9 ms·

Which cognitive psychology findings are solid that I can use to help students?

143 points by azeemba 2y ago

ein0p 2y ago
> abandoning traditional lecturing in favor of active learning I think this is a misunderstanding of what "lecturing" is supposed to do. It's supposed to _introduce_ you to the material at a high level. Think of it as of skimming a scientific paper. The actual "learning" is something you do on your own after the lecture (although some lecturers require that you _first_ study the subject and then listen to the lecture), and when doing assignments. IOW, it's not a be all end all, and it shouldn't be treated as the only thing you need to learn the material.
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  I think that's lost on a lot of people though, including some/many teachers and lecturers, especially those who enjoy conducting lectures. Not for OP, but for typical discussion: A good way of getting people to understand how lecturing is really only introductory is to consider learning a sport. You can get lectured for hours, days, years on technique and strategy and reading the play and knowing your team mates. But pull on the boots or put a racquet in your hand and you're starting from scratch.
- qp11 2y ago
  Herbert Simon - "The criticism of practice (called "drill and kill") and the emphasis on sparking interest is very common. But all evidence, from the lab and studies of professionals, indicate that real competence comes with extensive practice. In denying the critical role of practice one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve real competence. The instructional task is not to "kill" motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice while at the same time sustaining interest"
  - wumbo 2y ago
    As a software engineer, musician, and now taking on martial arts, yes. For me it helps that I enjoy perfecting/varying/repeating. There could be some element of play in math homework. Play is practice that sparks interest. But what is playful math? “Here’s a character for Pathfinder. Optimize the shit out of it.”
    - chongli 2y ago
      Math gets more playful and fun the more you study. The most fun I’ve had with math was when working through difficult proofs in logic, analysis, abstract algebra, and geometry. Some of the math learned in high school can be made more fun and playful with applications such as you mentioned, or with contest math designed for high school students. For a few years now I’ve been involved with the CEMC [1] (at my Alma mater) as a grader for the Euclid math contest which I think is quite fun without requiring anything beyond high school math (doesn’t even require calculus). [1] https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/contests.html https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/contests.html
      - nordstreem 2y ago
        Not an endorsement but a criticism of how schools teach math: https://www.mentava.com/ https://www.mentava.com/ According to Mentava their program has 5th graders ready for AP math and middle schoolers ready for college computer science. 20 minutes a day. It’s just another language. A lot of people see it as esoteric wizardry; the debbil in der math, Bobby! One plus one 1+1 Same thing, less parchment, less writing stick needed. It’s data compression for an era where Walmart didn’t exist
      - raverbashing 2y ago
        > Math gets more playful and fun the more you study. But not in the way teachers/professors teach it. Quite the contrary
    - inglor_cz 2y ago
      I am programmer, musician (singer), author and I used to do some martial arts when I was younger, though I had approximately 0 talent for them. I also studied maths as my major (Algebra, to be more precise). Math is infinitely playful. Trying to weasel your way into a hard problem using various results is fun. (Especially if you don't have a fixed deadline that would turn the play into stress.) It is like sitting in an alien workshop and trying very exotic tools that fit other hands. If you are more of a visual guy, play around with stuff such as fractals. There, you can visualize the intricate structure on your screen. I will never forget the moment when I saw the Mandelbrot set for the first time. Neither probably did Mandelbrot himself; according to the lore, he expected nothing like that and thought that the computer had an error.
  - nordstreem 2y ago
    Yeah need that muscle memory and not just the eyeball/ear memory Neurons aren’t special. Electrical state is all over our bodies. Need to use it to trigger the chemistry that builds muscle not just neurons
  - ein0p 2y ago
    Yep, and in a lot of fields things only get to the “fun” stage after much perspiration and effort. I’d say nearly all fields that are of practical utility are that way if you’re trying to make a dent in them.
  - Micanthus 2y ago
    But you also need students to be interested to do the practice in the first place. A big problem with modern schooling is they don't usually make a serious effort to convince students to be interested in the first place--apart from the occassional teacher going above and beyond the curriculum. When I was a sailing instructor, the first day I would always just take kids out on the boat and have fun with very little learning. That gets them invested, and from then on we can teach the necessary skills even when they're boring--tying knots, memorizing vocab, and learning points of sail and right-of-way rules is not what kids think of when they sign up to learn sailing, but it is necessary. Of course no 12 year old wants to learn geometry or literature when there's no fun, no purpose beyond "this will be useful for you as an adult I promise". They need to be hooked, and then they can go through boring stuff
    - ein0p 2y ago
      It’s sort of like any other difficult skill in that yes you need to be interested in the skill to make the effort to acquire it, but no you’re not going to be interested in 90% of the work it takes to acquire it, and some perseverance and discipline will be required. Kids need to be at peace with that.
  - mrob 2y ago
    Teachers should explain this point to students. When I was in secondary school, the teachers called the practice tasks "problems". But they obviously already knew the answers, so the problematic nature of the tasks was entirely artificial. The name felt like they were gloating about being permitted to force you to do pointless work. Calling the tasks "exercises" and explaining the analogy to physical exercise would have been much better.
    - dvdkon 2y ago
      My teachers never called practice tasks "problems", and I still didn't like doing repetitive tasks like "do 20 long-form divisions". I think students do understand that doing something over and over will make you better at that task, and it doesn't motivate them much.
      - mrob 2y ago
        That's not the mental model I had, and I doubt I'm the only one. I believed knowledge to be something you either had or didn't have. I understood that it was possible to learn things incorrectly, and to forget things (hence the necessity of revision), but I had no appreciation of "fluency" as a concept until I was an adult. As far as I understood it, the main limiting factor in education was teachers deliberately holding back knowledge. The main purpose of "problems", and especially of homework, was a show of social submission, designed to persuade the teachers to reveal the next secret. School one essentially one giant hazing ritual. There's one memory that stands out as the greatest moment in my education. My school had Acorn Archimedes computers, which came with BBC BASIC, and we were allowed to program them during lunch breaks. One of the older students programmed a Space War clone. I very much wanted to write one myself, but I didn't know how to calculate rotations. The older student refused to tell me the secret, which made perfect sense according to my dominance hierarchy model of education. I begged my math teacher for the secret, and to my surprise he actually explained how to rotate points using trigonometry. This felt like something incredibly subversive, where the teacher was giving me knowledge I hadn't earned. For this reason I still think of that teacher more favorably than any other, despite other teachers objectively doing more for me. I went on to write a superior Space War clone.
