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How We Learn Versus How We Think We Learn
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.Robert Bjork [0] talks a lot about this, in particular in [1], and also in his 1h long lecture "How we learn vs how we think we learn" [2].It's important to distinguish between "performance" (how well you're doing right now) vs "learning" (how well you do after some time delay).
Compare blocked practice with interleaved practice. Suppose you're practicing calculating the area of different geometric figures of types A, B, C, etc.
Blocked practice means you do problems in the order of: AAAABBBBCCCC, etc.
Interleaved practice means you mix them up: ACCBAABACA, etc.
Blocked practice increases your performance (how well you're doing right now) because problems of the same type cluster together, i.e. you're able to "cache" the right formula and just plug in the numbers. But this doesn't help learning, because you're not practicing recognizing what features of the figure should prompt you to retrieve which formula from memory.
Interleaved practice reduces your performance, because more cognitive effort is required to retrieve the right formula, you might get it wrong, etc. But it improves learning, because you're training yourself to recognize which figure requires which formula.
So "desirable difficulties" can be introduced (of which interleaving is one) to increase learning at the cost of reducing performance.
[0] https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/ [1] https://youtu.be/gtmMMR7SJKw [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxZzoVp5jmI