We hear a lot about innovative educational approaches, and since these silly people have been at this for a long time now, we hear just as often about the innovative approaches that some idiot started up a few years ago and are now crashing in flames. We’re in steady-state.
I’m wondering if it isn’t time to try something archaic. In particular, mnemonic techniques, such as the method of loci. As far as I know, nobody has actually tried integrating the more sophisticated mnemonic techniques into a curriculum. Sure, we all know useful acronyms, like the one for resistor color codes, but I’ve not heard of anyone teaching kids how to build a memory palace.
I’m just suggesting taking the idea out for a spin, see if it works well in some small, statistically-careful trials. I’m not talking about foisting it on everyone nationwide, willy-nilly. Which shows just how out of it I am.
I wish someone would test spaced repetition software for high schoolers or undergrads. That even has the excuse of everyone needing a PC or a tablet to do it, and we being able to easily afford that only recently, for why it hasn’t been done before. Mnemonics are great for quick low-effort cramming for remembering things overnight, but spaced repetition can be for life.
I’m having trouble coming up with any complex instruction given in schools that doesn’t directly lead to being tested in an exam. Can think of very few lessons in any sort of metacognition, some half-hearted mindmap thing mostly, and none at all where a specific metacognition method was being used in concert with an actual course.
I wish someone would test spaced repetition software for high schoolers or undergrads.
What makes you think they haven’t? When I look through the cites in http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition the majority of stuff was done with students of various age levels between elementary & college.
It might be an issue of how broad you define spaced repetition. I think a lot of those cites use a fairly broad definition but no Anki/Memosyth/Supermeno is involved.
Spaced repetition alone has probably been floated around, but giving students tablets and making them use Anki themselves to study at home might be new.
Spaced repetition in instruction might work great as long as the single teacher running the experiment is doing it, and is then going to go away after the experiment stops. Some of the students exposed to Anki might keep using it by themselves after being taught to.
I’m having trouble coming up with any complex instruction given in schools that doesn’t directly lead to being tested in an exam.
That depends a lot on the school. Mathematical proofs that take an hour to complete don’t lend itself to testing in exams.
Mostly I think the problem is that schools are really bad at teaching things that don’t lend itself to being tested. I had multiple teachers who did taught the idea that success is due to talent instead of being about the amount of time you put in.
If someone would have set me down and explained to me that hard work is really important, that would have done a lot.
Most subjects where some form of emotional intimacy is involved don’t lend itself well to being tested.
I wish someone would test spaced repetition software for high schoolers or undergrads.
Spaced repetition requires sincerity and discipline. You need to look at the question, understand it, decide just how well you remember the answer and act accordingly. And you need to do it every day.
Moreover, efficient spaced repetition, as I found, requires custom-taliored questions. You have to use your own cards.
If I was actually running this experiment and had ideal resources, I’d
Set up the students’ default SRS server to be hosted by the school, and give them extra credit if they log in every day and do their daily reviews.
Add some automated checks to detect usage patterns that probably represent just clicking through the thing without thinking.
Provide a small common set of new cards to everyone based on each lecture, after the lecture. Everyone sat through the same lecture, so they can handle some of the same questions.
Have instruction about making good cards, and have the students make their own cards as homework at the beginning of the course. The homework exercise cards would be reviewed like any homework.
Would give extra credits to students for up to tripling the default deck with their own questions, which would pass some sort of spam filter check for random gibberish and a human inspection in questionable cases.
Yes, I know, overjustification effect and everything for using credit as the carrot to make the students use the system. Still, should be worth a try.
Also could just make the finished deck the “course project” which you’d submit along with doing the final exam for review, and which would contribute to your grade. So you’d want to have covered the material with good questions and have a good review profile.
Could also give students the choice between a SRS course and a regular one, where in the regular one their grade would be entirely defined by the exam, while in the SRS course points from the review of the deck they made would be added to their test score for determining the grade. “You do some random busywork and you’ll get a guaranteed grade lift on that nasty calculus course.”
Spaced repetition requires sincerity and discipline. You need to look at the question, understand it, decide just how well you remember the answer and act accordingly.