- enasterosophes 2y ago
  When I was a math student, I found the utility of lectures magnified a lot for me when I realized that the lecture isn't the best time for first exposure to material. I got a lot more benefit when I was able to gain access to the lecture notes weeks in advance and begin trying to understand it by myself at a leisurely pace. Then when I attended lectures I was able to do so in a relaxed frame of mind, with understanding of what I found confusing so far, so I could focus on that part of the lecturer's presentation, and be ready with good questions.
  - nicolas_t 2y ago
    I tried this as a student but then found that the actual useful part of a lecture is a tiny percentage and that it was just better to take advantage of the teachet’s office hour to ask questions well in advance of the class
  - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
    One of my classes at uni used the ‘flipped classroom’ method. You were supposed to watch pre-recorded lectures ahead of time (comes with the ability to pause, slow down, rewind as necessary). Then in the actual lecture, the teacher would just have a slide deck with exercises. Students tried solving first, then the teacher showed the correct solution. If you got stuck or didn’t understand, you could immediately ask questions, and those questions would also benefit other students’ understanding. It is hard to understate how much better this method was for grokking the material than the traditional ‘zoning out during the lecture and struggling with the exercises at home’. I don’t understand why all classes aren’t taught this way.
  - lanstin 2y ago
    I would and sort of still do buy the text books as soon as I registered and make sure to read at least the first few chapters before class. Makes it easier to know what to take. It’s on, ask better questions, and remember it longer. I wouldn’t do the homework tho till just before the deadline.
- devjab 2y ago
  I think part of the issue is how we learn differently. For some students the lecture is important, for others it’s a time where your mind wanders and then you’re sort of “left behind” because you didn’t pay attention. So it’s likely always going to be a complicated mix of things where you can’t really get it right for every student if you sort of follow traditional learning. I’m an external examiner for CS students as a side gig. Now that I’ve been one for 8 years, it’s a relatively easy task for me because I’ve been through their curriculum twice every year. I remember the first time, however, and how I subsequently decided I’d better refresh my own… I’m not sure if learning is the right word here, but my own “what I had been taught in CS”. I did so with edx.orc where I took a few Harvard and MIT courses on CS. What struck me about those courses was just how good the video lectures were for me. I have ADHD and bipolar type 2, and I can honestly say I didn’t really do well with CS lectures when I attended university. But these video lectures were so good, that it honestly taught me the first year of introduction and parts of the later courses in a couple of weeks. Sure… I had the foundation with me, but it also made me wonder if you couldn’t just use these lectures everywhere English speaking. Now, I don’t mean to disrespect my own professors but they were terrible at lecturing by comparison. Which isn’t too weird I guess, I imagine it’s natural for some of the top universities in the world to have some of the best lecturers. In this modern age, we can frankly share these awesome video lectures. Lectures you can pause, rewind a bit, rewatch and so on. All the things I would’ve personally benefited from immensely. Then you could have your local professors do the active learning and so on. I know it’s not likely to happen, but it should.
  - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
    > it also made me wonder if you couldn’t just use these lectures everywhere English speaking Having educators is essential for the health of any society. Educators who constantly revise the material, learn it themselves, and teach it to others. Who themselves become informal or formal teachers. This is one of the ways societies deal with change. The educational requirements change with time and place. The teachers themselves are learning all the time. Some are temporarily bad. Some are permanently bad because of bad job incentives or bad evaluation systems. Replace all this with centrally produced lectures and your society will seriously deteriorate because of the gaps between what needs to be taught at different places and times and what is taught at those places and times will widen considerably. Please understand that societies are intricate trees and vines, not machines.
- Micanthus 2y ago
  The best professor I ever had combined the two approaches. She would lecture at extremely fast pace for a few minutes, then select a student to do a related problem on the board. If the student got stuck, they could ask for help from the class and if the whole class was stuck we could ask for help from the professor of course. The in-class work wasn't graded so it was pretty low-pressure once you got used to it. After the problem, the professor went back to lecturing and repeat. But I could also easily see this backfiring in certain ways. A couple other things that enabled this to be a positive experience: 1) It was a higher level math elective, everyone in that class chose to be a math major and chose to take that particular elective. This avoids having students who simply don't care, which often ruined similar situations in high school in my experience. 2) It was a relatively small class, I think about 15 students, in a relatively small university. Because it was a small school, I already knew most of the other math majors, and the class had a more personable and trusting atmosphere. Even if you didn't know a person, and thought they were stupid or annoying, you didn't want to burn that bridge because you were almost guaranteed to be in a class with them again later. Because of all this, making a mistake was no big deal, even the shyer less-confident students didn't seem particularly nervous. 3) Class attendance and participation was not graded. This made it very clear that doing the problems was for our benefit, it wasn't busy work. 4) You didn't volunteer, and it wasn't an option to sit out. The professor literally was going person-by-person based on how we were seated, starting from a random person each class. This way it wasn't an oppurtunity for know-it-alls to show off, and less motivated and shy students couldn't just disengage With a slightly different setup it sounds like torture. But as it was, it kept the class engaged and you could immediately apply what you were learning in lecture to cement it. That was the hardest math class I ever took (discrete and combinatorial mathematics) because--for scheduling reasons--I'd gotten an exception to take it before I'd met the the prereqs, which meant I was a freshman taking this 3000-level elective in parallel with calc 2 lol. If it was with a worse professor I definitely would have failed, I was not at all prepared. I've taken classes with a completely "flipped classroom" and I just don't have the motivation to do well in classes like that, but I also can't focus enough on lectures with no engagement (at least I couldn't back then before I started ADHD medication)
- red_admiral 2y ago
  YES. If you only listen to the lecture, and perhaps re-read the notes, you won't learn much. But that's never how a lecture-based course was meant to work! In my undergrad, it was made clear to us that the learning happens when you do the worksheets, and the discussions around them in the workshops / exercise classes / tutorials / presentations. But the lectures are still there for a reason. The history of education is littered with the skulls of the failures of pure "discovery learning", sometimes rebranded as "active learning". And apart from a small elite of people who were going to be top of the class whatever you do (short of Vonnegut-style drastic measures), it does. not. work. The "traditional" method, practiced properly, contains lots of opportunities for practice (which is, naturally, "active") in some sense. It just recognizes that learners sometimes need to be told what to practice, first.
