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Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

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Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#111

Post by GolDDranks »

dumblesplits wrote: post #110
GolDDranks wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At a wedding I met a photographer from the far east who had learnt perfect English in his late teens with (to my native ears) a perfect northern accent. So it is possible. I suspect that even a tin-eared adult learner could master those phonemes with enough obsessive repetition, both listening and speaking. I'm reminded of Liam Neeson's character in 'Taken' spending a transatlantic journey listening over and over aga…

Yes, it's possible. What I was trying to say, is that children get almost invariably past a certain level of goodness, whereas with adults, the results vary a lot. And I agree that motivation has a lot to do with it, as well as that children are very motivated.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#112

Post by iandanforth »

The neurobiology section is so far removed from the basic understanding of memory formation I honestly wonder how the author came up with it. It's not like myelin plays no role in learning, but the primary mechanism is synaptic formation. The author has ignored the stadium to focus on a seat. If you're interested in this I highly recommend "In Search of Memory" which is Eric Kandel's autobiography. He won the Nobel prize for his work describing how memories form and is a primary author of one of the most popular and widely used textbooks "Principles of Neural Science". His bio is highly entertaining, accessible, and informative.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#113

Post by Garlef »

Tomte wrote: post #51
hiisukun wrote: post #29

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 applyin…

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.…

> Education Science ... Germany

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.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#114

Post by ouraf »

An old professor that specialized in helping students prepare to university or civil servant tests used to say that if you want to understand a subject, you need to do two things about it:

- Make some kind of logical scheme to help with disambiguation (things like which legal process comes first, of the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle order of philosophers and ideas)

- Write the long form of the subject everything by hand. Pen on paper. If it's a law or bill, write it fully, if it's a scientific concept, write every part of it that is related to the subjects that can appear on the test.

It's slow, tiresome and a complete nightmare for students with anxiety problems (trust me, i know), but as you write, you very slowly burns the knowledge that fills your logical scheme into your brain.

That's what the people that succeed in hard tests do to dominate nebulous topics. I don't know if it translates to actual mastery in different areas, but it's a very strong studying technique

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#115

Post by Tomte »

Garlef wrote: post #113
Tomte wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Education Science ... Germany 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 imp…

No, Bildungswissenschaft. But yes, I found out some way along my studies that I'm actually really interested in parts of psychology. Henry Roediger's research, for example.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#116

Post by 082349872349872 »

GolDDranks wrote: post #111
dumblesplits wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a wedding I met a photographer from the far east who had learnt perfect English in his late teens with (to my native ears) a perfect northern accent. So it is possible. I suspect that even a tin-eared adult learner could master those phonemes with enough obsessive repetition, both listening and speaking. I'm reminded of Liam Neeson's character in 'Taken' spending a transatlantic journey listening over and over aga…

Yes, it's possible. What I was trying to say, is that children get almost invariably past a certain level of goodness, whereas with adults, the results vary a lot. And I agree that motivation has a lot to do with it, as well as that children are very motivated.

I agree that for most adult learners, aiming for accent-free is likely to disappoint. However, my personal figure of merit is getting to the point where people are happy conversing with you in their L1/your L2, rather than wishing to swap to their L2/your L1, and any reasonably motivated adult ought to find that attainable.

  no effort: your L1, their L2
  easy mode: your L1, their L1
  aim for:   your L2, their L1
  hard mode: your L2, their L2
(indeed, in my experience —past an acceptable baseline— people judge L2 speech far more by register and rhetoric than by phoneme production)

> children are very motivated

That, and much less afraid that they "might make a mistake"

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#118

Post by germinalphrase »

eimrine wrote: post #104
bavell wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Listening to your favorite new song everyday for a week is spaced repetition and very enjoyable, no pain whatsoever. You'll quickly learn the nuances of the song that you didn't pick up in your first few listens. Also a great way to memorize lyrics.

This relates to learning as much as watching some coding streams on Twitch to an actual coding.

That’s a value judgement which has nothing do to with whether or not listening to a song repeatedly counts as spaced repetition.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#119

Post by blackbear_ »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #44
whartung wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, f…

Agreed. And it builds muscle memory. It's the difference between saying "Of course I can walk a mile" and actually walking a mile.

Thanks to muscle memory, I have a probability of about 50% of mistakenly typing "int" instead of "in" whenever I write text in human languages, lol

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#120

Post by blackbear_ »

watwut wrote: post #91
Alt4Alt wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please expand on that. Is'nt Anki one of the most popular tools for using spaced repitition? By meaning spaced repetition is easier do you mean to refer to some other tools which makes it easy to implement and use?

If you reread chapters of a book in intervals, you are doing spaced repetition. If you return back to previous topic in math and do exercises again, you do spaced repetition. Flashcard are just easy to implement application of it. Yes among flashcards, anki is the most popular. But naive use of it leads to a lot of pain and tons of problems, you have to learn how to use anki.

Do you have any resources for learning how to use Anki? I use the default settings and I find them okay
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