this is actually exactly what my chemistry teacher in secondary school used to do with pretty much every topic. first, we'd conduct the experiment and write a protocol of what happened and then he'd teach us WHY it happened on a molecular level. this was very helpful because we always had a real-life example to tie the concepts to when studying and even during exams i would think about the original experiment and transfer it to the material of the questions
Years ago, I watched the Annenberg series online; in particular, the math. In each lesson, they would always start with an opener that would get the students thinking about the topic. The students would literally play with manipulatives to see what they could learn in terms of patterns and answer the question(s) put to them. Later, (the next day?) they would debrief and start the formal lesson. When I tried to mimic this in my classes, I found the students were more engaged and learned the material better. This was a technique that was also used in reading, where students were asked a question or journal,--anything to get them to think about the upcoming lesson and also to have them pull out information that they already learned so they could attach this new information on to make connections between what they know and the new knowledge.
My example would be that of a teacher who asks the students to tell them to recall anything they might no about a given subject before the teacher starts explaining it. Is this a good example?
I want to learn a game, so I will take on board what you said. I will play a game complete a test (i’ll make up before hand) then watch a video on the skills I need to improve upon
Cool - let me know how it goes! I do want to emphasize that the preparation for future learning is one model. Researchers are still figuring out exactly when this kind of approach is more beneficial than the "tell + practice" approach. It can be a little tricky to get right. But practical experience often helps to ground the knowledge we learn so that it makes sense. Best of luck!
If I have a limited amount of time (say 1.5 hours a day, 3 days a week), should I still do prep for future learning? I know that this most likely varies a lot with the skills I want to learn and my own prior knowledge but I am interested in the relation between performance and time spent on preparation.
That's a very interesting question. I'm obviously not Benjamin, but i have done preparation for future learning in variable time lengths. I always like to be on top of my of game at school, so i often research a module's information (learning outcomes, the criterias we'll be tested on, and sometimes even specific assignments we'll be given - in the school listen i'm in, all this information is publicly available). I've done "preparation for learning" using this information literally on the bus on my way to class and i found it helpful. We were starting the module, i researched the module, learning outcomes, i looked at it and thought about what i knew and didn't know, i researched a few key words that i'd never heard of, found some things i found interesting and read a bit further on, and the content of that lecture, i skimmed a few articles about it. When i got to class i found that this helped me immensely. As my teacher spoke, i was able to see how things he talked about were related to some things we were going to see further ahead. Sometimes he skipped an important detail which made things harder for everyone else, but not for me, as i was already aware of it. Sometimes he stated the definition of something, and just from that i was able to the grasp the entire concepts of the thing, since it wan't really new for information, but rather a gap on the knowledge (or hypothesis) i already had. This is specially the case when you know that a concept is supposed to be a bridge between to other things, and you know those two things already. When you finally go and learn that bridge concepts it immediately makes sense. And vice-versa (when you know the bridge concepts, but not the 2 other things). But i think this might have been the case for me because i did a mixture of preparation for learning, and some "light pre-study." I think the lines between these can get blury. According to Justin Sung the preparation is when you focus on big picture and how things are related to each other and come together to form that big picture, whereas pre-study is when you focus on the individual concepts and actively try to learning the things. Basically just studying, just ahead of time. And another way in which i've done preparation for learning is by doing projects (in other areas, this would have been equivalent to lab experiments) very early on, not touching that again, and then learning it many months later. I'm studying IT to be specific, so in these projects, i would learn just the absolute bare minimum to be able to apply a concept or technology (as pat of a much bigger project i was working on), and then not touching that project again. And then months later i learned at school about these technologies. The implementation i already knew, but the underlying logic was new to me. But i was still able to grasp it much faster than any of my classmates, and i i would say it made sense to me almost immediately. A lot of the theory were things that i had wondered about, or even confirmed things i had hypothesized. Just for the record, i did because i was interested in these technologies and stuff and found this whole thing fun. Which in itself might've actually been a factor that influenced the outcome (but it wouldn't be much different from the example of the students playing war video games). So basically, "preparation for future learning" has proven helpful to me from as shortly as 20min before the class, on the bus, to several (around 4 - 5) months before i learned the concept.
