?) state. I recall some researchers discussing how children effortlessly play (so the opposite of the original topic about effortful learning...) experimenting, collecting data etc. to learn and develop their worldviews, but if you impose requirements or expectations on them, they learn slower and don't blossom.
I keep curiosity but lowering the bar and raising the reward. I think that's going to be different for everyone, but for me the lowered bar is by making sure I have concrete "wander" time in my day, and the reward is having someome I'm excited to talk to about the topic. The latter gives me the drive to actually use my wander time on stuff that's interesting, not just faff it away on YouTube.
I also make "grab bags" for everything, I am a perpetually disorganized person but this lets me be prepared. I have a drone bag, an electronics box, a bike toolbox, any significant project gets a bag/box I grab on a whim. That way I lower the preparedness bar and boring organization tasks.
I'm definitely in this camp except for one area - PBS Space Time[0].
I have _NO CLUE_ about 80% of the topics on the more complex subjects. Especially when he's explaining the equations. I rewatch the videos sometimes 4-5 times and still learn things that my mind glossed over. Lots of "ah ha!" moments. Love this channel.
According to Krashen, effort is not needed for comprehensible input to be effective. Rather, it is more likely that you are simply not consuming enough comprehensible input
Krashen is speaking with regards to languages. He doesn't expand on this to other fields.
It may well be the case that 'comprehensible input' is enough for languages because we already _understand_ at least one language to a functional degree, and there's no real 'learning' a foreign language, moreso _remembering_ words and structures. Much like most people don't 'understand' the mechanics of their native language, they merely use them.
I don't think that we can readily assume that comprehensible input is thus generalisable across other things we would wish to learn.
Krashen is brought up a lot as a "magic bullet". But I think there are 3 big caveats to his work that often don't get brought up.
- The amount of comprehensible input needed is really huge. So much so that someone who has 10-20 hours a week to learn a language might be better using an active approach.
- I used to think that if you understood a language certainly you would also be able to speak it. But this just isn't true. Passive vocabulary and active vocabulary (not to mention sentence construction) are separate and need to be practiced individually.
- In my own experience I have been very successfull with comprehensible input when paired with being in the country or studying the language during the day. This allows me to solidify links from what I've heard and read with the real world. AFAIK, his studies had a similar setup, always including students who were studying the language and then did extra reading/watching on top of that.
There is a bit of a pipe dream, that you will just watch mangas all day at your level and suddenly come out fluent.
I wonder if the nature of internet discourse has also changed, reducing how much there is. Comparing wiki.c2.com style pages/discussions with reddit now, things evolve in a much less coherent manner, there is less of a conversational back and forth truly developing ideas and more of a show-offy approach. Perhaps topics are also more difficult - e.g. learning CSS today with 30+ units of measurement must be hell compared to back in the day.
I believe it's just learned impatience/discomfort. I have over half a century, and yet can still approach things with the attitude of "it's all greek to me" — meaning that a bunch of funny characters may initially make me feel like I'm back in kindergarten, but I can remain confident that it will all become comprehensible after I have learned* what each splodge signifies and in what ways they are combined together.
> μὴ εἶναι βασιλικὴν ἀτραπὸν ἐπί γεωμετρίαν — E
* of course, a major part of this learning process involves doing the exercises, and if no one has been nice enough to set any exercises, then one simply has to provide one's own by playing around with other combinations of splodges to see if anything interesting results. cf http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html
I think there's a lot of possible explanations which may be true to different degrees and for different people.
One possibility is that it becomes more challenging to integrate information the more you know, and the more that you are aware of your limitations.
The child might read something and pick up the general idea of what things are from the context. An adult might realize that the context definition is incomplete.
A child might read an instruction that says to use a box wrench to tighten the bolt and pick up from contacts that that's just the tool that you use.
An adult night Wonder what kind of box wrench, metric or imperial ratcheting or not. What about other times where I use the socket for this type of work, is that better
Yes, learning requires effort. Does it need to be _effortful_?
