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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

#91

Post by watwut »

Alt4Alt wrote: post #88
watwut wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spaced repetition takes effort, and causes pain. It is tedious. So it still fits in with the idea proposed This is not true. Anki is tedious and causes pain. Flashcards are such in general. But dpaced repetition does not requires either.

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.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#92

Post by rbanffy »

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…

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.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#93

Post by golem14 »

mighmi wrote: post #7

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'…

Maybe read “Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata”. Forces you into that mode you were in earlier in your life.

I found the experience enlightening.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#94

Post by barbarbar »

mbrameld wrote: post #22

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…

Such a good comment. Thank you for providing that.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#95

Post by Retric »

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 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.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#96

Post by arrowsmith »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #89
makeitdouble wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaced repetition happens everyday outside of a "sit at a desk and learn" setup and is plenty efficient without effort and pain. The obvious one is seeing again and again a concept so much you end up remembering it, like the Dunning Kreuger effect (or to take it darker, being able to recipe an ad you've seen hundreds of time) If anything, I'd argue the pain and effort can be negative it will still work.

Some things you learn without really trying. We learn our native language by repetition because we hear it all around us. But the question here is what if you want to or need to learn something you won't learn automatically? What helps? Try spaced repetition. It doesn't happen every day automatically. You must force yourself to do it even though it is tedious, if you want to learn what you want to learn.

I think what GP meant is that we already learn a lot of things through "spaced repetition" even if we're not consciously applying that technique. E.g. if you drive the same route repeatedly, eventually you'll remember the way without needing to look at a map. That's spaced repetition.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#97

Post by moffkalast »

ghufran_syed wrote: post #57

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?" https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Halmos/quo... .

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."

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#98

Post by GolDDranks »

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…

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!

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#99

Post by culebron21 »

You don't need to go down to cellular or sub-cellular level to see what works and what doesn't. This essay might get this right, but conjectures at higher level may be misleading. At the same time, there has been a good deal of research on how learning works at the level that we can look at and understand: real people learning in different ways, then tested. There's been a research, that I fail to recall where, that when people liked learning, they learned little, while if they did hard tasks and disliked it, in fact they learned the matter far better, than the first group.

Re: Learning needs to be effortful to be effective

#100

Post by GolDDranks »

082349872349872 wrote: post #87
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…

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…

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.
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