And that test performed just before the lecture has no measurable effect? What if students don't play, but have the test? Is it not that test which is providing the bulk of the "shelf"?
Labs & Lectures - what if ... I wonder how the following approach would work. Explain to students that for specific topics, there will first be a lab, followed by the associated lecture. Students will possess both lab instructions and text covered by the lecture. They are encouraged to read both prior to lab time, and they are told/shown how their performance is expected to vary based on such preparation. Thoughs?
Wouldn't this be due to video games leverging neuroplasticity due to the difficulty of the task and the expectations of those tasks(learning to aim, learning to do/calculate x) with a vast amount of errors being present opening that gate to plasticity? also cod is frustrating online lol
I don't think neuroplasticity has anything to do with it - except for the fact that we can learn stuff because neurons in our brains can change. I don't know of any kind of specific relationship that games have to increasing neuroplasticity. In this case, the games didn't cause any learning on their own and these were commercial video games made without specific learning goals in mind.
@@benjaminkeep That's interesting, i feel like some games (Portal!) naturally frustrate the player and causes them to think more deeply about what they're doing. I play competitive video games alot, and when im practising something the levels of frustration i get are incredible, and when i try to revise afterwards, it becomes incredibly easy in comparision i guess. People who are intrisincally motivated or people who see novelty in the games they play (which could be something that wasn't accounted for in the study, i haven't read it though so take my word with a grain of salt) probably approach games with a mindset that naturally frustrates them since being able to accomplish more in a game means having to learn something about a game. This in turn leads to more neuroplasticity since frustration and errors are the gate to neuroplasticity in my limited understanding. For example, say i want to learn a combination of key presses that brings about a style of movement i think is cool, and those key presses must be done in a very tight timing. I have motivation (i want to learn how to move in a way i think is cool) and so i'll practise it until i can do it even once in a 30 minute session. I then have this state of neuroplasticity for myself which i can use for other things (studying!). Side note, out of curiosity, how do you think Blooms model on taxonomy should be applied to learning competitive video games? Higher order learning whilst efficient is very hard to achieve due to the stakes pressure and stress of needing to perform, and good practise of some scenarios cannot be done without a competitive enviroment at times, which would make you lose elo if you make mistakes. It's like a catch-22 almost.
@@fridging I mentions you say "elo." Are you a chess player? If so, have you figured out the answer or found something that got you closer to it? I'm a chess player and i am trying to figure out myself how we can integrate all these learning principles into learning chess. Spaced repetition and active recall is easy, there are puzzles and opening labs for that. But the rest, encoding and its multiple methods, interleaving, whole-part-whole learning, priming or "preparing for future learning" as per video, etc are not so straight forward.
i came up with both engaging into ones script before lecture (or suggested literature) and i will try using brilliant as a game, perhaps more suited for university level mathematics, i'll let you know how it went (probably in another comment section) anyway, the former seems obvious, as one is already prepared structurally for the fine details that are explained during lecture. could the favourable preparation of learning be an alternation between conceptual and procedural knowledge (introducing procedural skill on the way) ?
This is a good question. I think "priming" refers to a variety of phenomena (not all of which have been replicated in the recent psychological literature). Some of the studies that come to mind are things like "reading the ten commandments temporarily makes people more moral" (which was not replicated) or priming people with words related to being old makes people walk more slowly (also, I think, not replicated). Sometimes people think of anchoring as priming as well (for instance: hearing the number 9000 before judging the value of a car results in people judging the value of the car closer to $9000 than they would if they heard a different number). A lot of the priming studies have to do with association - you get people to think of something and ideas related to that idea come to mind more readily. You already "know" the something. You can also test pretty easily whether something has been primed (through reaction or association tests) Something a bit different, I think, is going on with prep for future learning. The student is actually learning something (they don't already know the something), but the character of what they learned is generally not explicit information, and it's harder to test whether they've learned it unless they get more explicit information. I think, to some degree, PFL has more to do with giving people important tacit knowledge than in a more tell & practice setting doesn't come across. It's worth noting that PFL doesn't always "work". You have to design the experience pretty well and there's ongoing research into when, say, a tell & practice regime is beneficial and when a PFL regime is beneficial.