After a bookish childhood, I spent years as an adult trying to "learn more." Mnenomic tricks, Anki, active note-taking, exercises, trying a different book if the first one doesn't stick. It didn't work very well and I probably wasted a lot of time. Two things became clear: 1) I was focusing on the process as a way to procrastinate on the real effort involved, 2) I was compensating for a lack of real curiosity about the subject matter. Yes, learning is hard work, but does it need to _feel hard_? When I've felt truly engrossed in something, I don't need to remind myself to exert effort, and I'm not really thinking about whatever X% of learning gain I can get from doing it better.
Deep down, I think like seeing myself as the kind of person who is "really into learning" -- math, theology, classics of literature, CS, art history, whatever. Keeping up the identity I developed as a nerdy kid. Of course, it's important to be gritty about learning because... why? Hustle culture?
Now, I'm trying the opposite approach: enjoy as much entertainment as I want, avoid exerting any effort or discipline in learning, and stop immediately if I'm not feeling it. Part of this is not beating myself up when I naturally lose interest in something (95% of things). Yes, it's easy to get distracted by low-effort scrolling and such. Ultimately, though, avoiding exertion makes it easier to focus on those rare things that truly spark wonder.
I'm convinced that there are two kinds of learning - conscious and subconscious. Most people think of learning as a purely conscious effort but I would point out that becoming fluent in a new language is almost entirely a subconscious effort.
Conscious effortful study can help you pick up new vocabulary and grammar, but our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up. It has to be learned subconsciously. Most of us don't even notice the effort needed to read this paragraph of text because it's all subconsciously processed before out conscious minds get to it. While conscious learning requires short bursts of focused attention, subconscious learning is done almost 24/7 in the background in a relaxed state (no effort is needed, and I'm not even sure if it makes a difference).
[1] None of this is backed up, I essentially pulled it out my ass. It's my theory on why language classes don't work, but children pick up languages so effortlessly.
More things that can be pushed to subconsciousness the better you get. You cannot constantly map your native tongue to a target language consciously and improve.
Look at any activity, chess, music, physical sports, at top levels most of it is subconscious effort.
Imagine having to constantly look at your keyboard, consciously searching for the letters to communicate your thoughts.
How would you expect to communicate well if your conscious process includes the menial search for the individual letters? How would you be a good chess player if you didn't have an intuitive feeling for most board positions but had to evaluate every move for a long time?
The things you learned well, were things that you successfully committed to your subconsciousness. Sometimes you plateau and think there's no room to improve, but by inspecting the conscious effort, you can find things that need to be practiced to make them subconscious.
I have studied a lot of the theory behind second language acquisition. Indeed, acquiring a language, even a second language, is a subconscious process. Or rather, learning a second language is a process that usually happens consciously and subconsciously in parallel. There have been debates whether conscious knowledge turns into subconscious one (skill automatization) or whether there are multiple learning systems that learn independently (the so-called no-interface position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_position ). The debate is not settled.
However, that doesn't mean that the process of acquiring the language isn't effortful! Even the most hardcore no-interface positionists accept that the subconscious learning system uses linguistic input that is _processed_ for its meaning and _comprehended_ (called "intake" by some experts) as its source material. When you don't have automatized knowledge yet, comprehending is very effortful and cannot happen without focused processing. The theoretical debate is more about whether that processing requires "metacognitive" processes and declarative memory and automatizing those, or is just getting intake (input comprehended by one means or others, without regarding any "rules" or "deduction" or "explicit/system 2 thinking") enough. But all in all, it takes effort anyway, in the sense that you still need to focus, and you might get frustrated of not understanding enough, struggling to follow.
Also, there are some studies that claim that children don't pick up languages as effortlessly than is generally thought. Quickly? Yes. Often with good results (in terms of pronunciation and grammar)? Yes. But effortlessly? Not so much!
Language classes do work, as long as you participate.
Children may appear to be picking up languages effortlessly, but consider how much time they spend to do so: take 2 years of a language, and you will be in advance of a 2 year-old native speaker.
> our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up
good point for oral communication, but literacy doesn't have to be done in real time
While I agree that adult capabilities for language learning are often underselled, you need to appreciate that a 2 year-old native speaker hasn't got the capabilities to learn the language to the full extent. Yet a 2-year old is likely to have a better phoneme representation – often much better – in their native language than an adult who has studied 2 years in language classes.
