Quotes About Learning

The whole idea of the testing effect is that you learn more by testing yourself than by rereading. Well, it's very hard to get students to do that because they've been trained for so long to keep reading and reading the book.

We make the effort because the effort itself extends the boundaries of our abilities. What we do shapes who we become and what we're capable of doing. The more we do, the more we can do.

Pitting the learning of basic knowledge against creative thinking is a false choice

The greater the effort to retrieve learning, provided that you succeed, the more that learning is strengthened by retrieval

When you praise for intelligence, kids get the message that being seen as smart is the name of the game. "Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control," Dweck says. But "emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure." 18

In the school of life experience, setbacks show us where we need to do better.

The illusion of mastery is an example of poor metacognition: what we know about what we know. Being accurate in your judgment of what you know and don't know is critical for decision making.

the more effort required to retrieve (or, in effect, relearn) something, the better you learn it.

Adopt active learning strategies like retrieval practice, spacing, and interleaving. Be aggressive. Like those with dyslexia who have become high achievers, develop workarounds or compensating skills for impediments or holes in your aptitudes.

L. L. Jacoby, C. N. Wahlheim, & J. H. Coane, Test-enhanced learning of natural concepts: effects on recognition memory, classification, and metacognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 36 (2010), 1441

There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don't know.

by spacing or interleaving the practice, retrieval is harder, your performance is less accomplished, and you feel let down, but your learning is deeper and you will retrieve it more easily in the future.

An apt analogy for how the brain consolidates new learning may be the experience of composing an essay. The first draft is rangy, imprecise. You discover what you want to say by trying to write it. After a couple of revisions you have sharpened the piece and cut away some of the extraneous points. You put it aside to let it ferment. When you pick it up again a day or two later, what you want to say has become clearer in your mind.

the kind of retrieval practice that proves most effective is one that reflects what you'll be doing with the knowledge later. It's not just what you know, but how you practice what you know that determines how well the learning serves you later.

Simply including one test (retrieval practice) in a class yields a large improvement in final exam scores, and gains continue to increase as the frequency of classroom testing increases. Testing

kind—perhaps an experience or a paper exam—shows me where I come up short in knowledge or a skill. Step 2: I dedicate myself to becoming more competent, using reflection, practice, spacing, and the other techniques of effective learning. Step 3: I test myself again, paying attention to what works better now but also, and especially, to where I still need more work.

factual knowledge," considered to be a lower level of learning than "conceptual knowledge." Conceptual knowledge requires an understanding of the interrelationships of the basic elements within a larger structure that enable them to function together.

Incompetent people lack the skills to improve because they are unable to distinguish between incompetence and competence.

When it comes to learning, what we choose to do is guided by our judgments of what works and what doesn't, and we are easily misled.

When retrieval practice is spaced, allowing some forgetting to occur between tests, it leads to stronger long-term retention than when it is massed.

students need to take more control of their own learning by employing strategies like those we have discussed. For example, they need to test themselves, both to attain the direct benefits of increased retention and to determine what they know and don't know to more accurately judge their progress and focus on material that needs more work.

The paradox is that those students who employ the least effective study strategies overestimate their learning the most and, as a consequence of their misplaced confidence, they are not inclined to change their habits.

first time and then waited some days before they reread it.

Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when your attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.