@Benjamin Keep, PhD, JD Thanks, I am not trained in cognitive science. But from a peripheral understanding, I believe this is akin to structure building ( I called this priming) You are getting a brief idea about the bigger picture, how individual facts you will learn will fit into the same etc. Such a structure acts as a magnet to absorb info faster. ( for example, listening to a best lecture gives this impact). Having the bigger picture or scaffolding enables deeper processing faster when you attempt to learn
Agreed. At the broad level, we are talking about activating or building prior knowledge so that the target to-be-learned material has more relevance and meaning.
@@benjaminkeep how about getting the students to access existing knowledge that they have by building analogies of what they already know to understand the new knowledge? Broadly speaking, a lot of knowledge and frameworks from different fields have similar models in other fields but are just termed differently.
How you ever thought that this was an appropriate comment is beyond me. What you need to learn is to view women as people. That's actually good advice even if you want to continue being a sleazeball, by the way.
this is actually exactly what my chemistry teacher in secondary school used to do with pretty much every topic. first, we'd conduct the experiment and write a protocol of what happened and then he'd teach us WHY it happened on a molecular level. this was very helpful because we always had a real-life example to tie the concepts to when studying and even during exams i would think about the original experiment and transfer it to the material of the questions
Sounds like a good teacher!
Years ago, I watched the Annenberg series online; in particular, the math. In each lesson, they would always start with an opener that would get the students thinking about the topic. The students would literally play with manipulatives to see what they could learn in terms of patterns and answer the question(s) put to them. Later, (the next day?) they would debrief and start the formal lesson. When I tried to mimic this in my classes, I found the students were more engaged and learned the material better. This was a technique that was also used in reading, where students were asked a question or journal,--anything to get them to think about the upcoming lesson and also to have them pull out information that they already learned so they could attach this new information on to make connections between what they know and the new knowledge.
I wish I can have three classes, first one give very easy concepts, second hands on, third more complex concept plus answer questions
Cuz I think if I do hands on first I would be so confused, and won’t make much progress, but teaching complex concepts first I would be confused too
Preparation for future learning is like foreplay, it makes the "learning" experience go a lot smoother 😉
I think reading the Life of Fred math books is a fantastic preparatory exercise for math students.
My example would be that of a teacher who asks the students to tell them to recall anything they might no about a given subject before the teacher starts explaining it. Is this a good example?
I want to learn a game, so I will take on board what you said.
I will play a game
complete a test (i’ll make up before hand) then watch a video on the skills I need to improve upon
Cool - let me know how it goes! I do want to emphasize that the preparation for future learning is one model.
Researchers are still figuring out exactly when this kind of approach is more beneficial than the "tell + practice" approach. It can be a little tricky to get right. But practical experience often helps to ground the knowledge we learn so that it makes sense.
Best of luck!
If I have a limited amount of time (say 1.5 hours a day, 3 days a week), should I still do prep for future learning? I know that this most likely varies a lot with the skills I want to learn and my own prior knowledge but I am interested in the relation between performance and time spent on preparation.
That's a very interesting question.
I'm obviously not Benjamin, but i have done preparation for future learning in variable time lengths.
I always like to be on top of my of game at school, so i often research a module's information (learning outcomes, the criterias we'll be tested on, and sometimes even specific assignments we'll be given - in the school listen i'm in, all this information is publicly available).