His explanation of how one can feel like they have knowledge on a subject after engaging in some edutainment but you realize how shallow your knowledge is once you try to discuss it with others is something I find for myself a lot.
It is one thing I hope AIs can really help with. It is a common belief that you don't understand something until you can explain it to someone else in simple terms. I've tried this method with AI chat bots with some success. They have two immense advantages over other humans: infinite patience and bias towards understanding over agreement.
For complex and abstract concepts, most people just don't want to sit and listen to a 40+ year old dude mansplain them. AIs - no problem. They'll listen forever and never get tired, bored, frustrated, etc.
The second advantage is even more important. Most people listen only to wait for their turn to speak. Or they will get caught up on a minor point because they don't agree. That proclivity to disagree can often turn into blindness, erasing any further information past wherever they got hung up. Even if they do ask you questions, often it is some attempt to highlight their disagreements, in a pseudo-socratic method kind of lawyering. AIs have no ego, they don't have stake in the game. They aren't trying to convince you to agree with them. They can just listen and understand, rephrasing and repeating back.
Have you tried this with AI with a topic you are well versed in? I am very optimistic AIs will help people feel they have some sort of understanding but far less optimistic they’ll actually help build it.
They’ll try to coerce any of your (or the model’s) mistakes into the correct answer out of politeness, and when you make a mistake it has zero model of the model you used to produce such a mistake, so it has no idea where to intervene in your knowledge except at which words hit the keyboard.
Idk, I am extremely extremely unimpressed any time I try to quiz it on topics I know. Except for coding, which makes sense since that’s the exercise of pushing as much semantic information into syntactic information as possible.
It sounds like you are doing something different than what I am suggesting. I am not quizzing the AI looking to determine how well the AI knows the subject. I am using the AI as if it doesn't know the subject at all.
I try to explain a subject to the AI as if I am trying to teach a friend who has no knowledge on the subject. Then I am judging how well I can communicate the idea. In many cases as soon as I try to explain the idea I realize that my own knowledge isn't deep. So I am judging myself, not the quality of the AI.
An analogy is the Rubber Duck method of program debugging. Most programers have been in the situation where when they try to explain an answer to another programmer the answer will suddenly pop into their head. The value isn't the knowledge in the other programmers head, it is in the act of trying to explain. LLMs are patient and unopinionated and make for a good recipient.
Or as mathematician Paul Halmos said: "Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?"
Or as the modern school system would say: "Shut up and stop asking things, look at the examples in your textbook and memorize this proof I've written onto the blackboard. The test will only verify if you can apply the process like a robot, so understand it if you want but I couldn't care less if you actually do."
> The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax.
This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.)
I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions.
The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with.
The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case.
Readit News
This post is interesting, but it reads like a layperson (from a teaching point of view) coming up with some fairly good theories of learning (of which there are quite a few) and discussing how applying them makes concrete differences in knowledge acquisition.
If I was to make a guess, I'd say that the 'effortful' component the author discusses is most aligned with something commonly called the "transformation" stage of learning -- where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them. A silly but apt example would be watching a youtube video on solving a rubik's cube, then having to transform the state of a real rubik's cube using your new knowledge.
This idea, and related ones, continue to be discussed at length by those who develop curriculum for educational institutions, and at a more meta-level, those who develop lessons for students who will later write a curriculum! I see a few links in sibling comments to Aviation learning, Youtube, PBS, but not to documents produced by any university on theory of learning. Perhaps they need to better link their work for smart hn readers to find.
Unfortunately, in my experience there are several shortcomings of the field (or at least typical bachelor's master's programs outside teachers's preparation, which is separate in Germany).
They love to talk about interdisciplinarity, and will even call out neuroscience and psychology often. In practice, it's mostly a social sciences field, and as such has been taken over by constructivism. Now, while learning is obviously (IMO) a constructive activity, they will "explain" everything with "handwave... social construction... handwave", while dismissing e.g. neuroscience aspects as "not a learning theory" and thus not worthy of discussion.
The statistical sophistication is very, very low. It's not all linear regression, but mostly, and even when it isn't there is no (even implicit) discussion of causality, just adding all variables (what McElreath calls "causal salad).
Fischer, K. W., Goswami, U., Geake, J., & Task Force on the Future of Educational Neuroscience. (2010). The future of educational neuroscience. Mind, Brain, and Education, 4(2), 68-80.
