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I'd like to piggyback on this to also call out, for people interested in this sort of thing, that this hyper-stabilization or mastery training (which is like de

by mr_luc 10y ago

I'd like to piggyback on this to also call out, for people interested in this sort of thing, that this hyper-stabilization or mastery training (which is like developing muscle memory, maybe literally in the case of musicians learning a new piece or technique), is very different from general learning. See "Make It Stick" and the studies referenced in it regarding "desirable difficulties" that help create strong connections; coaches, teachers and learners mostly express preference for controlled, topical, less-confusing practice, but their preference is usually wrong as measured by performance (in sports and classroom contexts, anyway), whereas mixed-up practice that feels harder, and variations on that like trying to solve things before being taught the correct way, show better results.

rememberberry 10y ago
Any other good literature on this, or learning in general?
- mr_luc 10y ago
  I have a few favorites, but by and large I got those favorites from from Make It Stick, which I've reread a few times now. It's the best view-from-10k feet (written by 3 learning/memory researchers) I could have hoped for in a field with so much significant work being done, and the footnotes are a nice map to that world. I got interested in learning science from reading about the SuperMemo guy about 10 years ago, and there were some HN discussions where people were saying "this is cool, are there any other really solid learning effects, like spaced reps, that we know about?," and I think it was from HN that I learned about some of Bjork's stuff (one of the fathers of desirable difficulty, https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/robert-a-bjork-publications/ https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/robert-a-bjork-publications/). But I got the chance to learn more when researching for some training software I wrote in 2014, which was when Make It Stick was published; it was really helpful.
- rhapsodic 10y ago
  > Any other good literature on this, or learning in general? As another commentter mentioned, "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle is excellent. Applying the principles it discussed made my musical practice an order of magnitude more effective than it had been previously.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  Take a look at the wikipedia articles for Desirable Difficulties and Spacing Effect. Spacing and Interleaving was the hot topic in research the last time I looked (about 5 years ago). Note that "spacing" is different than "spaced repetition". There are quite a few papers linked to the Wikipedia articles, though, very unfortunately the "desirable difficulties" page only lists the original papers. If you google around, you should be able to find quite a few more. Keep in mind that most of the research in this area is psychological. It is often very difficult to build good studies. On top of that, many papers have pretty poor statistics in them, so take whatever you read with a grain of salt. It's very, very easy to suffer from confirmation bias because there are a lot of studies and many of them are not great. You can pick your conclusion and build an impressive looking list of references. Just be a bit careful of that when you are going through the review literature.

by mr_luc 10y ago

rememberberry 10y ago

Any other good literature on this, or learning in general?

mr_luc 10y ago
I have a few favorites, but by and large I got those favorites from from Make It Stick, which I've reread a few times now. It's the best view-from-10k feet (written by 3 learning/memory researchers) I could have hoped for in a field with so much significant work being done, and the footnotes are a nice map to that world. I got interested in learning science from reading about the SuperMemo guy about 10 years ago, and there were some HN discussions where people were saying "this is cool, are there any other really solid learning effects, like spaced reps, that we know about?," and I think it was from HN that I learned about some of Bjork's stuff (one of the fathers of desirable difficulty, https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/robert-a-bjork-publications/ https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/robert-a-bjork-publications/). But I got the chance to learn more when researching for some training software I wrote in 2014, which was when Make It Stick was published; it was really helpful.
rhapsodic 10y ago
> Any other good literature on this, or learning in general? As another commentter mentioned, "The Talent Code" by Daniel Coyle is excellent. Applying the principles it discussed made my musical practice an order of magnitude more effective than it had been previously.
mikekchar 10y ago
Take a look at the wikipedia articles for Desirable Difficulties and Spacing Effect. Spacing and Interleaving was the hot topic in research the last time I looked (about 5 years ago). Note that "spacing" is different than "spaced repetition". There are quite a few papers linked to the Wikipedia articles, though, very unfortunately the "desirable difficulties" page only lists the original papers. If you google around, you should be able to find quite a few more. Keep in mind that most of the research in this area is psychological. It is often very difficult to build good studies. On top of that, many papers have pretty poor statistics in them, so take whatever you read with a grain of salt. It's very, very easy to suffer from confirmation bias because there are a lot of studies and many of them are not great. You can pick your conclusion and build an impressive looking list of references. Just be a bit careful of that when you are going through the review literature.