Quotes About Understanding

Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it.

This presumption by the professor that her students will readily follow something complex that appears fundamental in her own mind is a metacognitive error, a misjudgment of the matchup between what she knows and what her students know.

Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know.

People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times—say, a textbook passage or a set of terms from an eighth grade biology class—you can burn it into memory. Not so.

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

We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one.

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.

But few students practice these strategies, and those who do will need more than encouragement if they are to practice them effectively: It turns out that even when students understand that retrieval practice is a superior strategy, they often fail to persist long enough to get the lasting benefit.

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

rising familiarity with a text and fluency in reading it can create an illusion of mastery.

One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know.

The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to your prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.

People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. A mental model is a mental representation of some external reality.

Knowledge is more durable if it's deeply entrenched, meaning that you have firmly and thoroughly comprehended a concept, it has practical importance or keen emotional weight in your life, and it is connected with other knowledge that you hold in memory.

Mastery in any field, from cooking to chess to brain surgery, is a gradual accretion of knowledge, conceptual understanding, judgment, and skill. These are the fruits of variety in the practice of new skills, and of striving, reflection, and mental rehearsal.

How ably you can explain a text is an excellent cue for judging comprehension, because you must recall the salient points from memory, put them into your own words, and explain why they are significant—how they relate to the larger subject.

I hate when people say 'I see'. It doesn't mean anything and I think it's hostile. Whenever anyone tells me 'I see' I think they're really saying 'Fuck you'.

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.

One man's nonsense is another man's sense.

It was strange to see someone you have only known alone begin interacting with other people, for that somebody known to you disappears and is replaced by a different, more complex, person. You watch him revolve in this new company, revealing new facets, and there is nothing you can do but hope you like these other sides as much as you like the side that seemed whole when it faced only you.

Odio quando qualcuno dice «Capisco». Non significa nulla ed è vagamente aggressivo. Ogni volta che lo sento in realtà mi suona come un «Vaffanculo».

I often feel like I want to think something but I can't find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought.

People do not love those whose eyes show that they are somewhere else

She understood as women often do more easily than men, that the declared meaning of a spoken sentence is only its overcoat, and the real meaning lies underneath its scarves and buttons.