The Hypercorrection Effect
one of this kind of quizzing where
it feels hard because you should do it before you know the answer is something
I wrote about in range called
desirable difficulties these are things that make learning feel less fluent
they are
unpleasant they may slow you down
much better for long-term retention interesting so the more difficult the
learning the more you learn often I
mean but I guess there can be a case where
something so over your head that
you're not learning anything right but these desirable difficulties are like
one of
the most famous ones is called
interleaving or mixed practice and this is if you're training
at something you you want to vary
the types of pro so let's give an example
DJing I'm I'm DJing at the moment
okay so I don't know all the skills that go into DJing but if there's a way to
do it
you should try to instead of doing
the same skill over and over and over again well let me give you let me give
you a research example and then you can Port
it into DJing so in a recent study there
were dozens of uh middle school math
classrooms Middle School of sixth
grade that were assigned to different types of math learning some of them
randomly
assigned some of them got what's
called blocked practice that's you give like problem type a AAA bbbb
Etc kids make progress fast they're
happy rate their teachers highly Etc other other classrooms got what's called
interleaved or mixed practice where
instead of doing a followed by B it's like you took all the problem types
threw them in a hat and Drew them
out at random progress is slower they might be less happy because they don't
feel like
they're getting it but instead of
having to just execute a procedure they're having to match a strategy to a type
of
problem and when the test came along
where everyone has to transfer to new problems the inter Le group blew the
block Practice Group away it was
like the effect size was like taking a kid from the 50th percentile and moving
them to the 80th just by arranging the
practice in a way that made it more
difficult what's going on there I think
I mean it seems to be and this this
work for physical learning as well I think this is one of the reasons why this
if
you want why fotsa is like why like
90% of the best footballers grow up on fotsa instead of like playing on
full-size
pitch um is that it forces you to
instead of doing using procedures knowledge which is you learn how to
execute this procedure over and over
you're doing making connections knowledge which is identifying the
structure of a problem and foring
out how to match a strategy to it and so you're building this like mental
template instead of just an ability
to execute this like flexible template that can be applied going forward so
you're
getting like a broader context of
the challenge versus a very narrow solution perspective to how the challenge is
solved you're kind of understanding
it from a deeper level right from different sides and and you're building this
generalizable model in your head of how
to approach it I mean my my favorite
and I'd be the only person to say this but my favorite study that went into
range
was this one the one that surprised
me the most I guess was this one that was done at the United States Air Force
Academy which is this amazing place
for experiments because they get a thousand new students every year those
students
are randomized to math classes that
all have the same test and same grading and everything then they are randomized
the
next year and randomized again so
you can get these huge experiments randomizing people to math classes and
they looked at 10,000 students and
found that the teachers who are the best at getting students to do well on the
test
in their own class in their own
intro class right teacher year one has students who score highly on their test
those students go on to underperform
in the subwing classes and teachers whose students sometimes rated them lowly
poorly because they thought it was
hard don't do as well on the test the first year overperform in subsequent
classes
and the difference is the way to get
someone to do really well in the test is to teach this very narrow body of
knowledge that they'll have to
execute at the test the best way to prepare them for math learning is to give
them this much broader connection of ideas that
will serve them later on so again
this is like to me the theme on every page of range that would have made a
crappy
subtitle is is sometimes what seems
the best in the short term will undermine long-term
development the tricky thing with
that as you say is I I think about all the areas and industries that I'm
playing in
now so I go do I have the time to go
broad like if I'm learning to DJ at the
moment and at at the moment I'm just
trying to figure out what these [ __ ] buttons do you know what I
mean like there's all these buttons I'm trying to
press them in the right order but
you're telling me that the thing that's better for my long-term development
might be just to spend some time understanding
music and how it's made and how and
understanding like the the Beats of music and make maybe spend some time
making music myself cuz right now
I'm just trying to smash two songs together at the right time I think this gets
at a
fundamental issue that that that
maybe I should have brought up earlier actually so and it has to do with how
you
characterize the different tasks
that you're trying to learn so there was a period where I was really confused
about
the research I was reading in in
building expertise because there were two camps of researchers both led by
eminent scientists one that would
study people doing sort of more 10,000 houry
kind of approach same thing over and
over and they would get better and this other camp that would find if people
did
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