I don’t think sincerity is such an issue with SRS. It’s relatively easy to understand that it’s unfun to have cards that you don’t know at all coming up because you hit good the last time when you should have hit again.
As far as having to do it every day, I don’t think that’s true. If you skip a day that’s not optimal and you have to answer the cards the next day. It will also be a bit harder to answer them the next day. I think that teaches something to the kid about consequences.
Good education is complex. To do things right, you have to do many details right. If just a few of them are missing, the whole thing may start falling apart.
It is good to be reminded than an important or helpful piece is missing. The sad thing is that the following internet discussions often quickly move from “X is missing, we need to somehow integrate X into the system” to “just throw all the other useless pieces away and focus on X, that will fix everything”. I am not saying it will happen here—this is LessWrong after all—just that this is a typical thing that happens. If someone would make a specific LessWrong site for educators, this effect should be one of the minor sequences.
So, it would calm down the anxious people like me, if all proposals of changes in education included an upper bound of the proposed change. Like: how much time do you think it would be appropriate to spend in a typical elementary school teaching… in this specific case, the method of loci… assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff). Would it be a new subject? Or just a lesson or two? (Or perhaps a new subject called “Meta”, where this would be just a lesson or two among other learning-how-to-learn techniques, and the whole subject would be one hour per week during one year? And perhaps another year on a high school, to refresh the memories.)
Now if we agree on an estimate that a lesson or two should be enough for the method of loci, then it gives us a specific time frame, which is good for proposing specific solutions. Assuming you have a lesson or two for teaching the method of loci, how would you do it? -- And please note that these lessons are actually quite easy to try in real life: Just do it with volunteers in the afternoon. That’s not good enough to scientifically measure the impact of the method, but you get some rough estimates by asking the same students a year later whether they still use the technique, and whether they actually even remember it.
Good education is complex. To do things right, you have to do many details right.
I’m curious as to what examples of good education you are basing this on. If there’s somewhere out there providing good education, I’d be very interested in their methods and product. Or is this perhaps based on theory?
Just my experience of many things that can go wrong. Many people notice just one of them and suppose that this is the problem of education, and if you optimize for fixing it, everything will automatically be allright. The most popular example among non-teachers on internet is “creativity”, I believe. Just throw everything out of the window, maximize for “creativity” and you are done. Even worse, those people usually can’t even taboo “creativity” and tell you what specifically they mean and how specifically would they optimize for it. It’s just an applause light; in best case, they will give you a hyperlink to some TEDx talk with some smart kid doing something that happens to be creative and say: more of this. Silently assuming that if you would put all children into exactly the same situation, you would get exactly the same results, reliably.
And by this I am not saying that “creativity” (however we define it) is bad; merely that it is just one important goal among many. Not merely guessing the teacher’s password is another value, obvious for a LW reader. It is good to give students freedom to explore the topics they are interested about; but we should also take care they don’t have huge blind spots in areas that for whatever reason didn’t catch their interest. It is good to teach them to find their own sources in books or online; but there is also a lot of pseudoscience and other bullshit out there. This whole process has to be done within some financial constraints. Putting more students together, we need to take care about some social issues, e.g. to prevent bullying. We need a way to deal with actively malicious students. We need some system of evaluation, at least for feedback while studying; some people think it is a good idea to also include certification. Etc. And don’t forget that children are diffferent and what works perfectly for one of them can fail horribly for another.
Like: how much time do you think it would be appropriate to spend in a typical elementary school teaching… in this specific case, the method of loci… assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff). Would it be a new subject?
The idea of teaching the method of loci is that it will make it easier for the students to store information in their brain.
assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff).
Few of the things taught are essential. There no reason why every student needs to learn calculus or trigometry.
I think go and look for all the information that most adults forget it. I have interacted with a few Go students from Korea. They went to a school that focused mainly on teaching them Go instead of teaching the usual subjects. The whole curriculum is Go.
They still survive as adults. Schools attempt to teach a lot that isn’t essential and which students forget anyway soon afterwards.
My abilities of using Word wouldn’t be worse if there wouldn’t have been classes in school trying to teach students to use the program.
The first step to do something about education is to recognize that a huge part of what goes on in schools is either teaching stuff that gets forgotten after the next test or it’s about teaching birds to fly.
