Beating the Forgetting Curve with Distributed Practice “If you read the research on how much people forget after training, it’s depressing. Do a search for the ‘Forgetting Curve’. Once we know something like this, we need to change our approach and educate others.”- Connie Malamed (The eLearning Coach)The above quote is from our interview with Connie Malamed. After our inspiring and thought-provoking interview with Connie Malamed, we were left wondering about the interesting human nature that is revealed with the ‘forgetting curve’, and its impact on learning design. We set out on a journey to explore and learn more about this phenomenon.Below are the questions we had in mind when we embarked on our journey: What is the ‘forgetting curve’? One of the most intriguing features of the human mind is that it is volatile in nature (just like the Random Access Memory (RAM) in a computer). These findings have great significance for learning professionals while developing learning interventions. Excerpts from Experts Infographics Presentations Articles
15 Surprising Discoveries About Learning What are some of the most encouraging known facts about learning? From taking a walk to learning a new language, there are countless things we can do to improve the way we learn. Below we list fifteen steps toward a better brain: 1. Laughter boosts brain function. Pam Schiller and Clarissa A. 2. Recent research at Griffith University has found that personality is more important than intelligence when it comes to success in education. Dr Poropat says educational institutions need to focus less upon intelligence and instead pay more attention to each student’s personality. “With respect to learning, personality is more useful than intelligence for guiding both students and teachers,” Dr Poropat said. Dr Poropat said the best news for students is that it’s possible to develop the most important personality traits linked with academic success. Personality does change, and some educators have trained aspects of students Conscientiousness and Openness, leading to greater learning capacity. 3. 4.
The 27 Principles to Teaching Yourself Anything (aka The Self-Guided Education Manifesto + PDF download “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” —Mark Twain Note: This post is intentionally long. It’s meant to be our compass for learning the skills that matter in the world and throwing theory out the window. Read it. Save it. At the end of this post I’ve even provided two free PDF downloads to further guide you towards learning what matters (one is a list of over 30 of the best online resources for creating your own passion-filled curriculum). Enter the Unofficial Self-Guided Education Manifesto… Last week’s article on The Birth of Self-Guided Education caught like wildfire. When that happens, I know a topic deserves some respect. Many of last week’s comments blew my mind. Living Legends create their own education. The truth of the matter is every Living Legend (whether they dropped out of high school or got a couple PhD’s) took their education and their learning into their own hands. So without further ado… 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.
Learning Techniques One of the things that we expect you to pick up by osmosis, but almost never mention explicitly, is techniques for learning itself. After you leave university, you will be expected to be able to learn by yourself for the rest of your life. And an hour spent addressing the meta-issue of learning skills pays off in reduced time to actually learn. A lot of work has been done over the past few decades about how people learn. This document suggests a wide range of techniques that may make your learning more effective. You may want to experiment with some of them to see if they work for you. I recommend the work on accelerated learning by Colin Rose and Brian Tracy. You can learn anything if you have a goal that requires it. There are a number of stages to learning, each of which involves a number of aspects. The right state of mind There are six aspects to being in the right state of mind to learn. Here are the six aspects: Find a personal reason to want to learn this material. Memorising
A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop “More is better.” From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance. Laptops do in fact allow students to do more, like engage in online activities and demonstrations, collaborate more easily on papers and projects, access information from the internet, and take more notes. Indeed, because students can type significantly faster than they can write, those who use laptops in the classroom tend to take more notes than those who write out their notes by hand. Moreover, when students take notes using laptops they tend to take notes verbatim, writing down every last word uttered by their professor. What drives this paradoxical finding? To evaluate this theory, Mueller and Oppenheimer assessed the content of notes taken by hand versus laptop.
zenhabits 35 Psychological Tricks To Help You Learn Better Have you ever considered letting your students listen to hardcore punk while they take their mid-term exam? Decided to do away with Power Point presentations during your lectures? Urged your students to memorize more in order to remember more? If the answer is no, you may want to rethink your notions of psychology and its place in the learning environment. Below are 35 proven psychological phenomena that affect you and your students every day: 1. Definition: It is easiest to recall information when you are in a state similar to the one in which you initially learned the material. Application: Urge your students to sit in the same room they studied in when they complete their take-home quiz. 2. Definition: The tendency to overemphasize internal explanations for the behavior of others, while failing to take into account the power of the situation. Application: Sometimes students need your help distinguishing between internal and external factors that affect academic performance. 3. 4. 5. 6.
untitled From Self-Discovery to Learning Agility in Senior Executives by Suzanne Goebel, Richard Baskerville Suzanne Goebel Georgia State University Richard Baskerville Georgia State UniversitySeptember 20, 2013 Third Annual International Conference on Engaged Management Scholarship, Atlanta, Georgia. September 19-22, 2013. Abstract: In the complex world of the senior executive, one of the single most important predictors of executive success is learning agility. Number of Pages in PDF File: 19 Keywords: Learning Agility, Mental Agility, Self-Awareness, Executive Coaching, Resilience, Managing Uncertainty, Managing Change, Dealing With Ambiguity, Reflection, Metacognition, Complex Learning, Managing Complexity
Why Can't We Get Anything Done? These days, people know a lot. Thousands of business books are published around the world each year. U.S. organizations alone spend more than $60 billion a year on training — mostly on management training. But all of that state-of-the-art knowledge leaves us with a nagging question: Why can't we get anything done? To answer that question, Fast Company talked to Jeffrey Pfeffer, 53, the Thomas D. 1. One culpable party is the literature of knowledge management — almost the cult of knowledge management — that has grown over the past few years. The reason that we've fallen into this knowing-doing gap is this: Doing something actually requires doing something! Compare all of this knowing with the good old Yankee ingenuity of the past — or even with Bill Gross's idealab! 2. Today, there are experts on everything except how to get things done. The educational establishment must take some responsibility for this problem. The truth is that business school is all about talking, not doing. 3. 4.