Mahadevan, J. (2020). Ethnographic studies in international human resource management: Types and usefulness. German Journal of Human Resource Management, 34(2), 228-251.
Romani, L., Barmeyer, C., Primecz, H., & Pilhofer, K. (2018). Cross-cultural management studies: state of the field in the four research paradigms. International Studies of Management & Organization, 48(3), 247-263.
Fortunately I see some very high quality and rigorous research techniques applied (with much less handwaving away of neuroscience) among my friends, but I don't need to look far for contrast. I don't work directly in this area, but am present for the pub discussions as it were.
However, I would say that statistical sophistication often seems to rely on the happenstance of cross-domain expertise. People only have so much time, knowledge, etc -- just the usual faults of humanity and organisations.
Some programs have really embraced neuroscience etc, but there’s minimal incentives for schools to keep up to date. Teachers going back for a masters don’t actually need anything more than a degree in hand to get a higher wage at their existing job. Which then feeds back into how these programs are setup and managed.
I guess you're studying "Erziehungswissenschaften"? You might find that educational psychology ("Pädagogische Psychologie") has a lot of the depth you would expect. One nice example is cognitive load theory.
One of the more complex mathematical treatments of learning are "knowledge and learning spaces". But it seems they get bogged down a lot in implementation details (= conflating implementation with interface behaviour). And: It's a bit to simplistic. For example, talking about things like the "expertise reversal effect" in this framework is not straightforward.
If I take a valuable nugget of information about it, is that real learning comes through experience: using the information, recalling it fron memory and manipulating it in some way. This goes from just writing what you hear to a personal project. Anything behavioral, more than just receiving and thinking, helps to actually learn.
I find it crazy that the educational system expects children to develop in this axis on their own almost entirely because they are simply expected to do so. I went to well-regarded schools and it’s generous to say they put a minimal amount of effort into teaching us how and why to learn. A frank assessment would be that they hardly seemed aware of the topic…
Sure, folks could just read the code, but inevitably people scan rather than read in detail. We all do that, and the cryptic nature of programming languages can just exacerbate it.
Typing naturally slows people down. It also provides a natural opportunity to make simple changes if they so desire.
Also, the article never mentioned the one absolutely knock down, finding that has been confirmed over and over again as effective for learning (or at least remembering): spaced repetition.
I believe you need to be conscious of what you are trying to learn and if it is tedious, then you are conscious of it because tedious means you experience some strain.
You will remember it better because it was painful. Just speculating but it makes sense to my layman brain.
Yes, people know. Education schools aren’t held in low esteem by social scientists or the educated public by reason of lack of familiarity. They can’t even manage a detectable effect on teacher effectiveness. Note I did not say large. The effect of an education degree on teacher effectiveness is not reliably distinguishable from zero.
> It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness
> Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...
They deal with very specific constraints because of classroom economy.
If your stated goal is to get every child in this room to read, then you're wildly out of alignment with the needs of the child who could be reading the classics by the end of the year.
Gifted and accelerated programs only alleviate the problem by a fixed amount by adding one additional more intense tier, which every child competes for to improve their university application profile.
Any person who tried to teach a child one to one for a short period of time learns how unfit school is. The only limit to their learning is the adult's energy and skill. While school is the product of several rounds of the lowest slowest denominator.
Kings and princes used to be taught by tutors they form long term relationships with. This is still the best way. School is the equivalent of feeding the masses dog food to keep them compliant.
One of the earlier posts decried "constructivism" in research, but I don't know how you get around the fact that most students are not, even cannot even be allowed to reach their full potential in whatever way that applies to them, because society requires us to fill certain roles, which that potential may not apply to. Educational outcomes are socially-constructed; I'd even go so far as to say that this social need is more predictive than inborn potential and even effort.
I was probably one of the handful people who were actually paid to program Apple IIs in Brazil.
It was a remarkable experience to work at a applied research centre early in my career (I was in my second year in college) that had a lasting impact on everyone involved.
It also argues that easier/faster learning is often worse. Harder learning lasts longer, and a big part of it is what they refer to as finding ways to "interrupt the natural process of forgetting". With this in mind, interleaved/ varied practice, spaced repetition, reflection, are all techniques that both lead to deeper understanding and better retention.
