5 ms·

This stuff is super important and it is good that it is being researched seriously. The money shot is right here in the abstract >We find that students in the

• ghaff 7y ago
  "A learning should be fun" assumption gets baked into an awful lot of discussions around Ed Tech and related topics. It's not that learning should always be painful/boring/etc. but I'm not sure that coming at education from an angle where if it's not enjoyable there must be something wrong is the right one.
  • zabzonk 7y ago
    Quite. I spent the first 15 years of my adult life learning to be a microbiologist. I can't say I found any of that process being "fun", though a quite a bit (but by no means all) of it was interesting.
  • grawprog 7y ago
    I don't know, I actually do find learning fun. Even when it gets hard and frustrating. Almost especially when it gets hard and frustrating. It feels good when something finally clicks. Though I find it's not until some time later i realize this 'thing' I used to struggle with is now easy to understand. For me it's the same reason I like video games. It gives me the same feeling learning something new, especially when I can connect it somehow to previous knowledge, that completing an especially frustrating section of a game I have to do over and over before I get it does.
  • friendlybus 7y ago
    X must be fun is baked into most areas of life. It's the closest thing we have to a shared existential story in the west. Live to have fun. It's the default position to a lot of questions. Some education can be mentally taxing but deeply engaging or fun in a way that's difficult to describe. I agree with you, enjoyment shouldn't be evidence of an education result.
  • Too 7y ago
    Struggle is not opposite of fun. Too much can be frustrating but in the exact right amount it can be an even bigger source of motivation when you manage to pass the next hurdle. Playing sports for example is a struggle, most people think it's fun, and you get physical benefits afterwards.
• jimhefferon 7y ago
  There are other factors, too (some mentioned further down in the article). Active learning classes are often messier, by which I mean that there is a lot of people speaking up, sometimes things are proposed that are not quite right and there is discussion of how it is wrong and how to make it right, etc. I don't teach all my classes in 100% active ways, but it has seemed to me that in the classes that are more active I get significantly lower student evaluations. People often rate my knowledge of the subject as less, for instance. That is, when I ask in class, "What do you think?" at least some of them perceive, at least a bit, that I am not sure.
  • ghaff 7y ago
    The subject matter, class size, and student body probably lent itself better to more active classes but I certainly found many of my business school classes more engaging than many of the big undergrad lectures I sat through. (There were some really good undergrad lecture classes as well although they were generally not core engineering/science classes.) I'm sure it's also true that forced participation in classes is doubtless tough for a lot of people. Again, not really an issue in business grad school, but I can see it being something of a problem in other settings.
• echelon 7y ago
  > If you're struggling, you're learning. I think this is correct, but the curve can't be too steep.
• jgamman 7y ago
  I know you're using "money shot" as slang for "key take-away" or tl:dr but it's origin is intertwined with porn - you might want to re-consider keeping it as a goto phrase online and in the real.
  • ahelwer 7y ago
    Wikipedia disagrees with you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_shot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_shot
    • alexanderdmitri 7y ago
      Not bad advice from GP when you get to the "see also" section in your linked wikipedia article (pretty much immediately there with one scroll on mobile).
• closed 7y ago
  > If you're struggling, you're learning. I think this is close, but reversed. Learning requires a struggle (eg effort), but you can struggle without learning (eg you aren't getting good feedback).
• SquishyPanda23 7y ago
  Isn't it more the opposite? Active learning is about promoting things like talking to other students face to face or on classroom-based chat systems about assignments. It's more of a social media flavored experience compared to watching a lecture. And it feels a lot less like work. I don't think I've seen active learning implemented very well, but in my experience the more actively students work in groups and discuss their opinions the less actual material you cover. What does happen in group settings is that the best students re-explain the material to students not doing so well. This might lead to increased average performance, but I'm sure they've accounted for that.
  • jimmyvalmer 7y ago
    This sounds like a response from a humanities or business major. If you've never felt utterly defeated practicing a difficult passage in music or pulling an all-nighter on a problem set, then I question the extent of learning. I've learned more from the chess and go games I've lost (leaving me in tears) than the ones I won. Bandying opinions with one's peers is a form of learning, yes, but it's a nonrigorous one that I wouldn't pay tuition for.
