Learning How to Learn

108 points by maxan 6 years ago | 5 comments

Very interesting roundup. Another article that takes the same line would be [1].

[1]: https://www.davidculley.com/learning-how-to-learn/

Benjammer 6 years ago |

Another simple trick is to really make a strong effort to learn the jargon of whatever you are learning. It can seem corny from the outside at first, and if you start using jargon with non-enthusiasts, you might not get the best reactions. But learning the ontology of a topic can help balance between finding unknown unknowns through exploration ("I just need to do it and get my hands dirty to learn") and filling in known gaps in your mental knowledge/skill framework. (Disclaimer: I learned this concept from Tim Ferriss' book, 4 Hour Chef)

Qision 6 years ago |

Thanks for this, it's a nice summary. The final section about what doesn't work is really interesting and in fact too short! I really thought there was "learning styles".

pbhjpbhj 6 years ago | |

I've seen this about learning styles before and it doesn't seem to tally with my own learning - I need to write stuff to retain it, and I need visuals for quick learning. If I see a map of a place for a few minutes then I can navigate, talk to me about the place (this is in the North, this is next to that) for an hour and I'd still be hopelessly lost. You can argue that this is just using the best medium, but other people don't appear to be able to pick up map based info in the same way; other people seem to prefer oral/aural reptition.

I can see that all learning styles work for all people, but the idea that there's not some people who receive learning better under different styles seems really unlikely, and thus needing very strong proof.

Doing pottery teaching I definitely would say that students split in to those who one could simply explain to, and others who needed to see it done, and others that wanted something diagrammatic but could grasp without necessarily seeing the specific actions. I always approached the learning tasks the same way and relied on the students (all ages) to lead me, and transformed the style according to the group: so this is a fascinating result to me. The students never said "oh I'm a X-style learner" (eg "I'm a visual learner") so it seems unlikely to me that they were demanding a learning style because of a false pre-conception of themselves. It could be that there was a range of intelligence, and that those who were more "intelligent" could do the 3D mental manipulations/visualisations to grasp the concepts, and so didn't need images/demonstrations ... but that would still be different sorts of people having different educational styles that benefited them more.

Anyone reference some more, readable, developments of this concept over the last couple of years since the result was announced?

>"So most students are not employing study strategies that mesh with self-reported learning preferences, and the minority who do show no academic benefit. Although students believe that learning preferences influence performance, this research affirms the mounting evidence that they do not, even when students are mastering information on their own. These findings suggest a general lack of student awareness about the processes and behaviors that support effective learning. Consistent with this notion, Hussman and O’Loughlin also found negative correlations between many of the common study strategies reported by students (e.g., making flashcards, use of outside websites) and course performance. Thus regardless of individual learning style or the alignment of the style with study techniques, many students are adopting strategies that simply do not support comprehension and retention of information." (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-...) //

One of the most intelligent guys at my Uni (way back!) always used flash-cards (spaced repetition); are they saying that's a very poor way for _all_ people to learn. He must have been even more of a genius (I think he got the top marks in the Chem exams, at what was then the 3rd top Uni in the UK) than I imagined.

The fact that students didn't adapt their learning to their perceived style of learning doesn't mean they weren't learning better from the stuff that matched "their style".

A very muddled bunch of assumptions in that article.

RickJWagner 6 years ago |

Thanks to the poster.

I took a MooC by the same title a while back. It was a good class.