There's analysis done on the "teacher quality" (based on student results) and the amount of teacher training (at these schools). There's basically zero difference between an emergency qualified teacher with no education qualifications, and someone with a masters or PhD of education.
Quote - https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/1001059_Teacher...
> Our results suggest that only two of the forms of teacher training we study influence productivity. First, content-focused teacher professional development is positively associated with productivity in middle and high school math. Second, more experienced teachers appear more effective in teaching elementary math and reading and middle school math. There is no evidence that either pre-service (undergraduate) training or the scholastic aptitude of teachers influences their ability to increase student achievement.
The evidence is that teachers learn literally nothing (or overall nothing - maybe they learn some good things and some harmful myths) in teacher college. They might learn a bit of math, which helps them teach math. IIRC it's also found that doing a PhD in education can be helpful in teaching classes with a heavy essay writing focus.
It's not surprising, since a lot of what gets taught in teacher college is junk psychology from the 1930s, and the essays of the kind of people who do a PhD in education. Here's a few of the biases that they tend to have (IMO):
* Education experts did OK at school, and think that the fundamentals are boring because their white upper-middle-class parents helped them learn phonics and the times tables.
* Education experts are often not actually good at much other than essay writing and year 10 math, and don't see the point of hard sciences like pyschology.
* There's plenty of smart people who go into education, but they do it because they want to teach, not be a researcher.
I could go through some of the poor content in education degrees (like the hero of education experts Vygotsky, who I'm not convinced many have even read other than through n-th hand sources where people write "the student is thus about to construct knowledge through scaffolded tasks in the zone of proximal development (Vygoskly, 1930something)", but you'd be lucky to find many teachers who agree on what any of that means (other than be common sense "don't make it too hard to follow").
Is it really a wonder that Cletus, who got a job in rural school in Alabama with no more qualifications than being able to write his name correctly teaches just as well (according to research) as someone with a PhD in education?
The good research is in psychology departments - people who study the science of learning are generally pretty well informed on it.
That's probably why some school subjects that lack this component largely or entirely like history, geography or literature are so hard to learn.
Hear and forget, see and remember, do and understand.
Is this a reference to some specific university?
Learning Is an Active Process Learners do not soak up knowledge like a sponge absorbs water. The instructor cannot assume that learners remember something just because they were in the classroom, shop, or aircraft when the instructor presented the material. Neither can the instructor assume the learners can apply what they know because they can quote the correct answer verbatim. For effective knowledge transfer, learners need to react and respond, perhaps outwardly, perhaps only inwardly, emotionally, or intellectually.
[0] https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/a...
Nowadays, I need comprehensible input the whole time, hooks to actually understand what's going on. I'm not sure if it's an issue with brain plasticity or growing impatience, perhaps a learned discomfort of not understanding things. Perhaps the internet has since trained me to google things instead of stopping to think or just soldier through, learned helplessness resorting to the hivemind's omniscience if you will.
I suspect this refusal to engage with the material and just flee to the search is this very lack of effort, which has caused me to stagnate. Alas...
Learning is an investment, and as my salary increases and life gets more comfortable, my brain doesn't feel the urge to learn and prefers leisure.
I'm looking for ways to "hack" my brain and get back into the habit of learning in my free time and wanting to figure things out. When I have kids I hope they will be curious and I'll learn with them.
Please share anything you've found. For me:
- discovering Obsidian a year ago was a great boon. It led me to comb through millions of words of old person notes, remembering many different me's interest in different topics etc. When approaching a new topic, I now compulsively take detailed notes and then reform them into "evergreen notes" (google this term) although it's not the same effortless joy of my childhood.
- recently refinding old sites like wiki.c2.com has rekindled a great passion. The style of discussions, without marketing, status seeking, linking to blogs, medium articles etc. is also extremely pleasant and lets the content float up much better. Even modern communities which don't suffer from these problems still seem to have jaded userbases, who are just... Tired and not willing to really revel in their knowledge, but protectedly proactively avoid things.
