20 ways to supercharge your ability to learn: - Barking up the wrong tree
Love studies on learning. :)
A Study In Movement
When being given correction, many dancers get defensive because they are approaching their craft subjectively and are unwilling to engage in an empirical assessment of their line, form, execution etc. Also, there are very few teachers that they will come across who have the knowledgebase to provide such detailed instruction. They’re used to classes with no instruction, just copying choreography. However this must never deter a knowledgeable teacher from providing dancers with cohesive critiques.
Safi A. Thomas
Artistic Director
The Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory
(via safithomas)
The problem with praising kids for their innate intelligence — the “smart” compliment — is that it misrepresents the psychological reality of education. It encourages kids to avoid the most useful kind of learning activities, which is when we learn from our mistakes. Because unless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong — that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore — the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence. Samuel Beckett had the right attitude: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
A further element that establishes a climate for self-initiated experiential learning is emphatic understanding. When the teacher has the ability to understand the student’s reactions from the inside and has a sensitive awareness of the way the process of education and learning seems to the student, then again the likelihood of significant learning is increased.
Externalization makes users count on the interface and gives them the feeling (unrightfully so) that the thinking-work is done for them. This seduces them into more shallow cognitive behavior and discourages undertaking cognitive activities aimed at strategy and knowledge construction. Users who internalize information themselves behave more plan-based, invest more effort in cognitive processes, and are more proactive and ready to make inferences. This in turn results in more focus, more direct and economical solutions, better strategies, and better imprinting of knowledge. This knowledge is easier to recall at a future point in time, and is better transferable to transfer situations where the interface, the task, or both are different, and less vulnerable to a severe interruption.
Amateur musicians, for example, tend to spend their practice time playing music, whereas pros tend to work through tedious exercises or focus on difficult parts of pieces. Similarly, the best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often, while lesser skaters work more on jumps they’ve already mastered.
Just as there’s a balance between simplicity and obscurity, there’s a balance between length and learning. More people might read a short text, but a longer text yields more learning. Is there no pleasure in learning anymore?
Just imagine all the things you could remember if you couldn’t read this sentence.
