The more I use Anki, the more I fail to understand what the point of just watching lectures, reading textbooks, etc. only one time is. I mean seriously, what’s the point? What’s the point of watching a lecture or reading a textbook chapter if you’re gonna forget it a day later without revisiting it or applying it?
Spaced repetition research has its roots all the way back to the late 1800s, with Ebbinghaus’ work on the forgetting curve. Multiple studies since the 1970s have shown that spaced repetition is effective for the long-term retention of learning material.
Even so, here we find ourselves halfway to 2022, with Anki and similar SRS being fringe software that essentially none of the general population knows about. Despite its proven benefits, the prevailing study strategies of the overwhelming percentage of students are devoid of any spaced repetition.
Some of this might have to do with the laziness of people and not wanting to spend time to review the information that they’ve learned when they could alternatively just cram before any assessments of knowledge, but another part may be due to the fact that the actual purveyors of knowledge (i.e. lecturers, textbook companies. whatever) do not actually provide any means for students to retain what they learn.
Is the onus completely on the student to implement spaced repetition? Or should the teachers put some effort forth to create decks or other means of spaced repetition for their students? I’m just confused as to why we’re here in 2021 with lectures being provided without any regard for long-term retention. The reality is that any lecture you watch will be promptly forgotten by you in a couple of days without revisiting it. What, then, is the point of even watching the lecture in the first place if you don’t implement spaced repetition to remember what you’ve learned?
If someone could please give their perspective on this or point out some cognitive distortion that makes this question unreasonable/unfeasible, I’d greatly appreciate it.
I’ve seen some strategies online, but I am interested in ones that have been demonstrated to actually be effective.
In this article:
- Why do we forget things?
- Prerequisites to knowledge building
- The spacing effect and spaced repetition
- Active recall and the Testing effect
- How to apply all this in real life?
Why do we forget things?
Many people assume that they have poor memory because they forget things like their car keys or their friend's birthdays, but the brain is working as it should!
We humans didn't evolve millions of years to remember every single thing that happens to us. We evolved to survive. That means that the brain had to distinguish which information was relevant to our survival, remember it, and discard everything else to save resources. And this is roughly how the brain does it:
To encode memory, first, the information has to enter the short-term memory to store the data. This happens as soon as the person is exposed to the stimulus. The short-term memory is part of the working memory, where the brain stores the information not just to store, but to manipulate it. In both processes, the data is lost almost as soon as the attention is shifted.
To make the transition to long-term memory, we have to consolidate the memory. There are two types of memory consolidation:
- Synaptic Consolidation: This can be thought of as the prolonged strengthening of synaptic transmission, or in other words, the strengthening of the signal between the neurons.
- Systems Consolidation: This is a reorganization process in which memories from the hippocampal region, where memories are first encoded, are moved to the neo-cortex in a more permanent form of storage.
Our objective is to consolidate the memory for future use, and now that we understand a little more about how the brain works, we can use this knowledge to optimize the learning process and remember anything for as long as we want.
... keep reading on reddit ➡Hi guys, I'm a doctor based in the UK. I've got a youtube channel - which is all about medicine, studying and learning. I've recently uploaded a video about 'How to learn anything faster' - the link is attached. Please check it out if that's something you're into and let me know what you think. Thanks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buc9dawCPWQ
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Hi! Sorry for the long-winded post.
I'm wondering if anyone on r/learntodraw is familiar with the work of K. Anders Ecisson on deliberate practice?
To summarize it in one short sentence, deliberate practice is based on perpetually practicing things "just outside" of your comfort zone, in a hierarchically structured way, with lots of feedback.
Although I've found a couple of videos I couldn't find anything that offers such a structured approach from the bottom-up.
In addition, I've found really conflicting information, or straight up quackery when it comes to learning drawing (e.g some people swear by blind contour drawing while some say it's a waste of time and the proponents of blind contour drawing books still fall for the left/right brain-hemisphere dichotomy)
So I've been wondering:
- is there any evidence-based body of work on the pedagogy of learning to draw
- what would be the breakdown of skills needed to sketch (the more fine-grained the better)
- what exercises would you recommend that are amendable to very fast feedback cycles (e.g one exercise I've come up with would be trying to recreate randomly drawn curves and then comparing them to the model)?
https://languagefixation.wordpress.com/
Currently a fan of this one but the guy hasn’t updated in like 5 years+ so I was hoping for another one or even just an article detailing someone’s experiences with this method.
If you haven’t seen his blog, the method revovles around jumping into reading adult novels (I don’t mean it in a sexual context. Just big boy books with no pictures) really really early in the language learning phase. He does pretty much no grammar work after the first few weeks and seems to switch between extensive and intensive, regardless of his actual language proficiency. It’s an interesting idea that I would like to follow but sometimes I get afraid that it isn’t working that well.
Currently a B1-B2ish Japanese student and so while I can read a few paragraphs with no problem from a detective crime novel, there are always parts that throw me off and I just can’t parse em. That makes me unsure of this strategy so any links or success stories that you guys can provide would be cool!
Edit: forgot that a key component is keeping a translation of the novel close at hand so you can get through those tough parts.
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~hsstffg/preprints/Training_in_chess.PDF
