My Top 8 Essays of 2022

I wrote 40 essays in 2022. While far from my most prolific year, I am pleased with how most of them turned out. Thus, to give myself a little writing break over the holidays, I thought I’d share some of my favorites from this year:

1. Why Don’t We Use the Math We Learn in School? Years after drilling the algorithm for long division, when was the last time you used it? I explore evidence that people are surprisingly bad at the math they ought to know well. I also explain some reasons why math doesn’t seem to play as prominent a role in real life as it probably should.
2. Cognitive Load Theory and Its Applications for Learning. Why do we find some subjects confusing? Why do we struggle to keep up in math or physics classes? I review the major findings of cognitive load theory, which seeks to explain our learning successes (and failures) in terms of how our brains process information.
3. How Do We Learn Complex Skills? Understanding ACT-R Theory. ACT-R is John Anderson’s career-long quest to integrate many diverse findings in cognitive psychology into a single model of the process of thinking and reasoning.
4. How Does Understanding Work? What goes on in our heads when we understand text we’re reading? Construction-Integration suggests we comprehend text by generating multiple interpretations, which then “stabilize” into a coherent picture.
5. Variability, Not Repetition, is the Key to Mastery. Varied examples, contexts, problems and methods all lead to more robust learning than narrow…