- Tainnor 2y ago
  I studied maths as a remote degree (after having completed another degree earlier at a regular university), so I didn't have lectures. There were (optional) tutoring sessions (that I didn't make use of) and a few optional in-person sessions with the teacher where they would summarise the material, but otherwise we were just expected to read the lecture notes (that were self-contained like a textbook) and do the exercises. To me that worked very well and from attending the in-person sessions, usually meeting the other students was more valuable than the actual content itself. So I guess I don't fully understand the value of lectures, at least not in maths. If I read up on the material, I can go at my own pace. Of course, everyone learns differently, so YMMV.
- Detrytus 2y ago
  Lecturing was invented in Middle Ages, before the printing press, when there might have been only a single copy of each book per university. So instead of asking students to read the book (which would be impossible) a lecturer would read it and then tell the students what the book said. Nowadays, when everybody can just read the book themselves lectures are pointless. When I was in college I basically never attended any lectures for that reason.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    Nowadays also young people hardly even read anything though - there’s just too much dopamine on YouTube and TikTok. Lectures force attention
- addcommitpush 2y ago
  Teaching ressources (i.e. prof/TA time) are limited. The question is therefore not whether lecturing is useful or where does it fit in the overall learning process, but whether those limited hours of prof/TA time are better spent lecturing vs doing something else (e.g. active learning). There is a trade off between lecturing and active learning, even if you perfectly understand what lecturing is supposed to do.
  - pas 2y ago
    The whole problem is that a college program tries to fit in a ton of stuff side-by-side, which mostly end up being introductions to deeper academic fields. (Which is not surprising as profs and TAs are academics, the usually are passionate about that field, and so on.) Which is not bad, but compared to a more coherent program which inspires and empowers students to get interested in the industry and/or maybe in research would be much much much better. And yes, of course, obviously, of-fucking-course, every year every every stakeholder in this huge circus parrots about this. And nothing happens. Credentialism and perverse incentives just continue to rob everyone involved of their passions and joy of learning. (Okay, not everyone, but there's a reason that colleges/universities become "easier" https://www.slowboring.com/p/college-students-should-study-more https://www.slowboring.com/p/college-students-should-study-m... )
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
The top answer is a worthwhile read if learning is of even remote interest. I'm forwarding it on to a teacher I know, who is always looking for ways to improve children's learning.
- tgv 2y ago
  But it's not exactly accurate. E.g., > You can actually model this precisely, mathematically, using a forgetting curve. I'm not exaggerating when I refer to these things as laws of physics That's utter bullshit. There is no precise model for retention time. It isn't mathematics. It isn't even physics. Retention time isn't even the only factor involved. So what remains of the "mathematically precise forgetting curve"? People forget more and more over time. And even that isn't 100% true.
  - rmbyrro 2y ago
    Multiple studies have found statistical patterns that can be modeled through mathematical functions. It's not mathematical in a precision and mechanical sense, but the standard deviation of practical observations from the modeled curve is low enough to make it a good predictor and guide for spaced repetition and to optimize time spent to retention ratio.
    - mjburgess 2y ago
      The laws of physics refer to real properties the world has (eg., mass, charge, etc.). Largely, when you use statistics, you're modelling epiphenomena: bundles of randomly arranged properties that aggregate to an apparent quantity that doesnt correspond to anything in the world (eg., compare "mass" with "salad"). The problem with much psychology (and anything ending in -metrics) is that mainstream research in it, for ~century, has been treating the former and latter as equivalent. There is no property of animals called, "forgetting", and anything we model with stats is, at best, an epiphenomenon. It's important not let the x-metrics disciplines get away with their pseudo-scientific propaganda on this. Populations of individuals have, on average, rates of memory (etc.) performance across time which can be approximately quantities. It is highly unlikely this corresponds to any physical property.
azeemba 2y ago
The top answer highlights a lot of different things but spaced repetition does seem to get quite a bit of emphasis. I first learned of it from my buddy's blog post on how he uses anki cards to do space repetition for basically everything: https://www.petemillspaugh.com/anki https://www.petemillspaugh.com/anki I tried to use them but haven't really stuck with it.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  Apparently med students skipped the lecture now and just use Anki cards and YouTube videos at 1.5 or faster speed to get through most of their learning related classes. I know two students who did quite well on step one and step two, but I do not believe they are using Anki now in their residency
- rgoulter 2y ago
  > I tried to use them but haven't really stuck with it. I think it's domain dependent. It's easy to recall things you encounter frequently, and difficult to recall things which are rarely encountered. Failing to recall something means taking the time to look it up. With spaced repetition, you're making the bet that it's worth spending some time in order to improve recall for a bunch of stuff. -- The surprise is how much value you can get for how little it can cost. It's likely a good bet for stuff like language learning (or healthsci), where there's a long tail of things you'd like to be able to recall quickly, and 'cost' of looking something up is quite high. (It's not a fluid conversation if you have to bring out a dictionary). Whereas with e.g. programming, you're often spending time looking stuff up anyway.
owenpalmer 2y ago
I recommend active recall combined with spaced repetition. Integrating it with a school system however, now that's a tricky problem.
zarzavat 2y ago
Something to remember is that spaced repetition is optimised for adults and teenagers. The memories of young children work somewhat differently and we don’t yet know what the optimal way to teach them is.
- nicolas_t 2y ago
  Interesting any good research studies on this?
  - zarzavat 2y ago
    There is some information on the Supermemo wiki, for example this: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_does_not_work_for_kids https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_does_not_work_for_kids The title is a bit exaggerated. Spaced repetition should work fine for adolescents, it probably doesn’t work for very young children, and for the ages 5-10 it’s going to need some adaption. Spaced repetition is a trick to get the adult brain to retain knowledge, something it does not do easily. Adults are optimized to forget daily life (what did you have for lunch yesterday?), but to remember sporadic and important events, things that have may impact on survival. Spaced repetition tricks the adult mind into thinking that your daily Spanish vocab is important because you didn’t test today’s word for three months. Younger children are different. Their greater plasticity means that they can learn languages without much conscious effort, as long as the volume of information is high enough. A child doesn’t learn a language 10 words a day like an adult does. It may be volume rather than spacing that is more important in children.
    - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
