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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

#71

Post by corysama »

leidenfrost wrote: post #41
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…

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 pr…

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…

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#73

Post by scotty79 »

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…

> where the student takes things they have heard, seen, or experienced and attempts to transform some part of the world using them

That's probably why some school subjects that lack this component largely or entirely like history, geography or literature are so hard to learn.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#74

Post by galaxyLogic »

dmvdoug wrote: post #55
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…

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.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#75

Post by scotty79 »

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…

> "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.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#76

Post by galaxyLogic »

leidenfrost wrote: post #41
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…

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 pr…

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.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#77

Post by galaxyLogic »

corysama wrote: post #71
leidenfrost wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

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 a…

One tidbit worth mentioning I think is that learning something even if you think you don't know why you should learn it, is that you will learn how to learn. You can then apply that learning to anything. But you are right kids should be taught to see that learning itself is the problem.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#78

Post by vjerancrnjak »

SPBS wrote: post #62

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 t…

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.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#79

Post by barry-cotter »

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…

> 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.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#80

Post by vjerancrnjak »

Learning for me is an anxious nail biting activity. I do not know why because I never felt the rush to learn something. I get anxious even when I start learning something I want to learn. The smaller the anxiety, the less I learn.

It works, it becomes a cycle of anxiety and blissful revelation, an obsession.

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