I've done "preparation for learning" using this information literally on the bus on my way to class and i found it helpful. We were starting the module, i researched the module, learning outcomes, i looked at it and thought about what i knew and didn't know, i researched a few key words that i'd never heard of, found some things i found interesting and read a bit further on, and the content of that lecture, i skimmed a few articles about it.
When i got to class i found that this helped me immensely. As my teacher spoke, i was able to see how things he talked about were related to some things we were going to see further ahead. Sometimes he skipped an important detail which made things harder for everyone else, but not for me, as i was already aware of it.
Sometimes he stated the definition of something, and just from that i was able to the grasp the entire concepts of the thing, since it wan't really new for information, but rather a gap on the knowledge (or hypothesis) i already had. This is specially the case when you know that a concept is supposed to be a bridge between to other things, and you know those two things already. When you finally go and learn that bridge concepts it immediately makes sense. And vice-versa (when you know the bridge concepts, but not the 2 other things).
But i think this might have been the case for me because i did a mixture of preparation for learning, and some "light pre-study." I think the lines between these can get blury. According to Justin Sung the preparation is when you focus on big picture and how things are related to each other and come together to form that big picture, whereas pre-study is when you focus on the individual concepts and actively try to learning the things. Basically just studying, just ahead of time.
And another way in which i've done preparation for learning is by doing projects (in other areas, this would have been equivalent to lab experiments) very early on, not touching that again, and then learning it many months later. I'm studying IT to be specific, so in these projects, i would learn just the absolute bare minimum to be able to apply a concept or technology (as pat of a much bigger project i was working on), and then not touching that project again. And then months later i learned at school about these technologies. The implementation i already knew, but the underlying logic was new to me. But i was still able to grasp it much faster than any of my classmates, and i i would say it made sense to me almost immediately. A lot of the theory were things that i had wondered about, or even confirmed things i had hypothesized.
Just for the record, i did because i was interested in these technologies and stuff and found this whole thing fun. Which in itself might've actually been a factor that influenced the outcome (but it wouldn't be much different from the example of the students playing war video games).
So basically, "preparation for future learning" has proven helpful to me from as shortly as 20min before the class, on the bus, to several (around 4 - 5) months before i learned the concept.
And that test performed just before the lecture has no measurable effect? What if students don't play, but have the test? Is it not that test which is providing the bulk of the "shelf"?
Labs & Lectures - what if ...
I wonder how the following approach would work.
Explain to students that for specific topics, there will first be a lab, followed by the associated lecture. Students will possess both lab instructions and text covered by the lecture. They are encouraged to read both prior to lab time, and they are told/shown how their performance is expected to vary based on such preparation.
Thoughs?
Wouldn't this be due to video games leverging neuroplasticity due to the difficulty of the task and the expectations of those tasks(learning to aim, learning to do/calculate x) with a vast amount of errors being present opening that gate to plasticity? also cod is frustrating online lol
I don't think neuroplasticity has anything to do with it - except for the fact that we can learn stuff because neurons in our brains can change. I don't know of any kind of specific relationship that games have to increasing neuroplasticity. In this case, the games didn't cause any learning on their own and these were commercial video games made without specific learning goals in mind.
@@benjaminkeep That's interesting, i feel like some games (Portal!) naturally frustrate the player and causes them to think more deeply about what they're doing. I play competitive video games alot, and when im practising something the levels of frustration i get are incredible, and when i try to revise afterwards, it becomes incredibly easy in comparision i guess. People who are intrisincally motivated or people who see novelty in the games they play (which could be something that wasn't accounted for in the study, i haven't read it though so take my word with a grain of salt) probably approach games with a mindset that naturally frustrates them since being able to accomplish more in a game means having to learn something about a game. This in turn leads to more neuroplasticity since frustration and errors are the gate to neuroplasticity in my limited understanding.
