Hey YouTube, back with another video.
This week I'm going to talk about four reasons why learning probably isnt as easy as you
think.
so firstly, well people are really bad at knowing what they do and what they don't know.
I don't mean they're bad at knowing things that they never learned, I'm saying they're
bad at judging how good their understanding of a topic is.
And this is a really serious problem.
As confucous put it: "True wisdom is knowing what you don't know".
Or as Mark Twain put it:"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, its
what you know for sure that just ain't so".
Now I don't know if thats actually how Mark twain talked, but we're gonna go with that.
If you're in school and you do a test and you get a grade thats way off the mark of
what you thought you were going to get before you go and complain you should really sit
down and ask yourself: was it the test that failed to judge how well you knew the topic
or was it yourself that failed to judge how well you knew the topic?
Its a valuable question.
So that leads us directly into point two, which is the illusion of mastery.
So maybe you used to sutdy this way, or you had a friend study this way but I'm sure you've
heard of this method where you take your textbook you're trying to learn, say its microbiology,
and you're going through the textbook and as you read through it more and more you highlight
parts that you think are very interesting and maybe very important key points, you highlight
them in blues and reds and fuchsias and magenta orange and a dozen different colors and then
you read through and you keep doing that again and again and when it comes time for the test,
you realize you don't know any of the material, even though you felt like you were very comfortable
with the text.
Now this is called the 'illusion of mastery' because you feel like you know it, but you
actually don't.
The reason this is possible is because if you're just reading through material, and
reviewing material without actually thinking critically about the material then you will
learn little or nothing about the actual material because your brain doesn't actually learn
stuff if its not being challenged to learn it.
These sorts of methods seem very effective because as we read through the textbook we
find words like 'ribosome' and 'nucleic acid' and they seem more familiar to us, so it feels
like we've learned what they mean and it feels like this textbook, oh the first time i read
it took me 12 hours and the second time it only took me 6.
Well thats not necessarily because you've learned the material, but it could be because
you're more familiar with how the words look.
Now you might not actually know what 'ribonucleic acid' is, and what 'ribosomes' are and how
they are important in biology, or what they do in terms of life in a cell, you might not
know any of that, but the words look more familiar.
Along that logic, you could take a book that is in a language that you don't understand
and read through it and highlight things you think look cool, and over time your brain
will recognize how those words look, but it won't actually know what they mean.
So you'll get the illusion of mastery, where this foreign language becomes easier to read
through but your brain isn't actually capable of understanding the meaning of those messages,
so basically if you're not struggling with the material, you're doing it wrong.
Number three: rote memorization isn't actually learning.
I mean, it sort of is learning, but its the lowest ranking of learning, according to bloom's
taxonomy 'knowledge' or the ability to recall facts and figures and dates and names, that
is the lowest rank of learning.
In order to actually learn something, you need to be able to put it into your own words,
to evaluate it, to analyze it, to synthesize it, to see how it fits into a greater context.
That is what actual learning means.
Number four: some of the most hated teachers are actually the most effective teachers.
I'm not talking about teachers that didn't show up to class, or that swore at their kids,
I'm talking about teachers that maybe seemed to jump all over the place, and they had a
bit of an unusual style that was sometimes hard to follow, the kinds of teachers that
really challenged you, and it was like 'man, i have to study for this class like twelve
times more than the other classes, and like she marks me so hard and theres like tests
all the time'.
I don't know why I went valley girl there just know, but those are some of the most
effective teachers.
As I mentioned in point number one, we're really bad at judging how well we know something.
We're also really bad at judging how effective a certain teaching strategy is, thats why
we have science.
Now that we can objectively quantify how well one method of teaching works compared to another,
we can compare that objectivity to how well we feel that we're learning something so we
can actually look now, and we've found that there is a lot of very effective teaching
methods that students think suck, when science tells us that those are some of the best methods.
So some teachers that seem to be the worst, are actually the best, and we're bad at judging
that.
While those teachers that - wow their class is really fun and you just winged through
it and it was 'no problem', well thats because you probably weren't learning much in it.
I told you a bunch of things you're probably doing wrong, and ways that you're failing
at learning and now I'm just gonna leave you?
Ya.
Next week I'm going to make a video the science of learning, about effective methods of learning,
and study methods.
I just finished reading this book called 'make it stick: the science of successful learning'.
Its pretty cool, if you don't want to wait till the next video, you can check out that
book.
I highly recommend it.
Stay tuned!
Thanks for watching!