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Learning New Information Is Easier When It Is Composed of Familiar Elements

30 points by akbarnama 11y ago

ThomPete 11y ago
It's also called analogies and I am not sure why that required a study to find out, but perhaps it's more the science behind they are looking for. Seymour Papert wrote an amazing book called "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in this field.
madaxe_again 11y ago
Something of a "no shit" paper. I'd wager that students who studied algebra before calculus did better than students who were made to do calculus having never learned algebra.
- bildung 11y ago
  > I'd wager that students who studied algebra before calculus did better than students who were made to do calculus having never learned algebra. And you'd win :) The type of learning you describe differs from the types of learning most (to my knowledge pretty much all) neuro scienctists are researching, though. You describe meaningful learning, neuroscientists research the rat-in-a-maze-types (associative and instrumental learning). They work in fundamentally different ways. You probably know that "aha" moment when you suddenly grasp a new concept. Most often, this pretty much equals meaningful learning. You mull over some content, and once your mind can make sense of it, you have "leaned" it. No need for rote learning at all. Associative (and instrumental) learning works completely absent of meaning. It's just pattern matching between e.g. stimuli and responses. Rat pushes a button, food drops into the cage. After 20 repetitions, rat learns that a causes b. The article describes students rembering Chinese characters without being able to read Chinese, so no meaning involved.
  - natsukaze 11y ago
    Of course there is a meaning in chinese characters. Once you get that 木 is a tree (which is pretty easy to see), you might figure that 林 is woods and 森 is a forest, even though 森 will look wildly complicated for someone who never really looked at chinese characters. People are learning to read chinese like this for thousands of years, and instead of remembering 12 individual brushstrokes for 森 you just need to remember that it's 3 trees.
    - bildung 11y ago
      Of course you are right! But as I understood the article, the treatment difference occured during the first phase, association between character and meaning. They observed that those character-meaning pairs that got repeated more often during the first phase have been remembered more often in the second phase (as part of two-character combinations).
    - madaxe_again 11y ago
      It's also book in Kanji, and I've always thought it looks more like a book with its leaves hanging open - even though the pictogram is indeed a tree.
      - z2 11y ago
        You may be thinking of 本 :) It actually has a much more complicated and varied etymology than that of 'tree'. http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?submitButton1=Etymology&characterInput=%E6%9C%AC http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?subm...
        drivers99 11y ago
        The Heisig method is very good at getting you to be able to remember the differences between characters, in particular how to write them. (To keep it on topic...) it is based on building up the characters from previously learned components ("radicals"). It also builds on your existing knowledge of English because you learn the radicals and characters with English keywords. The idea is to learn the characters in English first, so that you'll have that as a base of knowledge to learn the actual language. [1] a good intro: http://akitajet.com/wiki/Heisig_Method http://akitajet.com/wiki/Heisig_Method if you want to try the method I would suggest picking up Remembering the Kanji volume I and then utilizing http://kanji.koohii.com http://kanji.koohii.com for the mnemonic "stories" and to practice with their spaced repetition method.
- SilasX 11y ago
  Same thought here. People are going to learn and retain more if what you teach is grounded in the student's existing worldmodel. In fact, if it isn't, you arguably haven't taught them anything at all! Compare: "A snorble is a snopful that has two to three zigtugs. Many snopfuls are found in tigglesneck contexts. This will be on the test!" vs: "Okay, you know horses, dogs, and oxen? We classify those as snorgfuls because they have properties X Y and Z, which you may remeber if you've had [experience] with one of those. Non-snorgfuls would act differently because of having these other properties, which shows up in how ..." Sadly, most teaching is like the first, and people don't even try to make it like the second.
power 11y ago
There is less new information to learn if it can be encoded using already learned elements, so this is as expected.
copsarebastards 11y ago
Also in the news: sky blue, grass green.

30 points by akbarnama 11y ago

It's also called analogies and I am not sure why that required a study to find out, but perhaps it's more the science behind they are looking for. Seymour Papert wrote an amazing book called "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in this field.

madaxe_again 11y ago

Something of a "no shit" paper. I'd wager that students who studied algebra before calculus did better than students who were made to do calculus having never learned algebra.

bildung 11y ago
> I'd wager that students who studied algebra before calculus did better than students who were made to do calculus having never learned algebra. And you'd win :) The type of learning you describe differs from the types of learning most (to my knowledge pretty much all) neuro scienctists are researching, though. You describe meaningful learning, neuroscientists research the rat-in-a-maze-types (associative and instrumental learning). They work in fundamentally different ways. You probably know that "aha" moment when you suddenly grasp a new concept. Most often, this pretty much equals meaningful learning. You mull over some content, and once your mind can make sense of it, you have "leaned" it. No need for rote learning at all. Associative (and instrumental) learning works completely absent of meaning. It's just pattern matching between e.g. stimuli and responses. Rat pushes a button, food drops into the cage. After 20 repetitions, rat learns that a causes b. The article describes students rembering Chinese characters without being able to read Chinese, so no meaning involved.
- natsukaze 11y ago
  Of course there is a meaning in chinese characters. Once you get that 木 is a tree (which is pretty easy to see), you might figure that 林 is woods and 森 is a forest, even though 森 will look wildly complicated for someone who never really looked at chinese characters. People are learning to read chinese like this for thousands of years, and instead of remembering 12 individual brushstrokes for 森 you just need to remember that it's 3 trees.
  - bildung 11y ago
    Of course you are right! But as I understood the article, the treatment difference occured during the first phase, association between character and meaning. They observed that those character-meaning pairs that got repeated more often during the first phase have been remembered more often in the second phase (as part of two-character combinations).
  - madaxe_again 11y ago
    It's also book in Kanji, and I've always thought it looks more like a book with its leaves hanging open - even though the pictogram is indeed a tree.
    - z2 11y ago
      You may be thinking of 本 :) It actually has a much more complicated and varied etymology than that of 'tree'. http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?submitButton1=Etymology&characterInput=%E6%9C%AC http://www.chineseetymology.org/CharacterEtymology.aspx?subm...
      - drivers99 11y ago
        The Heisig method is very good at getting you to be able to remember the differences between characters, in particular how to write them. (To keep it on topic...) it is based on building up the characters from previously learned components ("radicals"). It also builds on your existing knowledge of English because you learn the radicals and characters with English keywords. The idea is to learn the characters in English first, so that you'll have that as a base of knowledge to learn the actual language. [1] a good intro: http://akitajet.com/wiki/Heisig_Method http://akitajet.com/wiki/Heisig_Method if you want to try the method I would suggest picking up Remembering the Kanji volume I and then utilizing http://kanji.koohii.com http://kanji.koohii.com for the mnemonic "stories" and to practice with their spaced repetition method.
SilasX 11y ago
Same thought here. People are going to learn and retain more if what you teach is grounded in the student's existing worldmodel. In fact, if it isn't, you arguably haven't taught them anything at all! Compare: "A snorble is a snopful that has two to three zigtugs. Many snopfuls are found in tigglesneck contexts. This will be on the test!" vs: "Okay, you know horses, dogs, and oxen? We classify those as snorgfuls because they have properties X Y and Z, which you may remeber if you've had [experience] with one of those. Non-snorgfuls would act differently because of having these other properties, which shows up in how ..." Sadly, most teaching is like the first, and people don't even try to make it like the second.

power 11y ago

There is less new information to learn if it can be encoded using already learned elements, so this is as expected.

copsarebastards 11y ago

Also in the news: sky blue, grass green.