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Highlights

  • 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.