But you wouldn’t even do something as revolutionary as scrapping the existing curriculum. It’s easy to throw enough year dates at students in history classes that a student who doesn’t use mnemonics for them utterly crashes but a student who uses mnemonics can follow.
Then you do two years of that kind of history education for 9 and 10 year olds with the teacher reiterating mnemonics constantly.
Now if we agree on an estimate that a lesson or two should be enough for the method of loci, then it gives us a specific time frame, which is good for proposing specific solutions.
You can teach the basic concept in a lesson or two but you don’t teach the skill of actually using mnemonics on a habitual basis in that timeframe.
In the first place
by Gregory Cochran
I wish someone would test spaced repetition software for high schoolers or undergrads. That even has the excuse of everyone needing a PC or a tablet to do it, and we being able to easily afford that only recently, for why it hasn’t been done before. Mnemonics are great for quick low-effort cramming for remembering things overnight, but spaced repetition can be for life.
I’m having trouble coming up with any complex instruction given in schools that doesn’t directly lead to being tested in an exam. Can think of very few lessons in any sort of metacognition, some half-hearted mindmap thing mostly, and none at all where a specific metacognition method was being used in concert with an actual course.
What makes you think they haven’t? When I look through the cites in http://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition the majority of stuff was done with students of various age levels between elementary & college.
It might be an issue of how broad you define spaced repetition. I think a lot of those cites use a fairly broad definition but no Anki/Memosyth/Supermeno is involved.
Spaced repetition alone has probably been floated around, but giving students tablets and making them use Anki themselves to study at home might be new.
Spaced repetition in instruction might work great as long as the single teacher running the experiment is doing it, and is then going to go away after the experiment stops. Some of the students exposed to Anki might keep using it by themselves after being taught to.
That depends a lot on the school. Mathematical proofs that take an hour to complete don’t lend itself to testing in exams.
Mostly I think the problem is that schools are really bad at teaching things that don’t lend itself to being tested. I had multiple teachers who did taught the idea that success is due to talent instead of being about the amount of time you put in.
If someone would have set me down and explained to me that hard work is really important, that would have done a lot.
Most subjects where some form of emotional intimacy is involved don’t lend itself well to being tested.
Spaced repetition requires sincerity and discipline. You need to look at the question, understand it, decide just how well you remember the answer and act accordingly. And you need to do it every day.
Moreover, efficient spaced repetition, as I found, requires custom-taliored questions. You have to use your own cards.
I don’t see most high schoolers adapting it.
If I was actually running this experiment and had ideal resources, I’d
Set up the students’ default SRS server to be hosted by the school, and give them extra credit if they log in every day and do their daily reviews.
Add some automated checks to detect usage patterns that probably represent just clicking through the thing without thinking.
Provide a small common set of new cards to everyone based on each lecture, after the lecture. Everyone sat through the same lecture, so they can handle some of the same questions.
Have instruction about making good cards, and have the students make their own cards as homework at the beginning of the course. The homework exercise cards would be reviewed like any homework.
Would give extra credits to students for up to tripling the default deck with their own questions, which would pass some sort of spam filter check for random gibberish and a human inspection in questionable cases.
Yes, I know, overjustification effect and everything for using credit as the carrot to make the students use the system. Still, should be worth a try.
Also could just make the finished deck the “course project” which you’d submit along with doing the final exam for review, and which would contribute to your grade. So you’d want to have covered the material with good questions and have a good review profile.
Could also give students the choice between a SRS course and a regular one, where in the regular one their grade would be entirely defined by the exam, while in the SRS course points from the review of the deck they made would be added to their test score for determining the grade. “You do some random busywork and you’ll get a guaranteed grade lift on that nasty calculus course.”
I don’t think sincerity is such an issue with SRS. It’s relatively easy to understand that it’s unfun to have cards that you don’t know at all coming up because you hit good the last time when you should have hit again.
As far as having to do it every day, I don’t think that’s true. If you skip a day that’s not optimal and you have to answer the cards the next day. It will also be a bit harder to answer them the next day. I think that teaches something to the kid about consequences.
