What if everything you knew about learning was wrong?
In a recent article on Wired, Robert Bjork, the director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, claims there are extreme flaws in the best perceived ways to learn.
Let’s dive right in.
Should You Focus on One Skill at a Time?
Bjork recommends “interleaving”. Instead of working on a single task for a full hour, such as a tennis serve, you should be mixing it up with multiple skills at the same time. Weaving in backhands, forehands, and volleys with your practice serves will help you progress whether you realize it or not.
“This creates a sense of difficulty,” Bjork said. “And people tend not to notice the immediate effects of learning.”
One piece of this advice shouldn’t be taken too far though. All of the things you are practicing at the same time should relate to one another.
Bjork explains that successful interleaving allows you to “seat” each skill among the others. “If information is studied so that it can be interpreted in relation to other things in memory, learning is much more powerful,” he said. There’s one caveat: Make sure the mini skills you interleave are related in some higher-order way. If you’re trying to learn tennis, you’d want to interleave serves, backhands, volleys, smashes, and footwork — not serves, synchronized swimming, European capitals, and programming in Java.
Does It Matter Where You Study?
Apparently where you are studying does matter. Professor Bjork says that if you want to be able access your skills or knowledge in more locations, you should be practicing and studying in multiple places.
By studying in your dorm room, a library, and out in a park you should theoretically be more capable of recalling the knowledge you’ve tried to store away for later.
Should You Learn Close to a Deadline?
Studies from Bjork also show that the further away from the time that was spent studying leads to less knowledge retained. This means that the optimum time to study is as close to the time when you need it as possible.
Does this mean that all the teachers that told us not to cram were wrong? Maybe, but let’s dig further.
What also matters is how many times you practice/study/learn. That is where getting started early would help because you would have more chances to perfect a skill or understand a complicated lesson.
Specifically interesting is the fact that when you repeatedly study the same material or practice the same thing your learning is exponential. The Wired article goes on to say:
If you study, wait, and then study again, the longer the wait, the more you’ll have learned after this second study session.
Bjork explains it this way: “When we access things from our memory, we do more than reveal it’s there. It’s not like a playback. What we retrieve becomes more retrievable in the future. Provided the retrieval succeeds, the more difficult and involved the retrieval, the more beneficial it is.”
Now that is something I wish I had know in college…
What About Note Taking?
Another interesting piece of the article is about when you should actually take notes when trying to learn something.
Most people take notes during a class as a way to retain what they hear. In fact, after class note taking is the better way to go.
Along these lines, Bjork also recommends taking notes just after class, rather than during — forcing yourself to recall a lecture’s information is more effective than simply copying it from a blackboard… “Forget about forgetting,” said Bjork. “People tend to think that learning is building up something in your memory and that forgetting is losing the things you built. But in some respects the opposite is true.”
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What have you discovered about how you learn best? Does it line up with the research by Professor Bjork above?
Share your experiences in the comments below this post and please share this essay if you enjoyed it.
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For me I’ve found that the more I study, practice, and teach, the more familiar I become with the material/information. Its a great reinforcement technique.
Excellent recommendation on making it habit to interleave related tasks. Great post, Caleb. Very thought provoking!
Thanks Jason. Weaving in multiple things at once really does work faster.
Excellent article. Also, I think taking the role of teacher as well as learner also helps people to learn better. Just knowing that you will have to recall and explain that you just learned to someone else seems to apply just the right amount of internal pressure to really focus and deepen the pathways needed to recall it later.
Great Post. Truth be told much of what we’ve been taught about how we learn, how we handle stress is not consistent with new neuroscience. Re learning; the new theory re Alzheimer’s is there must be a correct balance between what we learn and what we forget. If we don’t forget enough the data stored overtakes the information processing function of the brain.
Very interesting post Caleb. Much of it I had heard before but taking notes after class is a new one. I have found that when I learn a skill or bit of info, I feel more at ease once I have let it sit for several weeks. I think it has a lot to do about recall and memory but for some reason, it has cemented in my mind and makes more sense.
I really like the line that suggests that everything you are practicing needs to relate to each other to get the most benefit. For some reason, multi-tasking came to mind when I read that, along with another passage from a book “You might can multi-task, but your brain can not”. As long as the activities are related, you mind does not have to change gears and you can be more efficient.
Thanks for the info Caleb.
Hi Caleb,
Personally for me the most important discovery in terms of how we humans learn and how our brain functions came while reading a book called “Kluge: the Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind”.
The author skilfully depicts how our brain has developed over millennia and how EVERYTHING in our brain can be explained by how that particular aspect transfers into our practical lives.
Everything we learn, creates associations in our mind which enables us to implement certain skills when we encounter identical or similar circumstances.
Everything – starting with WHAT we learn and ending with HOW and WHERE we learn is taking part in the formation of those associations, so no wonder it’s more effective to study in 5 different locations than in one if we want to be able to recall what we learned in a location other than the one we study at.
I guess it’s not some breakthrough in human psychology, however, personally for me it was a light-bulb moment. I realized that our reflective part of brain governs our mind by working on its own in the same way it’s been working for millions of years.
Therefore techniques like spaced repetition, which you mention in your article, practising several skills at the same time and recalling things after the event make complete sense; we just have to imagine how similar methods would have worked for our ancestors to see how logical it all is.
A cave man wouldn’t have spent hours on practising ONE skill; he’d be out hunting mammoths which would employ running, climbing, orienteering and javelin hurling all at once… you get the drift!
Personally for me it’s most evident in the way I constantly improve my English – I speak WHENEVER I can (to train my ability to speak in all life situations) and I let new English words and phrases find me instead of hammering obscure vocabulary lists into my brain (therefore my active vocabulary reflects WHAT I do and is 100% practical for me).
Thanks for the great article Caleb!
Regards,
Robby
I agree with where you study and note taking at the end of a lecture. So many times we go through the motions and same routines. It is good to mix it up and keep our brains seeing and experiencing new things. I know from my past experiences when I teach a subject I am more likely to remember it. When you are the instructor you have to be the expert or should be more knowledgeable about the subject than your students.