For example, say i want to learn a combination of key presses that brings about a style of movement i think is cool, and those key presses must be done in a very tight timing. I have motivation (i want to learn how to move in a way i think is cool) and so i'll practise it until i can do it even once in a 30 minute session. I then have this state of neuroplasticity for myself which i can use for other things (studying!).
Side note, out of curiosity, how do you think Blooms model on taxonomy should be applied to learning competitive video games? Higher order learning whilst efficient is very hard to achieve due to the stakes pressure and stress of needing to perform, and good practise of some scenarios cannot be done without a competitive enviroment at times, which would make you lose elo if you make mistakes. It's like a catch-22 almost.
@@fridging I mentions you say "elo." Are you a chess player? If so, have you figured out the answer or found something that got you closer to it?
I'm a chess player and i am trying to figure out myself how we can integrate all these learning principles into learning chess. Spaced repetition and active recall is easy, there are puzzles and opening labs for that. But the rest, encoding and its multiple methods, interleaving, whole-part-whole learning, priming or "preparing for future learning" as per video, etc are not so straight forward.
Is "learning to learn" course by Barbara Oakley worth it?
I don't know - I've never taken it and I don't know how expensive it is. From what I've seen the content is decent.
i came up with both engaging into ones script before lecture (or suggested literature) and i will try using brilliant as a game, perhaps more suited for university level mathematics, i'll let you know how it went (probably in another comment section)
anyway, the former seems obvious, as one is already prepared structurally for the fine details that are explained during lecture.
could the favourable preparation of learning be an alternation between conceptual and procedural knowledge (introducing procedural skill on the way) ?
I have you a like for the pf pictures 😉. That man would eat Peterson alive
Ain't this priming?
This is a good question. I think "priming" refers to a variety of phenomena (not all of which have been replicated in the recent psychological literature). Some of the studies that come to mind are things like "reading the ten commandments temporarily makes people more moral" (which was not replicated) or priming people with words related to being old makes people walk more slowly (also, I think, not replicated). Sometimes people think of anchoring as priming as well (for instance: hearing the number 9000 before judging the value of a car results in people judging the value of the car closer to $9000 than they would if they heard a different number). A lot of the priming studies have to do with association - you get people to think of something and ideas related to that idea come to mind more readily. You already "know" the something. You can also test pretty easily whether something has been primed (through reaction or association tests)
Something a bit different, I think, is going on with prep for future learning. The student is actually learning something (they don't already know the something), but the character of what they learned is generally not explicit information, and it's harder to test whether they've learned it unless they get more explicit information. I think, to some degree, PFL has more to do with giving people important tacit knowledge than in a more tell & practice setting doesn't come across.
It's worth noting that PFL doesn't always "work". You have to design the experience pretty well and there's ongoing research into when, say, a tell & practice regime is beneficial and when a PFL regime is beneficial.
@Benjamin Keep, PhD, JD
Thanks, I am not trained in cognitive science. But from a peripheral understanding, I believe this is akin to structure building ( I called this priming)
You are getting a brief idea about the bigger picture, how individual facts you will learn will fit into the same etc.
Such a structure acts as a magnet to absorb info faster. ( for example, listening to a best lecture gives this impact). Having the bigger picture or scaffolding enables deeper processing faster when you attempt to learn
Agreed. At the broad level, we are talking about activating or building prior knowledge so that the target to-be-learned material has more relevance and meaning.
@@benjaminkeep how about getting the students to access existing knowledge that they have by building analogies of what they already know to understand the new knowledge? Broadly speaking, a lot of knowledge and frameworks from different fields have similar models in other fields but are just termed differently.
Maybe when you approach girls in a PUA sense and then use that to learn about girls from analysis but also with that experience to help
How you ever thought that this was an appropriate comment is beyond me. What you need to learn is to view women as people. That's actually good advice even if you want to continue being a sleazeball, by the way.
Can you look into doing a video on attention span in people?
Sure thing - I'll add it to the list. Sorry my video production is so slow - working on speeding it up. Thanks for watching!