      Naturally, in a large volume of normal conversation, the most common words are going to repeat most frequently (see Zipf’s law). Therefore, getting a lot of input is still (a form of) spaced repetition, just not a conscious one. In fact, it has been hypothesized (Krashen’s input hypothesis) that adults also acquire language subconsciously through input. We just spend less time on it than children.
    - rahimnathwani 2y ago
dclowd9901 2y ago
Excellent and interesting read. This question definitely does not pertain to the subject of the answer specifically but rather these Stack Exchange posts I see on here from time: this answer is so in-depth, so well written and so informative, it could be an entire article in a neuroscience magazine. Who goes to these kinds of lengths to post an answer on a niche Stack Exchange question? And why?
- JustinSkycak 2y ago
  Hey, I'm the guy who posted the answer. Why did I put so much effort into it? Well, 1) I'm really passionate about using science/technology to improve the state of math education (that's my job and my hobby and basically my whole life), and 2) I really disliked the original top answer, which was basically claiming there's no scientific insights teachers can use to improve their students' learning, something I know to be factually incorrect.
tornadofart 2y ago
I think it's absolutely cool that someone took the time to write such a good answer.
Willish42 2y ago
I'm sure I'm probably just less used to seeing StackExchange answers than StackOverflow answers but I am truly in awe at the length and thoroughness of the existing currently-top answer. By my quick + dirty JS console calculations, it's ~2930 words: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/a/27841 https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/a/27841
moi2388 2y ago
From computer science, read the title of the paper “attention is all you need” ;) That’s not true of course, but motivation is key. Do they actually read the books, do they solve the problems themselves? Or do they read the summary before filling in the multiple choice question? The first stimulates learning, the latter temporary memorization
- DrDroop 2y ago
  No, I think there is more to it then people what to admit. For example, there is a lot of comorbidity between ADHD and narcissism. There might be less social stigma about being the quirky inattentive ADHDer rather then the selfish narcissist but they are both attention disorders in some way. MRI scans of people diagnosed with NPD show that there brains prefer their dreams over reality. Meaning, there is a pathway in your brain for sensory information (exteroception) and a pathway for predictions your brain makes (interoception). For people with ADHD and NPD their interoception will often overwrite their exteroception when there is a conflicting signal.
  - circlefavshape 2y ago
    Ooh! This is exactly what I see in my teens' friends - a preference for their fantasy world over reality. Do you have a reference?
    - DrDroop 2y ago
      Sorry, I can't find it anymore. I got it from the youtube channel by Sam Vaknin. He is a convicted coin man with NPD, so take everything he says with a grain of salt. That having said, his work tend to lack the sort of victim pandering you see in other narcissism "experts". EDIT: there are a number of other studies on google scholar linking ADHD to psychopathy (in prison populations), just not the one with the fMRI scans.
aszantu 2y ago
seemingly a high percentage of people responds to changes in diet, 30 percent or so? If they have any issues: depression, low energy, adhd, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ...? It might be beneficial to those people, to try an elimination diet. The idea I got eventually is this: We've all been wrecking our guts with fast food and unknown chemicals, so everyone is affected to a certain degree. Here's my collection, feel free to add articles if you find something related. https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum/blob/main/DeficienciesSideEffects.md https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum/blob/ma...
- mial 2y ago
  The anecdote about taking 50k IU of vitamin D is really dangerous. Above 4000 daily IU is already putting a lot of people in hypervitaminosis (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21646368/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21646368/)
  - KingMob 2y ago
    Yeah, that's a very high dose. It's true most of us are deficient in vitamin D, but it's the kind of thing that should probably be regularly monitored once supplementation starts, rather than popping pills and hoping for the best.
  - aszantu 2y ago
    if your vitamin D makes you nauseous, you're taking too much
growingkittens 2y ago
> Most students are not motivated to learn the subject material. Many students are demoralized by school because schooling doesn't bother telling kids why they are learning something. In elementary school, when the teacher stepped into the hallway, a common complaint to hear was "what's the point of this?" By middle and high school, the question became a mindset - "this is pointless."
shandor 2y ago
I read Make It Stick [0] recently, and it seems to agree on almost everything on the science side that the top answer here brings up, if anyone is interested. It discusses many of the mentioned themes (spaced repetition vs. "blocking", mixed practice, testing effect, desirable difficulty) in more detail. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...
kreyenborgi 2y ago
> Instructional techniques that promote the most learning in experts, promote the least learning in beginners, and vice versa. This is known as the expertise reversal effect[0]. An important consequence is that effective methods of practice for students typically should not emulate what experts do in the professional workplace (e.g., working in groups to solve open-ended problems). Does this also go for programming? Is this an argument for learning academic stuff in academia and not just hands-on vocational group projects? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expertise_reversal_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expertise_reversal_effect
nonrandomstring 2y ago
[dead]
teleforce 2y ago
Please check this excellent book Outsmart Your Brain for learning and teaching by Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychology professor. Here's the HN post on the review: Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38513721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38513721
JR1427 2y ago
There is also a difference between "understanding" and "understanding and being practiced" at something. In the real world is not necessarily important to be able to rattle off information off the top of your head. More import is simply knowing that a thing exists, so you can go and look it up. Lectures are good at providing the latter.
aaron695 2y ago
Schools can't magic dumb students better. School have know close to maximum learning for 100 years. Most of school is fluff. Better learning, or more efficient learning won't change it. By far the largest issue currently is behavioral problems and worsening situation dealing with them. This is bad students making good students fail. Within the confines of what's currently allowed and dealing with politicians, drugging bad students seems the best solution. The problem is good students are also being drugged. The cognitive psychology solution is convincing parents of good students not to drug their kids.
adamfaliq42 2y ago
Thank you for posting this. As a Maths tutor for children, I find this really useful.
rahimnathwani 2y ago
The top answer is written by Justin Skycak (https://www.justinmath.com/ https://www.justinmath.com/) who works on Math Academy (https://www.mathacademy.com/ https://www.mathacademy.com/). Math Academy is awesome. I am a happy customer. Previous HN comments about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=mathacademy&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
sn9 2y ago
One of my favorite stories of basically successfully implementing this in practice was this anecdote of teaching linear algebra at Dartmouth in the 90s: https://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra.html https://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebr...