Connotational disclaimer.
Good education is complex. To do things right, you have to do many details right. If just a few of them are missing, the whole thing may start falling apart.
It is good to be reminded than an important or helpful piece is missing. The sad thing is that the following internet discussions often quickly move from “X is missing, we need to somehow integrate X into the system” to “just throw all the other useless pieces away and focus on X, that will fix everything”. I am not saying it will happen here—this is LessWrong after all—just that this is a typical thing that happens. If someone would make a specific LessWrong site for educators, this effect should be one of the minor sequences.
So, it would calm down the anxious people like me, if all proposals of changes in education included an upper bound of the proposed change. Like: how much time do you think it would be appropriate to spend in a typical elementary school teaching… in this specific case, the method of loci… assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff). Would it be a new subject? Or just a lesson or two? (Or perhaps a new subject called “Meta”, where this would be just a lesson or two among other learning-how-to-learn techniques, and the whole subject would be one hour per week during one year? And perhaps another year on a high school, to refresh the memories.)
Now if we agree on an estimate that a lesson or two should be enough for the method of loci, then it gives us a specific time frame, which is good for proposing specific solutions. Assuming you have a lesson or two for teaching the method of loci, how would you do it? -- And please note that these lessons are actually quite easy to try in real life: Just do it with volunteers in the afternoon. That’s not good enough to scientifically measure the impact of the method, but you get some rough estimates by asking the same students a year later whether they still use the technique, and whether they actually even remember it.
I’m curious as to what examples of good education you are basing this on. If there’s somewhere out there providing good education, I’d be very interested in their methods and product. Or is this perhaps based on theory?
Just my experience of many things that can go wrong. Many people notice just one of them and suppose that this is the problem of education, and if you optimize for fixing it, everything will automatically be allright. The most popular example among non-teachers on internet is “creativity”, I believe. Just throw everything out of the window, maximize for “creativity” and you are done. Even worse, those people usually can’t even taboo “creativity” and tell you what specifically they mean and how specifically would they optimize for it. It’s just an applause light; in best case, they will give you a hyperlink to some TEDx talk with some smart kid doing something that happens to be creative and say: more of this. Silently assuming that if you would put all children into exactly the same situation, you would get exactly the same results, reliably.
And by this I am not saying that “creativity” (however we define it) is bad; merely that it is just one important goal among many. Not merely guessing the teacher’s password is another value, obvious for a LW reader. It is good to give students freedom to explore the topics they are interested about; but we should also take care they don’t have huge blind spots in areas that for whatever reason didn’t catch their interest. It is good to teach them to find their own sources in books or online; but there is also a lot of pseudoscience and other bullshit out there. This whole process has to be done within some financial constraints. Putting more students together, we need to take care about some social issues, e.g. to prevent bullying. We need a way to deal with actively malicious students. We need some system of evaluation, at least for feedback while studying; some people think it is a good idea to also include certification. Etc. And don’t forget that children are diffferent and what works perfectly for one of them can fail horribly for another.
The idea of teaching the method of loci is that it will make it easier for the students to store information in their brain.
Few of the things taught are essential. There no reason why every student needs to learn calculus or trigometry.
I think go and look for all the information that most adults forget it. I have interacted with a few Go students from Korea. They went to a school that focused mainly on teaching them Go instead of teaching the usual subjects. The whole curriculum is Go.
They still survive as adults. Schools attempt to teach a lot that isn’t essential and which students forget anyway soon afterwards.
My abilities of using Word wouldn’t be worse if there wouldn’t have been classes in school trying to teach students to use the program.
The first step to do something about education is to recognize that a huge part of what goes on in schools is either teaching stuff that gets forgotten after the next test or it’s about teaching birds to fly.
But you wouldn’t even do something as revolutionary as scrapping the existing curriculum. It’s easy to throw enough year dates at students in history classes that a student who doesn’t use mnemonics for them utterly crashes but a student who uses mnemonics can follow.
Then you do two years of that kind of history education for 9 and 10 year olds with the teacher reiterating mnemonics constantly.
You can teach the basic concept in a lesson or two but you don’t teach the skill of actually using mnemonics on a habitual basis in that timeframe.