we can’t pin this all on memory. When you pull on certain strings from the lecture, you might discover that you had never really understood,
to understand something, you must actively engage with it.
lectures don’t work because the medium lacks a functioning cognitive model. It’s (implicitly) built on a faulty idea about how people learn—transmissionism—which we can caricaturize as “lecturer says words describing an idea; students hear words; then they understand.” When lectures do work, it’s generally as part of a broader learning context (e.g. projects, problem sets) with a better cognitive model.
With our intuitions primed through lectures, we’ll see that books, as a medium, reflect the same flawed ideas about how people learn.
Write an essay in response.
Great: that’s a better model! Let’s look at how it plays out.
If they take some notes, they’re not simply transcribing the author’s words: they’re summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing.
Readers must learn specific reflective strategies.
“What does it feel like to understand something? Where are my blind spots?”
“metacognition.”
The experimental evidence suggests that it’s challenging to learn these types of skills, and that many adults lack them.Baker,
if authors believe that understanding comes only when readers really think about their words, then they’re largely leaving readers to design their own “problem sets” and to generate their own feedback.
as learning science understands it, they’re only effective for people who are already proficient with both the object-level concepts and also the relevant metacognitive skills. For others, these activities appear to detract from understanding the material;
If the model is that people understand written ideas by thinking carefully about them, what would books look like if they were built around helping people do that?
textbooks do have explicit cognitive models: they support engagement with their concepts through things like exercises and discussion questions. Yet much of the metacognitive burden still remains with the reader.
Readers must decide which exercises to do and when.
By contrast, courses handle much of this metacognitive burden.
textbooks generally neglect emotional connection;
we don’t necessarily have to make books work. We can make new forms instead.
To help people encode more into long-term memory, we can draw on another powerful idea from cognitive science: spaced repetition.