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A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

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Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#21

Post by esafak »

vosper wrote: post #7
zlg_codes wrote: post #3

Quick learners absolutely exist, or everyone would learn at the same rate in school. I was regularly hamstrung by curriculae because I learned quickly. Schools chose to throw a bunch of busywork at me instead of deepening or questioning my understanding. "Your peers aren't on that yet." I don't care what my peers are doing. They made their decision about me years ago. If school can't be intellectually challenging the…

If schools were run like Khan Lab School then they’d put students together by subject-matter capability, not age. https://support.khanacademy.org/hc/en-us/articles/1150026831...

Multi-age classrooms are part of the Montessori philosophy.

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#22

Post by VikingCoder »

This made me go look this up:

Actress Marilu Henner, best known for her role as Elaine Nardo in the hit sitcom Taxi, has a highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), a rare condition shared by only 100 people worldwide.

I suspect those 100 people would be able to learn certain material faster than others.

I'm also curious about people who have learned mnemonic tricks. I've seen people memorize the order of the US Presidents in just a few minutes once they are taught a memory trick...

But yeah, the point of the article, in my mind, is that nothing beats investing a lot of time in especially in early childhood exposing people to all kinds of learning opportunities.

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#23

Post by lewisjoe »

whatever1 wrote: post #12

To an outsider I look like a programming language fast learner. I picked up python in a month and passed multiple big tech interviews. Reality is that I had been programming in C++, fortran and DSL for over a decade. Similar examples from colleagues in college and schoolmates. People with strong foundations seem to learn faster, but the reality is that there is past effort that you don’t see.

True. This might be confirmation bias so take it with a grain of salt: At school both students and teachers used to consider me brilliant. They saw me picking up concepts faster. But I knew all I had was a headstart. Everytime I was supplied books at the start of a new level,I just read them all and hunt for interesting knowledge.

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#24

Post by actuallyalys »

vannevar wrote: post #5

It seems unlikely that everyone learns at an identical rate, and the article itself seems to contradict that conclusion: "The fastest quarter of students improved their accuracy on each concept (or knowledge component) by about 2.6 percentage points after each practice attempt, while the slowest quarter of students improved by about 1.7 percentage points." That's a small difference in a single incremental component,…

As far as I can tell from reading the discussion section of the original paper, they unfortunately didn't address either a compounding effect or the fact that a small difference could accumulate over time. With the caveat that I may be misinterpreting the table, they did show that students with higher initial knowledge had faster learning rates [0]. That seems to be consistent with some students gradually accumulating an edge that grows over time, even if prior knowledge due to having more opportunities is also a factor, which is the authors' hypothesis. However, those rates were in log odds, meaning they decreased over time in percentage terms. That's only within the same task, so I don't think that rules out other types of compounding.

I will say that a student who consistently learns slightly faster and over the course of their entire education ends up drastically more skilled as a result would definitely be a faster learner, but that seems more muted than most people's intuitions of a "fast learner" or someone with a "knack" for a subject.

[0]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2221311120#t02

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#25

Post by likeclockwork »

closed wrote: post #13

People questioning the headline are missing the point of the underlying article. The underlying study is not about just rate of learning, but rate of learning under favorable conditions . The article describes where the data comes from: > In particular, we model learning using 27 datasets with over 1.3 million student performance observations from 6,946 learners in 12 different courses ranging across math, science, a…

Access to "favorable learning conditions" comes back to access to resources which some people won't engage with at all.

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#26

Post by tstrimple »

vannevar wrote: post #5

It seems unlikely that everyone learns at an identical rate, and the article itself seems to contradict that conclusion: "The fastest quarter of students improved their accuracy on each concept (or knowledge component) by about 2.6 percentage points after each practice attempt, while the slowest quarter of students improved by about 1.7 percentage points." That's a small difference in a single incremental component,…

To add to this, not all students are working on problems at the same rate either. I’d be willing to bet a good portion of fast learners spend more time thinking about these things. By the time I took my first and only programming class in school I’d already been writing in basic and putting together batch scripts to manage launching games. Of course I picked up pascal much more quickly than my peers because I’d already spent a considerable amount of personal time tinkering in the space. Same with math. I probably spent a lot more time thinking about that than most of my peers. I’d zone out in unrelated classes trying to figure out ways to extrapolate or repurpose math tricks I’d learned because it was interesting to me. So I appeared to be a very fast learner. But was I? I still spent longer than most of my peers on those subjects.

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#27

Post by djmips »

There's also the question of what to learn. I don't know if this has really been proven but it seems to me that some people who seem to learn quickly are those that have mastered the art of learning the minimum needed to accomplish their goal. And then there's those that go deep and venture into every nook and cranny of the subject and gather immensely more knowledge than what is needed for the task at hand.

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#28

Post by actuallyalys »

whatever1 wrote: post #12

To an outsider I look like a programming language fast learner. I picked up python in a month and passed multiple big tech interviews. Reality is that I had been programming in C++, fortran and DSL for over a decade. Similar examples from colleagues in college and schoolmates. People with strong foundations seem to learn faster, but the reality is that there is past effort that you don’t see.

Programming is probably an extreme case, since some people begin it as a hobby in middle school or high school and others go into introductory CS classes having done no programming at all, but it's not hard to imagine similar factors happening in other subjects. For example, I did well in high school English courses, which I and my peers obviously had years of classes in already—but I also did extra curricular reading and writing, mostly because it was something I enjoyed.

Now, would I say natural aptitude is negligible or non-existent, as the headline does? No, I don't think a single study is that definitive (and it did find a difference, just a small one).

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#29

Post by HKH2 »

lewisjoe wrote: post #23
whatever1 wrote: post #12

To an outsider I look like a programming language fast learner. I picked up python in a month and passed multiple big tech interviews. Reality is that I had been programming in C++, fortran and DSL for over a decade. Similar examples from colleagues in college and schoolmates. People with strong foundations seem to learn faster, but the reality is that there is past effort that you don’t see.

True. This might be confirmation bias so take it with a grain of salt: At school both students and teachers used to consider me brilliant. They saw me picking up concepts faster. But I knew all I had was a headstart. Everytime I was supplied books at the start of a new level,I just read them all and hunt for interesting knowledge.

A lot of students depend on extrinsic motivation - they want a reward for learning, or they don't want to be punished.

While you may disagree with labels, there is a positive correlation between intrinsic motivation and intelligence.

Re: A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then saw they don't exist

#30

Post by ShamelessC »

catchnear4321 wrote: post #2

> This story was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. that explains the smell.

GASP!
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