Sean
Intro
Learning is the ability to obtain knowledge and skills that you can recall procedurally, or from memory, in future problem-solving applications or opportunities. The ability to learn is a skill that can be sharpened and improved, contrary to popular belief. You can teach an old dog new tricks!. Surprisingly, the techniques for doing so are often counterintuitive.
In any field, from baking to sports to rocket science, learning involves the gradual acquisition of skills, understanding, knowledge, and good judgment. These are acquired through the processes of practice, seeking success, mental reflection, and conceptual rehearsal.
Fortunately, there are approaches to these learning strategies, and many of them are simple, practical, and easy for anyone to apply and recall into the future.
Learning Strategies
Retrieval Practice
Reviewing what you’ve learned from memory, e.g., through recall, is more effective at instilling lasting ability than re-reading or reviewing notes.
Using your memory to retrieve facts, concepts, events, or other ideas strengthens your ability to do so in the future, and “resets” the natural forgetting mechanism. For instance, after you have learned about a topic, taking part in even one simple quiz will allow for more effective learning than reviewing your notes or books afterward. So, while the analogy of the brain as a muscle may not be a perfect one, your brain’s neural makeup does indeed “exercise” in a sense, which it can get from recalling or retrieving ideas from memory. The longer the gaps between practice or attempts at learning, the more difficult your recall ability may seem. However, this effort (so long as you don’t wait too long) actually improves the learning process even further, enabling a more flexible and long-term memory of the skills, knowledge, or abilities you have learned.
Practice Solving Problems
Problem-solving is one of the best approaches to learning effectively and efficiently. When you are faced with a problem, even if it’s just for practice, try your best to solve it on your own before seeking solutions or assistance. This will allow you to learn the subject to its fullest.
By generalizing problems that you’ve solved, i.e., interpreting the solutions in terms of underlying rules, principles, or schemas, you will be better able to apply your solutions to other problems in the future. Even in unfamiliar situations, doing this will serve you well, and it is best applied in a varied manner across multiple disciplines, fields, or problem types. One example, in the fields of geometry and mathematics, involves computing the volume of a three-dimensional solid. By doing this many times for many different solids, you will better understand how to perform such a computation for any random geometric solid you encounter in the future.
Test Your Understanding as a Tool for Learning
Despite our best efforts, we all fall victim to bias, illusory thinking, and other barriers to our judgment and knowledge. By testing our understanding of things on a regular basis, we allow ourselves to probe how well we really know something, how well we have really learned. A pilot in a flight simulator is a good example of this — by regularly testing her ability to respond to simulated disaster situations, she becomes sure she can handle herself in a real emergency. This is true in virtually all fields of learning. Mastery is achieved only by continuously improving, testing, then improving again, ensuring you are always identifying and strengthening your weaknesses. New knowledge, though, must be built on old — the foundation. You’d have to know how to land a plane safely with both engines before you could learn how to land when one of them has failed. And to learn trigonometry, you’ll need to have some background in both geometry and algebra.
Quizzing oneself on a regular basis is a great way to instill a habit of testing and calibrating one’s knowledge or understanding. Without quizzes, students often misunderstand how well they understand the material they’ve learned. Why is this the case? Well, when they learn from a book or a professor, the knowledge is presented clearly and by someone who may have already mastered the topic. The arguments are easy to follow, and a student may really understand what they are hearing or reading in the moment. However, this understanding is probably only superficial, and it hasn’t been tested or applied, so it won’t last long in memory. There is no understanding of what’s missing until they are put to the test.
Elaboration
Elaborating on material you have learned gives it new meaning and allows you to express it in your words and on your terms. This makes connections with existing knowledge. The process of building on your foundation — relating new knowledge to existing — makes the connections even stronger and cements your grasp on what you’ve learned.
