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How to Learn Efficiently

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Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#11

Post by solarmist »

tarikjn wrote: post #6

Reading this, I couldn't help but draw the parallel with body building. The pain means new muscle is filling the micro-tears made during effort, and you train an other group the next day while the one you did today recovers.

Pain is a terrible word to use when describing that it's much too intense/broad of a word.

Soreness is acceptable (most likely not ideal either though, if your work to soreness let alone DOMS you will need extra recovery time that could slow your overall progress), but pain should never be tolerated.

Body sense is one of the most important things beginners have trouble learning. Whats' the differences between discomfort, soreness, pain, etc? Body position part of that difficult for beginners, what's it feel like to have a straight back?

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#12

Post by slinky773 »

emptytheory wrote: post #10

I'm one of those people who failed as an undergraduate. You know what's not pleasant? Being under constant stress to perform and "progress". Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with learning in school. By the way, that's entirely a product of the academic system. "The opposite is true: a good course is one where you always feel that you will barely make it." Because making people stress necessarily means they…

"Drive" by Dan Pink sort of talks about that. Your purpose should be something that you provide, not external factors, like grades and fears from what comes from them.

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#13

Post by bajaj »

Most of the techniques mentioned in this article relate directly to the way our brain makes associations and forms memory. Learning something is a two step process: retaining the new information in the brain and then forming association between that and the things that we already know.

I have observed that trying to recall something that I have learnt ensures I retain the information instead of simply getting the illusion of learning something.

Mixing topics essentially allows you to create new associations in the brain about the topic. The stronger the association about a topic, the more you retain the information. Another technique that works really well is trying to apply a new topic to your own life. By relating new information to things you already remember, you create the pathways to remember and retrieve certain information. Edit: link - how long term memory works: http://education.purduecal.edu/Vockell/EdPsyBook/Edpsy6/edps...

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#14

Post by slinky773 »

This is why I always make an active effort to participate in my classes. It generally all sticks better in my brain if there's something I can remember with it - I'll remember the four stages of the 30 Years' War if I can remember my teacher lecturing and me asking questions and my classmates joking around. It has worked so far, so I guess there's something to that.

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#15

Post by relaytheurgency »

The Learning Style theory is junk with the flimsiest evidence, but tell that to any teaching institute in this arena so obsessed with constructivist ideals. The reason I did not continue on to teach physics was partially due to an insistence that it was teachers who needed to expend more effort to make classes "fit" a student's preferences so that their learning would be a gradual climb. You learn material by flailing, not by floating.

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#16

Post by emptytheory »

slinky773 wrote: post #12
emptytheory wrote: post #10

I'm one of those people who failed as an undergraduate. You know what's not pleasant? Being under constant stress to perform and "progress". Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with learning in school. By the way, that's entirely a product of the academic system. "The opposite is true: a good course is one where you always feel that you will barely make it." Because making people stress necessarily means they…

"Drive" by Dan Pink sort of talks about that. Your purpose should be something that you provide, not external factors, like grades and fears from what comes from them.

It's entirely possible to be internally driven and to still not function well in a school. (Unless you think the only purpose students should pursue is "succeeding in school".)

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#17

Post by ivansavz »

> As an undergraduate student, I found that writing a summary of everything I had learned in a class was one of the best ways to study for an exam. I would just sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to summarize everything as precisely as possible. Ultimately, writing your own textbook would be a very effective way to learn the material.

Amen.

Back when I was tutoring a lot, I used to ask the students to keep a "master formula sheet" and continuously add formulas to it. In the final review session, I asked them to explain each math formula in plain English, e.g F=ma --> forces cause acceleration (and the acceleration produced by a force is inversely proportional to the mass of the object). I could immediately tell who understood the material and who was trying to get by on memorization.

Another useful exercise is to pretend you forgot your "formula sheet" and try to reproduce it from scratch. If you can't it means you're not solving enough problems---after solving 5-10 problems using a given formula, you start to remember it, and not as a string, but as an idea. You can forget a string; you can't forget an idea.

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#18

Post by matwood »

ivansavz wrote: post #17

> As an undergraduate student, I found that writing a summary of everything I had learned in a class was one of the best ways to study for an exam. I would just sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to summarize everything as precisely as possible. Ultimately, writing your own textbook would be a very effective way to learn the material. Amen. Back when I was tutoring a lot, I used to ask the students to keep…

I used a similar technique. In undergrad and grad school my studying consisted of typing up the notes from class and summarizing the book chapters. I was always amused when people would ask me for the notes without realizing that the act of creating them was the study part. I rarely looked at them after the fact.

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#19

Post by roflmyeggo »

ivansavz wrote: post #17

> As an undergraduate student, I found that writing a summary of everything I had learned in a class was one of the best ways to study for an exam. I would just sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to summarize everything as precisely as possible. Ultimately, writing your own textbook would be a very effective way to learn the material. Amen. Back when I was tutoring a lot, I used to ask the students to keep…

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -Albert Einstein

Re: How to Learn Efficiently

#20

Post by jfarmer »

avnfish wrote: post #2

Any thoughts on learning to code in an 'interleaved' manner? I.e. studying more than one language or concept at once?

I think it's wrong to think of "learning how to program" as "learning a specific programming language." This is difficult to see as a beginner, if not impossible.

IMO it's better to think of each particular programming language as a stage and your goal is to practice acting.

Learning multiple programming languages at once is more like trying to learn Spanish and Portuguese simultaneously. It's not impossible, but you'll find yourself doing "double duty" because your brain has yet to develop clear lines between the two languages.

I've directly taught hundreds of people how to code and have seen this first hand. Take a beginning programmer who knows a little Python (or Java or C or anything), teach them some basic Ruby syntax, and ask them to write a Ruby program, they'll write in a creole of Ruby/Python, Ruby/Java, Ruby/C, etc. (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language)

I'm not kidding. You'll see things like this from C or Java programmers

    def Fixnum add(Fixnum x, Fixnum y)
      return x + y
    end
It's remarkably consistent and they never once saw an example of code that looked like that. They mashed together ideas from Ruby and C and honest-to-goodness expected it to work.

Untangling those false connections just adds overhead to the learning process and (IMO) are best avoided until you have a clearer mental distinction between programming _per se_ and programming in a specific language.

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