143 points by azeemba 2y ago

> abandoning traditional lecturing in favor of active learning I think this is a misunderstanding of what "lecturing" is supposed to do. It's supposed to _introduce_ you to the material at a high level. Think of it as of skimming a scientific paper. The actual "learning" is something you do on your own after the lecture (although some lecturers require that you _first_ study the subject and then listen to the lecture), and when doing assignments. IOW, it's not a be all end all, and it shouldn't be treated as the only thing you need to learn the material.

BLKNSLVR 2y ago
I think that's lost on a lot of people though, including some/many teachers and lecturers, especially those who enjoy conducting lectures. Not for OP, but for typical discussion: A good way of getting people to understand how lecturing is really only introductory is to consider learning a sport. You can get lectured for hours, days, years on technique and strategy and reading the play and knowing your team mates. But pull on the boots or put a racquet in your hand and you're starting from scratch.
qp11 2y ago
Herbert Simon - "The criticism of practice (called "drill and kill") and the emphasis on sparking interest is very common. But all evidence, from the lab and studies of professionals, indicate that real competence comes with extensive practice. In denying the critical role of practice one is denying children the very thing they need to achieve real competence. The instructional task is not to "kill" motivation by demanding drill, but to find tasks that provide practice while at the same time sustaining interest"
- wumbo 2y ago
  As a software engineer, musician, and now taking on martial arts, yes. For me it helps that I enjoy perfecting/varying/repeating. There could be some element of play in math homework. Play is practice that sparks interest. But what is playful math? “Here’s a character for Pathfinder. Optimize the shit out of it.”
  - chongli 2y ago
    Math gets more playful and fun the more you study. The most fun I’ve had with math was when working through difficult proofs in logic, analysis, abstract algebra, and geometry. Some of the math learned in high school can be made more fun and playful with applications such as you mentioned, or with contest math designed for high school students. For a few years now I’ve been involved with the CEMC [1] (at my Alma mater) as a grader for the Euclid math contest which I think is quite fun without requiring anything beyond high school math (doesn’t even require calculus). [1] https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/contests.html https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/contests.html
    - nordstreem 2y ago
      Not an endorsement but a criticism of how schools teach math: https://www.mentava.com/ https://www.mentava.com/ According to Mentava their program has 5th graders ready for AP math and middle schoolers ready for college computer science. 20 minutes a day. It’s just another language. A lot of people see it as esoteric wizardry; the debbil in der math, Bobby! One plus one 1+1 Same thing, less parchment, less writing stick needed. It’s data compression for an era where Walmart didn’t exist
    - raverbashing 2y ago
      > Math gets more playful and fun the more you study. But not in the way teachers/professors teach it. Quite the contrary
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    I am programmer, musician (singer), author and I used to do some martial arts when I was younger, though I had approximately 0 talent for them. I also studied maths as my major (Algebra, to be more precise). Math is infinitely playful. Trying to weasel your way into a hard problem using various results is fun. (Especially if you don't have a fixed deadline that would turn the play into stress.) It is like sitting in an alien workshop and trying very exotic tools that fit other hands. If you are more of a visual guy, play around with stuff such as fractals. There, you can visualize the intricate structure on your screen. I will never forget the moment when I saw the Mandelbrot set for the first time. Neither probably did Mandelbrot himself; according to the lore, he expected nothing like that and thought that the computer had an error.
- nordstreem 2y ago
  Yeah need that muscle memory and not just the eyeball/ear memory Neurons aren’t special. Electrical state is all over our bodies. Need to use it to trigger the chemistry that builds muscle not just neurons
- ein0p 2y ago
  Yep, and in a lot of fields things only get to the “fun” stage after much perspiration and effort. I’d say nearly all fields that are of practical utility are that way if you’re trying to make a dent in them.
- Micanthus 2y ago
  But you also need students to be interested to do the practice in the first place. A big problem with modern schooling is they don't usually make a serious effort to convince students to be interested in the first place--apart from the occassional teacher going above and beyond the curriculum. When I was a sailing instructor, the first day I would always just take kids out on the boat and have fun with very little learning. That gets them invested, and from then on we can teach the necessary skills even when they're boring--tying knots, memorizing vocab, and learning points of sail and right-of-way rules is not what kids think of when they sign up to learn sailing, but it is necessary. Of course no 12 year old wants to learn geometry or literature when there's no fun, no purpose beyond "this will be useful for you as an adult I promise". They need to be hooked, and then they can go through boring stuff
  - ein0p 2y ago
    It’s sort of like any other difficult skill in that yes you need to be interested in the skill to make the effort to acquire it, but no you’re not going to be interested in 90% of the work it takes to acquire it, and some perseverance and discipline will be required. Kids need to be at peace with that.
- mrob 2y ago
  Teachers should explain this point to students. When I was in secondary school, the teachers called the practice tasks "problems". But they obviously already knew the answers, so the problematic nature of the tasks was entirely artificial. The name felt like they were gloating about being permitted to force you to do pointless work. Calling the tasks "exercises" and explaining the analogy to physical exercise would have been much better.
  - dvdkon 2y ago
    My teachers never called practice tasks "problems", and I still didn't like doing repetitive tasks like "do 20 long-form divisions". I think students do understand that doing something over and over will make you better at that task, and it doesn't motivate them much.
    - mrob 2y ago
      That's not the mental model I had, and I doubt I'm the only one. I believed knowledge to be something you either had or didn't have. I understood that it was possible to learn things incorrectly, and to forget things (hence the necessity of revision), but I had no appreciation of "fluency" as a concept until I was an adult. As far as I understood it, the main limiting factor in education was teachers deliberately holding back knowledge. The main purpose of "problems", and especially of homework, was a show of social submission, designed to persuade the teachers to reveal the next secret. School one essentially one giant hazing ritual. There's one memory that stands out as the greatest moment in my education. My school had Acorn Archimedes computers, which came with BBC BASIC, and we were allowed to program them during lunch breaks. One of the older students programmed a Space War clone. I very much wanted to write one myself, but I didn't know how to calculate rotations. The older student refused to tell me the secret, which made perfect sense according to my dominance hierarchy model of education. I begged my math teacher for the secret, and to my surprise he actually explained how to rotate points using trigonometry. This felt like something incredibly subversive, where the teacher was giving me knowledge I hadn't earned. For this reason I still think of that teacher more favorably than any other, despite other teachers objectively doing more for me. I went on to write a superior Space War clone.
enasterosophes 2y ago
When I was a math student, I found the utility of lectures magnified a lot for me when I realized that the lecture isn't the best time for first exposure to material. I got a lot more benefit when I was able to gain access to the lecture notes weeks in advance and begin trying to understand it by myself at a leisurely pace. Then when I attended lectures I was able to do so in a relaxed frame of mind, with understanding of what I found confusing so far, so I could focus on that part of the lecturer's presentation, and be ready with good questions.
- nicolas_t 2y ago
  I tried this as a student but then found that the actual useful part of a lecture is a tiny percentage and that it was just better to take advantage of the teachet’s office hour to ask questions well in advance of the class
- Tijdreiziger 2y ago
  One of my classes at uni used the ‘flipped classroom’ method. You were supposed to watch pre-recorded lectures ahead of time (comes with the ability to pause, slow down, rewind as necessary). Then in the actual lecture, the teacher would just have a slide deck with exercises. Students tried solving first, then the teacher showed the correct solution. If you got stuck or didn’t understand, you could immediately ask questions, and those questions would also benefit other students’ understanding. It is hard to understate how much better this method was for grokking the material than the traditional ‘zoning out during the lecture and struggling with the exercises at home’. I don’t understand why all classes aren’t taught this way.