- really calming myself down before engaging, e.g. closing my eyes for 10 mins in quiet, or just doodling on a paper, maybe stacking some 9 volt batteries into a tower and calmly approaching the topic, reading or such. In this way, reading can almost be like a reverse stream of consciousness. However life quickly knocks, taking me out of this (flow?) state. I recall some researchers discussing how children effortlessly play (so the opposite of the original topic about effortful learning...) experimenting, collecting data etc. to learn and develop their worldviews, but if you impose requirements or expectations on them, they learn slower and don't blossom.
I also make "grab bags" for everything, I am a perpetually disorganized person but this lets me be prepared. I have a drone bag, an electronics box, a bike toolbox, any significant project gets a bag/box I grab on a whim. That way I lower the preparedness bar and boring organization tasks.
I have _NO CLUE_ about 80% of the topics on the more complex subjects. Especially when he's explaining the equations. I rewatch the videos sometimes 4-5 times and still learn things that my mind glossed over. Lots of "ah ha!" moments. Love this channel.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/c/pbsspacetime
I found the experience enlightening.
It may well be the case that 'comprehensible input' is enough for languages because we already _understand_ at least one language to a functional degree, and there's no real 'learning' a foreign language, moreso _remembering_ words and structures. Much like most people don't 'understand' the mechanics of their native language, they merely use them.
I don't think that we can readily assume that comprehensible input is thus generalisable across other things we would wish to learn.
- The amount of comprehensible input needed is really huge. So much so that someone who has 10-20 hours a week to learn a language might be better using an active approach.
- I used to think that if you understood a language certainly you would also be able to speak it. But this just isn't true. Passive vocabulary and active vocabulary (not to mention sentence construction) are separate and need to be practiced individually.
- In my own experience I have been very successfull with comprehensible input when paired with being in the country or studying the language during the day. This allows me to solidify links from what I've heard and read with the real world. AFAIK, his studies had a similar setup, always including students who were studying the language and then did extra reading/watching on top of that.
There is a bit of a pipe dream, that you will just watch mangas all day at your level and suddenly come out fluent.
I wonder if the nature of internet discourse has also changed, reducing how much there is. Comparing wiki.c2.com style pages/discussions with reddit now, things evolve in a much less coherent manner, there is less of a conversational back and forth truly developing ideas and more of a show-offy approach. Perhaps topics are also more difficult - e.g. learning CSS today with 30+ units of measurement must be hell compared to back in the day.
The safer bet. Children and adult cognitive loads are assigned different in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
> μὴ εἶναι βασιλικὴν ἀτραπὸν ἐπί γεωμετρίαν — E
* of course, a major part of this learning process involves doing the exercises, and if no one has been nice enough to set any exercises, then one simply has to provide one's own by playing around with other combinations of splodges to see if anything interesting results. cf http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html
One possibility is that it becomes more challenging to integrate information the more you know, and the more that you are aware of your limitations.
The child might read something and pick up the general idea of what things are from the context. An adult might realize that the context definition is incomplete.
A child might read an instruction that says to use a box wrench to tighten the bolt and pick up from contacts that that's just the tool that you use.
An adult night Wonder what kind of box wrench, metric or imperial ratcheting or not. What about other times where I use the socket for this type of work, is that better
After a bookish childhood, I spent years as an adult trying to "learn more." Mnenomic tricks, Anki, active note-taking, exercises, trying a different book if the first one doesn't stick. It didn't work very well and I probably wasted a lot of time. Two things became clear: 1) I was focusing on the process as a way to procrastinate on the real effort involved, 2) I was compensating for a lack of real curiosity about the subject matter. Yes, learning is hard work, but does it need to _feel hard_? When I've felt truly engrossed in something, I don't need to remind myself to exert effort, and I'm not really thinking about whatever X% of learning gain I can get from doing it better.
Deep down, I think like seeing myself as the kind of person who is "really into learning" -- math, theology, classics of literature, CS, art history, whatever. Keeping up the identity I developed as a nerdy kid. Of course, it's important to be gritty about learning because... why? Hustle culture?
Now, I'm trying the opposite approach: enjoy as much entertainment as I want, avoid exerting any effort or discipline in learning, and stop immediately if I'm not feeling it. Part of this is not beating myself up when I naturally lose interest in something (95% of things). Yes, it's easy to get distracted by low-effort scrolling and such. Ultimately, though, avoiding exertion makes it easier to focus on those rare things that truly spark wonder.