    • SquishyPanda23 7y ago
      My experience is in the context of teaching mathematics in particular. Mainly calculus because that is be there level at which pedagogy theories are typically experimented with most. In upper level classes are typically straight lectures. Edit: I meant "opinion" in the sense that you don't really have much to say to your partner about a technical topic you don't understand yet. And in much of math you don't have intuition you can verbalize until you've worked many problems, which means the time to have conversations with your peers about it is probably not the same time you're learning it for the first time. That may explain why in practice the students who read the book before hand are often really just instructing the other students when they are having discussions.
    • natalyarostova 7y ago
      I've learned the most from struggling through the end problems in a PhD textbook; where when I go to sleep I feel so stupid and defeated that I wonder why I bother. Somehow doing this long enough you actually learn things...
• derekcarr19 7y ago
  It's the difference between being baby fed by a Ph.D or harvesting your own vegetables in a study group.
• K0SM0S 7y ago
  As someone who learned English mostly from entertainment or practical needs (online, living in a non-English speaking country), and never really spent much time "learning" rules beyond 12 — no more than my birth language, which I statistically mastered — I very much disagree, if you stop there. This is the old view of learning, and it's just wrong cognitively (neurologically). Struggling is feeling "under", less than, overwhelmed, and it brings fear or anger as primary emotions — red signs that this isn't a good path. By that point, you've switched a lot of attention away from the problem to focus on saving yourself, because genetic legacy is funny like that. If you're enjoying however, you're learning to the best of your abilities, cognitively. This isn't to say that the greatest games aren't hard at times. Difficulty can and should be enjoyable (it means you're in the sweet spot for improvement). This isn't to say that enjoyment and learning are related in general, beyond the former enabling the latter in specific contexts. But when you're struggling, you're indeed not learning, you're stuck; what you need is a new teacher, a new way to understand the thing, which may be yourself — at which point you begin to "play" with it as we say it (words carry all the answers we need, don't they?) However it's done, learning feels very good, like this inner "win" or "eureka" feeling. If you're struggling, you've failed. Already. You're in above your head. Even understanding would be partial and based on weak prerequisites, it's doesn't bode well for the next chapter, or the next task. Difficulty and pain are hard, but the good kind of hard, the one that teaches you, when pain becomes gain; it's a well known "truth" of life and the body by athletes, and the mind works just the same. In fact, the learning itself happens afterwards, when you sleep: maximum learning is enabled by sleep in most mammals apparently. Who would have thought the most active learner in class is the one dozing near the heater, haha.
  • friendlybus 7y ago
    I agree with you. I had similar experiences of an unexplained smooth euphoria and finding new angles as a useful tool for progress. I do not buy the distrust of negative emotion. There are keys to the kingdom hidden inside fear and anger. Talking those feelings out and getting to the driving principle underneath them has been worth it's weight in gold. The relevance realization pathway you describe is important, the successive eurakas are valuable. But when you go off into the unknown that is not structured like a language or a school topic, the Eurekas are several or more steps apart. You need to cope with the overload to grow your output. You are learning to deal with a character challenge. I think the balance between being vulnerable with your limitations and fears whilst stimulated enough to push to the limit of your competence and minimize flaw in your output and the sword and shield to performance. High speed learning is different to performance. It is to live on the boundary between being a fool and wise. Struggle is no issue, only credibility matters for truth seeking.
• roenxi 7y ago
  > If you're struggling, you're learning. Just for the benefit of all the people who will be struggling with burnout at some point in their lives: If you are struggling and trying new approaches then you are learning. Struggling and doing the same thing over and over won't end well, and isn't helpful to or expected by anyone.
• Chathamization 7y ago
  > In other word, "real" learning is hard, it takes work, it's not fun. The article compares active learning to passive learning like listening to lectures, and sees evidence that active learning is better. I don't think many people consider academic lectures more "fun" than active learning. The article also suggests that the reason why increased cognitive effort makes people feel like their learning less isn't because it isn't fun, but rather because students associate increased cognitive effort with poor learning: > Most importantly, these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning.
• joe_the_user 7y ago
  In other word, "real" learning is hard, it takes work, it's not fun. -- The quote is about active learning, learning that involves the student in the education process. I don't think the subjective rating of that as "not fun" is a given. Rather, I think this subjective impression from the entire context of a student's activities. It's pretty standard to expect "engaged" students to be happier than disengaged students. But students who are pressured to be engaged but don't engage are most unhappy of all. And today, students are confronted with a lot of easy, disengaged "junkfood" entertainment and are often working many hours a week along with school (or simply work endless hours of homework, etc). Under those circumstances, sure, learning that pushes the student to participate might get negative reviews. But I don't that justifies defining participatory learning "not fun" ipso-facto.