My current model of teaching and learning (self-teaching) is that to be effective, it needs to target a specific piece of information the student is immediately ready for. I want a word for such pieces of information, so let’s call them useable bits. In a sentence, the teacher or learner’s job is to present a stream of useable bits to the student with a minimum of non-useable bits. Most of the time, the vast majority of information the student receives is non-useable bits, and trying to sift the useable bits from that stream causes overwhelm and confusion.
Effective learning involves purifying information streams to contain a higher concentration of useable bits. There are multiple strategies for this:
Fast sifting: Learn how to more quickly and easily sift useable bits from a stream of non-useable bits. I think this is most students’ default strategy, developed as a survival tactic in school where it’s their only obvious option. It is unlikely to establish a new foundation, but instead establish a hodgepodge of trivia-like, quickly-forgotten extensions to the student’s pre-existing foundational knowledge, resulting in precisely the kind of deeply inadequate learning outcomes we observe as a rule from the education system.
Building from a foundation: Structure the learning task so that the student’s next useable bits that are also relevant to the student’s priorities are always apparent—we always know what the student is ready for next and we give just that information to them. This requires having a foundational grasp of the subject so that identifying the next useable bit that’s also most relevant to the student’s interest is obvious.
Digging a rabbit hole in which to lay a foundation: Focus on the first point of apparent uncertainty (the first non-useable bit), and recursively drill into it definitionally until that first non-useable bit becomes useable. This may be a deep rabbit hole. However, it hopefully results in establishing fundamental topic knowledge that will eventually allow a more focused approach to learning specific topics within the domain.
My current model of teaching and learning (self-teaching) is that to be effective, it needs to target a specific piece of information the student is immediately ready for. I want a word for such pieces of information, so let’s call them useable bits. In a sentence, the teacher or learner’s job is to present a stream of useable bits to the student with a minimum of non-useable bits. Most of the time, the vast majority of information the student receives is non-useable bits, and trying to sift the useable bits from that stream causes overwhelm and confusion.
Effective learning involves purifying information streams to contain a higher concentration of useable bits. There are multiple strategies for this:
Fast sifting: Learn how to more quickly and easily sift useable bits from a stream of non-useable bits. I think this is most students’ default strategy, developed as a survival tactic in school where it’s their only obvious option. It is unlikely to establish a new foundation, but instead establish a hodgepodge of trivia-like, quickly-forgotten extensions to the student’s pre-existing foundational knowledge, resulting in precisely the kind of deeply inadequate learning outcomes we observe as a rule from the education system.
Building from a foundation: Structure the learning task so that the student’s next useable bits that are also relevant to the student’s priorities are always apparent—we always know what the student is ready for next and we give just that information to them. This requires having a foundational grasp of the subject so that identifying the next useable bit that’s also most relevant to the student’s interest is obvious.
Digging a rabbit hole in which to lay a foundation: Focus on the first point of apparent uncertainty (the first non-useable bit), and recursively drill into it definitionally until that first non-useable bit becomes useable. This may be a deep rabbit hole. However, it hopefully results in establishing fundamental topic knowledge that will eventually allow a more focused approach to learning specific topics within the domain.
Related concept: “zone of proximal development” = the set of all things the student is able to learn immediately.