- lanstin 2y ago
  I would and sort of still do buy the text books as soon as I registered and make sure to read at least the first few chapters before class. Makes it easier to know what to take. It’s on, ask better questions, and remember it longer. I wouldn’t do the homework tho till just before the deadline.
devjab 2y ago
I think part of the issue is how we learn differently. For some students the lecture is important, for others it’s a time where your mind wanders and then you’re sort of “left behind” because you didn’t pay attention. So it’s likely always going to be a complicated mix of things where you can’t really get it right for every student if you sort of follow traditional learning. I’m an external examiner for CS students as a side gig. Now that I’ve been one for 8 years, it’s a relatively easy task for me because I’ve been through their curriculum twice every year. I remember the first time, however, and how I subsequently decided I’d better refresh my own… I’m not sure if learning is the right word here, but my own “what I had been taught in CS”. I did so with edx.orc where I took a few Harvard and MIT courses on CS. What struck me about those courses was just how good the video lectures were for me. I have ADHD and bipolar type 2, and I can honestly say I didn’t really do well with CS lectures when I attended university. But these video lectures were so good, that it honestly taught me the first year of introduction and parts of the later courses in a couple of weeks. Sure… I had the foundation with me, but it also made me wonder if you couldn’t just use these lectures everywhere English speaking. Now, I don’t mean to disrespect my own professors but they were terrible at lecturing by comparison. Which isn’t too weird I guess, I imagine it’s natural for some of the top universities in the world to have some of the best lecturers. In this modern age, we can frankly share these awesome video lectures. Lectures you can pause, rewind a bit, rewatch and so on. All the things I would’ve personally benefited from immensely. Then you could have your local professors do the active learning and so on. I know it’s not likely to happen, but it should.
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  > it also made me wonder if you couldn’t just use these lectures everywhere English speaking Having educators is essential for the health of any society. Educators who constantly revise the material, learn it themselves, and teach it to others. Who themselves become informal or formal teachers. This is one of the ways societies deal with change. The educational requirements change with time and place. The teachers themselves are learning all the time. Some are temporarily bad. Some are permanently bad because of bad job incentives or bad evaluation systems. Replace all this with centrally produced lectures and your society will seriously deteriorate because of the gaps between what needs to be taught at different places and times and what is taught at those places and times will widen considerably. Please understand that societies are intricate trees and vines, not machines.
Micanthus 2y ago
The best professor I ever had combined the two approaches. She would lecture at extremely fast pace for a few minutes, then select a student to do a related problem on the board. If the student got stuck, they could ask for help from the class and if the whole class was stuck we could ask for help from the professor of course. The in-class work wasn't graded so it was pretty low-pressure once you got used to it. After the problem, the professor went back to lecturing and repeat. But I could also easily see this backfiring in certain ways. A couple other things that enabled this to be a positive experience: 1) It was a higher level math elective, everyone in that class chose to be a math major and chose to take that particular elective. This avoids having students who simply don't care, which often ruined similar situations in high school in my experience. 2) It was a relatively small class, I think about 15 students, in a relatively small university. Because it was a small school, I already knew most of the other math majors, and the class had a more personable and trusting atmosphere. Even if you didn't know a person, and thought they were stupid or annoying, you didn't want to burn that bridge because you were almost guaranteed to be in a class with them again later. Because of all this, making a mistake was no big deal, even the shyer less-confident students didn't seem particularly nervous. 3) Class attendance and participation was not graded. This made it very clear that doing the problems was for our benefit, it wasn't busy work. 4) You didn't volunteer, and it wasn't an option to sit out. The professor literally was going person-by-person based on how we were seated, starting from a random person each class. This way it wasn't an oppurtunity for know-it-alls to show off, and less motivated and shy students couldn't just disengage With a slightly different setup it sounds like torture. But as it was, it kept the class engaged and you could immediately apply what you were learning in lecture to cement it. That was the hardest math class I ever took (discrete and combinatorial mathematics) because--for scheduling reasons--I'd gotten an exception to take it before I'd met the the prereqs, which meant I was a freshman taking this 3000-level elective in parallel with calc 2 lol. If it was with a worse professor I definitely would have failed, I was not at all prepared. I've taken classes with a completely "flipped classroom" and I just don't have the motivation to do well in classes like that, but I also can't focus enough on lectures with no engagement (at least I couldn't back then before I started ADHD medication)
red_admiral 2y ago
YES. If you only listen to the lecture, and perhaps re-read the notes, you won't learn much. But that's never how a lecture-based course was meant to work! In my undergrad, it was made clear to us that the learning happens when you do the worksheets, and the discussions around them in the workshops / exercise classes / tutorials / presentations. But the lectures are still there for a reason. The history of education is littered with the skulls of the failures of pure "discovery learning", sometimes rebranded as "active learning". And apart from a small elite of people who were going to be top of the class whatever you do (short of Vonnegut-style drastic measures), it does. not. work. The "traditional" method, practiced properly, contains lots of opportunities for practice (which is, naturally, "active") in some sense. It just recognizes that learners sometimes need to be told what to practice, first.
Tainnor 2y ago
I studied maths as a remote degree (after having completed another degree earlier at a regular university), so I didn't have lectures. There were (optional) tutoring sessions (that I didn't make use of) and a few optional in-person sessions with the teacher where they would summarise the material, but otherwise we were just expected to read the lecture notes (that were self-contained like a textbook) and do the exercises. To me that worked very well and from attending the in-person sessions, usually meeting the other students was more valuable than the actual content itself. So I guess I don't fully understand the value of lectures, at least not in maths. If I read up on the material, I can go at my own pace. Of course, everyone learns differently, so YMMV.
Detrytus 2y ago
Lecturing was invented in Middle Ages, before the printing press, when there might have been only a single copy of each book per university. So instead of asking students to read the book (which would be impossible) a lecturer would read it and then tell the students what the book said. Nowadays, when everybody can just read the book themselves lectures are pointless. When I was in college I basically never attended any lectures for that reason.
- ein0p 2y ago
  Nowadays also young people hardly even read anything though - there’s just too much dopamine on YouTube and TikTok. Lectures force attention
addcommitpush 2y ago
Teaching ressources (i.e. prof/TA time) are limited. The question is therefore not whether lecturing is useful or where does it fit in the overall learning process, but whether those limited hours of prof/TA time are better spent lecturing vs doing something else (e.g. active learning). There is a trade off between lecturing and active learning, even if you perfectly understand what lecturing is supposed to do.
- pas 2y ago
  The whole problem is that a college program tries to fit in a ton of stuff side-by-side, which mostly end up being introductions to deeper academic fields. (Which is not surprising as profs and TAs are academics, the usually are passionate about that field, and so on.) Which is not bad, but compared to a more coherent program which inspires and empowers students to get interested in the industry and/or maybe in research would be much much much better. And yes, of course, obviously, of-fucking-course, every year every every stakeholder in this huge circus parrots about this. And nothing happens. Credentialism and perverse incentives just continue to rob everyone involved of their passions and joy of learning. (Okay, not everyone, but there's a reason that colleges/universities become "easier" https://www.slowboring.com/p/college-students-should-study-more https://www.slowboring.com/p/college-students-should-study-m... )