Conscious effortful study can help you pick up new vocabulary and grammar, but our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up. It has to be learned subconsciously. Most of us don't even notice the effort needed to read this paragraph of text because it's all subconsciously processed before out conscious minds get to it. While conscious learning requires short bursts of focused attention, subconscious learning is done almost 24/7 in the background in a relaxed state (no effort is needed, and I'm not even sure if it makes a difference).
[1] None of this is backed up, I essentially pulled it out my ass. It's my theory on why language classes don't work, but children pick up languages so effortlessly.
Look at any activity, chess, music, physical sports, at top levels most of it is subconscious effort.
Imagine having to constantly look at your keyboard, consciously searching for the letters to communicate your thoughts.
How would you expect to communicate well if your conscious process includes the menial search for the individual letters? How would you be a good chess player if you didn't have an intuitive feeling for most board positions but had to evaluate every move for a long time?
The things you learned well, were things that you successfully committed to your subconsciousness. Sometimes you plateau and think there's no room to improve, but by inspecting the conscious effort, you can find things that need to be practiced to make them subconscious.
However, that doesn't mean that the process of acquiring the language isn't effortful! Even the most hardcore no-interface positionists accept that the subconscious learning system uses linguistic input that is _processed_ for its meaning and _comprehended_ (called "intake" by some experts) as its source material. When you don't have automatized knowledge yet, comprehending is very effortful and cannot happen without focused processing. The theoretical debate is more about whether that processing requires "metacognitive" processes and declarative memory and automatizing those, or is just getting intake (input comprehended by one means or others, without regarding any "rules" or "deduction" or "explicit/system 2 thinking") enough. But all in all, it takes effort anyway, in the sense that you still need to focus, and you might get frustrated of not understanding enough, struggling to follow.
Also, there are some studies that claim that children don't pick up languages as effortlessly than is generally thought. Quickly? Yes. Often with good results (in terms of pronunciation and grammar)? Yes. But effortlessly? Not so much!
Children may appear to be picking up languages effortlessly, but consider how much time they spend to do so: take 2 years of a language, and you will be in advance of a 2 year-old native speaker.
> our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up
good point for oral communication, but literacy doesn't have to be done in real time
It is one thing I hope AIs can really help with. It is a common belief that you don't understand something until you can explain it to someone else in simple terms. I've tried this method with AI chat bots with some success. They have two immense advantages over other humans: infinite patience and bias towards understanding over agreement.
For complex and abstract concepts, most people just don't want to sit and listen to a 40+ year old dude mansplain them. AIs - no problem. They'll listen forever and never get tired, bored, frustrated, etc.
The second advantage is even more important. Most people listen only to wait for their turn to speak. Or they will get caught up on a minor point because they don't agree. That proclivity to disagree can often turn into blindness, erasing any further information past wherever they got hung up. Even if they do ask you questions, often it is some attempt to highlight their disagreements, in a pseudo-socratic method kind of lawyering. AIs have no ego, they don't have stake in the game. They aren't trying to convince you to agree with them. They can just listen and understand, rephrasing and repeating back.
They’ll try to coerce any of your (or the model’s) mistakes into the correct answer out of politeness, and when you make a mistake it has zero model of the model you used to produce such a mistake, so it has no idea where to intervene in your knowledge except at which words hit the keyboard.
Idk, I am extremely extremely unimpressed any time I try to quiz it on topics I know. Except for coding, which makes sense since that’s the exercise of pushing as much semantic information into syntactic information as possible.
I try to explain a subject to the AI as if I am trying to teach a friend who has no knowledge on the subject. Then I am judging how well I can communicate the idea. In many cases as soon as I try to explain the idea I realize that my own knowledge isn't deep. So I am judging myself, not the quality of the AI.
An analogy is the Rubber Duck method of program debugging. Most programers have been in the situation where when they try to explain an answer to another programmer the answer will suddenly pop into their head. The value isn't the knowledge in the other programmers head, it is in the act of trying to explain. LLMs are patient and unopinionated and make for a good recipient.
https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos/quo....
This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.)
I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions.
The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with.
The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34710830