How much of the math you’ve learned in school do you use in everyday life? For the majority of people, the answer is surprisingly little.
This question is at the heart of the problem of transfer of learning — how we apply what we’ve learned to new problems and situations…
A new paper argues that watching video lectures at 2x the speed has minimal costs to comprehension. From the abstract:
“We presented participants with lecture videos at different speeds and tested immediate and delayed (1 week) comprehension. Results revealed minimal costs incurred by increasing video speed from 1x to 1.5x…
Setting goals can transform your life. Goals can help you get in shape, improve your finances, learn a new language, or finally launch that business.
But goal-setting can also leave you miserable. Burnout, stress and disillusionment are high on the list of potential side effects.
The crucial difference between success…
Why is learning effortful? Why do we struggle to learn calculus but easily learn our mother tongue? How can we make hard skills easier to learn? Cognitive load theory is a powerful framework from psychology for making sense of these questions.
Cognitive load theory, developed in the 1980s by psychologist…
As the year ends, I thought I’d revisit some of my favorite entries from the past twelve months.
Here are my top 7 essays:
In my quest to understand the nuts-and-bolts process of how we learn complex, valuable skills, I’ve read quite a few books on learning, teaching and skill acquisition.
This batch of books challenged my thinking and changed my mind on quite a few things. I read these books to further investigate…
Say you need to learn a complicated skill: physics, French or computer programming. How much time should you spend building your background knowledge before you start practicing the actual skill?
Consider machine learning. One way to learn this field would be to master first the underlying math. Then, when you…
I often don’t feel smart enough to do what I do.
I don’t say this out of false modesty or as an attempt to be more relatable. I spent the last decade taking on rather-immodest learning challenges. I’ve always been confident in my ability to learn new things.
Instead, the…
I once met with a successful academic and author. He told me that he didn’t understand most of his peers.
Getting tenure at a university is a lot of work. You need to produce a lot of the right kind of intellectual output to get recognized. …
Author of WSJ best selling book: Ultralearning www.scotthyoung.com | Twitter: @scotthyoung