BLKNSLVR 2y ago

The top answer is a worthwhile read if learning is of even remote interest. I'm forwarding it on to a teacher I know, who is always looking for ways to improve children's learning.

tgv 2y ago
But it's not exactly accurate. E.g., > You can actually model this precisely, mathematically, using a forgetting curve. I'm not exaggerating when I refer to these things as laws of physics That's utter bullshit. There is no precise model for retention time. It isn't mathematics. It isn't even physics. Retention time isn't even the only factor involved. So what remains of the "mathematically precise forgetting curve"? People forget more and more over time. And even that isn't 100% true.
- rmbyrro 2y ago
  Multiple studies have found statistical patterns that can be modeled through mathematical functions. It's not mathematical in a precision and mechanical sense, but the standard deviation of practical observations from the modeled curve is low enough to make it a good predictor and guide for spaced repetition and to optimize time spent to retention ratio.
  - mjburgess 2y ago
    The laws of physics refer to real properties the world has (eg., mass, charge, etc.). Largely, when you use statistics, you're modelling epiphenomena: bundles of randomly arranged properties that aggregate to an apparent quantity that doesnt correspond to anything in the world (eg., compare "mass" with "salad"). The problem with much psychology (and anything ending in -metrics) is that mainstream research in it, for ~century, has been treating the former and latter as equivalent. There is no property of animals called, "forgetting", and anything we model with stats is, at best, an epiphenomenon. It's important not let the x-metrics disciplines get away with their pseudo-scientific propaganda on this. Populations of individuals have, on average, rates of memory (etc.) performance across time which can be approximately quantities. It is highly unlikely this corresponds to any physical property.

azeemba 2y ago

The top answer highlights a lot of different things but spaced repetition does seem to get quite a bit of emphasis. I first learned of it from my buddy's blog post on how he uses anki cards to do space repetition for basically everything: https://www.petemillspaugh.com/anki https://www.petemillspaugh.com/anki I tried to use them but haven't really stuck with it.

readthenotes1 2y ago
Apparently med students skipped the lecture now and just use Anki cards and YouTube videos at 1.5 or faster speed to get through most of their learning related classes. I know two students who did quite well on step one and step two, but I do not believe they are using Anki now in their residency
rgoulter 2y ago
> I tried to use them but haven't really stuck with it. I think it's domain dependent. It's easy to recall things you encounter frequently, and difficult to recall things which are rarely encountered. Failing to recall something means taking the time to look it up. With spaced repetition, you're making the bet that it's worth spending some time in order to improve recall for a bunch of stuff. -- The surprise is how much value you can get for how little it can cost. It's likely a good bet for stuff like language learning (or healthsci), where there's a long tail of things you'd like to be able to recall quickly, and 'cost' of looking something up is quite high. (It's not a fluid conversation if you have to bring out a dictionary). Whereas with e.g. programming, you're often spending time looking stuff up anyway.

owenpalmer 2y ago

I recommend active recall combined with spaced repetition. Integrating it with a school system however, now that's a tricky problem.

zarzavat 2y ago

Something to remember is that spaced repetition is optimised for adults and teenagers. The memories of young children work somewhat differently and we don’t yet know what the optimal way to teach them is.

nicolas_t 2y ago
Interesting any good research studies on this?
- zarzavat 2y ago
  There is some information on the Supermemo wiki, for example this: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_does_not_work_for_kids https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_does_not_work_for_kids The title is a bit exaggerated. Spaced repetition should work fine for adolescents, it probably doesn’t work for very young children, and for the ages 5-10 it’s going to need some adaption. Spaced repetition is a trick to get the adult brain to retain knowledge, something it does not do easily. Adults are optimized to forget daily life (what did you have for lunch yesterday?), but to remember sporadic and important events, things that have may impact on survival. Spaced repetition tricks the adult mind into thinking that your daily Spanish vocab is important because you didn’t test today’s word for three months. Younger children are different. Their greater plasticity means that they can learn languages without much conscious effort, as long as the volume of information is high enough. A child doesn’t learn a language 10 words a day like an adult does. It may be volume rather than spacing that is more important in children.
  - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
    Naturally, in a large volume of normal conversation, the most common words are going to repeat most frequently (see Zipf’s law). Therefore, getting a lot of input is still (a form of) spaced repetition, just not a conscious one. In fact, it has been hypothesized (Krashen’s input hypothesis) that adults also acquire language subconsciously through input. We just spend less time on it than children.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago

dclowd9901 2y ago

Excellent and interesting read. This question definitely does not pertain to the subject of the answer specifically but rather these Stack Exchange posts I see on here from time: this answer is so in-depth, so well written and so informative, it could be an entire article in a neuroscience magazine. Who goes to these kinds of lengths to post an answer on a niche Stack Exchange question? And why?

JustinSkycak 2y ago
Hey, I'm the guy who posted the answer. Why did I put so much effort into it? Well, 1) I'm really passionate about using science/technology to improve the state of math education (that's my job and my hobby and basically my whole life), and 2) I really disliked the original top answer, which was basically claiming there's no scientific insights teachers can use to improve their students' learning, something I know to be factually incorrect.

tornadofart 2y ago

I think it's absolutely cool that someone took the time to write such a good answer.

Willish42 2y ago

I'm sure I'm probably just less used to seeing StackExchange answers than StackOverflow answers but I am truly in awe at the length and thoroughness of the existing currently-top answer. By my quick + dirty JS console calculations, it's ~2930 words: https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/a/27841 https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/a/27841

moi2388 2y ago

From computer science, read the title of the paper “attention is all you need” ;) That’s not true of course, but motivation is key. Do they actually read the books, do they solve the problems themselves? Or do they read the summary before filling in the multiple choice question? The first stimulates learning, the latter temporary memorization

DrDroop 2y ago
No, I think there is more to it then people what to admit. For example, there is a lot of comorbidity between ADHD and narcissism. There might be less social stigma about being the quirky inattentive ADHDer rather then the selfish narcissist but they are both attention disorders in some way. MRI scans of people diagnosed with NPD show that there brains prefer their dreams over reality. Meaning, there is a pathway in your brain for sensory information (exteroception) and a pathway for predictions your brain makes (interoception). For people with ADHD and NPD their interoception will often overwrite their exteroception when there is a conflicting signal.
- circlefavshape 2y ago
  Ooh! This is exactly what I see in my teens' friends - a preference for their fantasy world over reality. Do you have a reference?
  - DrDroop 2y ago
    Sorry, I can't find it anymore. I got it from the youtube channel by Sam Vaknin. He is a convicted coin man with NPD, so take everything he says with a grain of salt. That having said, his work tend to lack the sort of victim pandering you see in other narcissism "experts". EDIT: there are a number of other studies on google scholar linking ADHD to psychopathy (in prison populations), just not the one with the fMRI scans.

aszantu 2y ago

seemingly a high percentage of people responds to changes in diet, 30 percent or so? If they have any issues: depression, low energy, adhd, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ...? It might be beneficial to those people, to try an elimination diet. The idea I got eventually is this: We've all been wrecking our guts with fast food and unknown chemicals, so everyone is affected to a certain degree. Here's my collection, feel free to add articles if you find something related. https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum/blob/main/DeficienciesSideEffects.md https://github.com/cutestuff/FoodDepressionConundrum/blob/ma...

mial 2y ago
The anecdote about taking 50k IU of vitamin D is really dangerous. Above 4000 daily IU is already putting a lot of people in hypervitaminosis (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21646368/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21646368/)
- KingMob 2y ago
  Yeah, that's a very high dose. It's true most of us are deficient in vitamin D, but it's the kind of thing that should probably be regularly monitored once supplementation starts, rather than popping pills and hoping for the best.
- aszantu 2y ago
  if your vitamin D makes you nauseous, you're taking too much

growingkittens 2y ago

> Most students are not motivated to learn the subject material. Many students are demoralized by school because schooling doesn't bother telling kids why they are learning something. In elementary school, when the teacher stepped into the hallway, a common complaint to hear was "what's the point of this?" By middle and high school, the question became a mindset - "this is pointless."

shandor 2y ago

I read Make It Stick [0] recently, and it seems to agree on almost everything on the science side that the top answer here brings up, if anyone is interested. It discusses many of the mentioned themes (spaced repetition vs. "blocking", mixed practice, testing effect, desirable difficulty) in more detail. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...

kreyenborgi 2y ago

> Instructional techniques that promote the most learning in experts, promote the least learning in beginners, and vice versa. This is known as the expertise reversal effect[0]. An important consequence is that effective methods of practice for students typically should not emulate what experts do in the professional workplace (e.g., working in groups to solve open-ended problems). Does this also go for programming? Is this an argument for learning academic stuff in academia and not just hands-on vocational group projects? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expertise_reversal_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expertise_reversal_effect

nonrandomstring 2y ago

[dead]

teleforce 2y ago

Please check this excellent book Outsmart Your Brain for learning and teaching by Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychology professor. Here's the HN post on the review: Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38513721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38513721

JR1427 2y ago

There is also a difference between "understanding" and "understanding and being practiced" at something. In the real world is not necessarily important to be able to rattle off information off the top of your head. More import is simply knowing that a thing exists, so you can go and look it up. Lectures are good at providing the latter.

aaron695 2y ago

Schools can't magic dumb students better. School have know close to maximum learning for 100 years. Most of school is fluff. Better learning, or more efficient learning won't change it. By far the largest issue currently is behavioral problems and worsening situation dealing with them. This is bad students making good students fail. Within the confines of what's currently allowed and dealing with politicians, drugging bad students seems the best solution. The problem is good students are also being drugged. The cognitive psychology solution is convincing parents of good students not to drug their kids.

adamfaliq42 2y ago

Thank you for posting this. As a Maths tutor for children, I find this really useful.

rahimnathwani 2y ago

The top answer is written by Justin Skycak (https://www.justinmath.com/ https://www.justinmath.com/) who works on Math Academy (https://www.mathacademy.com/ https://www.mathacademy.com/). Math Academy is awesome. I am a happy customer. Previous HN comments about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=mathacademy&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

sn9 2y ago

One of my favorite stories of basically successfully implementing this in practice was this anecdote of teaching linear algebra at Dartmouth in the 90s: https://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra.html https://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebr...