Fundamentals of Learning

Chapter 1. A Pre-Quiz to Help You Learn

This chapter introduces you to a strange finding that neuroscientists discovered, and one I confess I dislike: there is plentiful data showing that before a person starts to learn about a field, a pre-quiz—a test you are asked to take before you are taught anything—is a great learning technique. It offers “the lay of the land,” if you will, introducing the main concepts and language the learner will encounter.

In that spirit, I’ll start you off with a pre-quiz. For each strategy below, respond with True or False according to whether you think it is a good strategy for learning:

• Rereading the material until you fully understand it

• Not taking breaks, so you learn the material faster 

• Taking the material step-by-step rather than skipping to later chapters

• Posing questions about the material to yourself

• Assuming that after you learn something, your memory of the material steadily degrades 

• Keeping a tight focus on each element/topic until a bigger picture emerges

• Trying to make many associations with the material

• Determining your learning style and using it to master the material  (for example, some prefer to hear information rather than see or read it)

• Taking a pre-quiz about the material you are about to learn

• Going to different rooms/places to study

• Mixing different topics rather than studying one thing at a time

Now that you’ve had a chance to consider your answers, let’s dig into the latest evidence! 

What the Data Says

Let’s take the concepts mentioned in the pre-quiz and show through the data whether they are a good method for learning. I’ve included an explanation for each.

Note

Please note: The links you will find in these answers are not meant to represent the full depth of the research, but rather are quick hits in case you wanted to get a general idea as well as a flavor of the data. For the major references in support of this report, please see the bibliography at the end.

Don’t! Keep Rereading the Material

Have you ever studied for an exam, diligently underlined the parts you felt were most important, then continually reread them and felt confident you knew the material? I certainly have! The problem with this process is that reading and rereading information keeps it in what is called working memory, namely our current presence of mind, rather than getting it into long-term memory. And it is long-term memory that we need to be able to respond to a test question or to someone in conversation the next day.

Rereading alone and believing we’ve learned the material is called the mistake of fluency. As you will see, or perhaps already know from bitter experience, this obvious-seeming strategy does not work. Putting information into long-term memory requires additional strategies.

Don’t! Keep Studying and Putting Off Breaks

It turns out that breaks give the brain time to absorb information and are very important for learning. All that advice we received to “just keep working, stick it out, sit there until you know it” was incorrect. How long a break, you ask? Currently, there is no consensus on the ideal break length or frequency. Some data supports taking a break every 90 minutes, other data every 50 minutes. For the length of the break, 15–20 minutes. Or maybe just five minutes.  

This sounds like a great opportunity to do some pilot tests on yourself—only experience can tell you how long or often your breaks should be, given your situation.  

Don’t! Just Take the Material Step-by-Step 

Like a pre-quiz, jumping around offers that holistic insight that can help you learn. (You could even scroll through this report and get a lot of good out of that!) A table of contents helps with this advantage as well. After all, it is a sweeping view of all the book is presenting for your learning pleasure, the big picture all in one place! Yet how many times do we crack open a textbook and dutifully read from start to finish, assuming that jumping ahead would be cheating at worst, confusing at best? Evidently, the confusion is worth it if you root around in the material you need to learn. The idea is to both jump around and go through the material as it’s laid out.  

Do! Pose Questions About the Material to Yourself

This one is massively helpful, for several reasons. Rather than rereading material (remember, this is the mistake of fluency), you need to move away from what you’re trying to learn and quiz yourself. This can be done in several ways. You can just look away and ask, “OK, what do I remember about this? What is the main idea, and how many details can I recall?” Even better might be to say this out loud to yourself or to someone else. Best of all might be the technique someone in one of my workshops pointed out to me. It comes from Richard Feynman, the great 20th-century physicist. Take out a blank sheet of paper (or a word processing document, or even the notes app on your phone). At the top, write the subject you want to learn. Then write out everything you know about the subject. To accomplish this, you will need to ask yourself what the main idea of the subject is and what things you recall about it.

All of these ways to pose questions will uncover gaps in our memory! Moreover, chances are great that there will be gaps in the details. I’ll get back to this point when we hear a message from our brain in Chapter 2.

So “gap-finding” is obviously crucial. Another reason that posing questions is so helpful is that we can use those questions to see where we still have questions. That brainteaser requires some explaining. You’ll find a lot of discussion of this in “Up Your Association Game”.

Posing questions can entail attaching the material in front of you to other things you have learned. For example, you might ask, “I seem to recall that Daniel Kahneman wrote about slow thinking as deliberative. So is posing questions a kind of slow thinking?”

The benefit you get from asking until you come up short is yet another reason to pose questions—it helps you recognize what you still don’t know. Now, that sounds odd! But a well-known phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect explains that our brains can get stuck on—and therefore learn—unfinished problems more easily than those where you quickly learn the solution. When there’s a quick solution, your brain figures it’s all taken care of, so you can forget it.

So, to summarize all the good you can do by posing questions to yourself:

• You’ll quickly discover the gaps in your learning so you can concentrate on those and quiz yourself repeatedly until you’re confident you have learned the material.

• You can stretch yourself a bit by asking questions that will relate what you’re learning to other things you’ve already learned. This creates more neuronal connections, enabling your brain to remember.

• You can ask until you find a thing or things that the material—or your other knowledge—can’t answer for you. The Zeigarnik effect can be a big boost in your learning. It may also explain why mystery stories fascinate us and make us want to turn those pages until we find out who the killer was!

Don’t! Assume That Your Memory of the Material
Will Degrade

While it might seem that way to the majority of readers, it is not necessarily the case that something learned is soon forgotten. If you’re patient with yourself, you can use another technique we’re going to discuss (diffuse thinking) to fish out some name or idea that seems maddeningly out of grasp. The knowledge may or may not be there—some patient trolling is required. This assumes, though, that you’re not on the spot to, say, recall someone’s name as you suddenly see them. We’ll dig deeper into diffuse thinking in Chapter 3.

Don’t! Narrow Your Focus on Each Element Until a Bigger Picture Emerges

Remember what I said about not taking the material step-by-step? You can get the much-desired big picture by moving from focused to diffuse thinking and then back again. This concept is so important and unusual that Chapter 3 is all about it.

Do! Make Many Associations, Even Nonsensical Ones

There’s nothing new to this advice; in fact, it’s centuries old. The latest update, however, is that creating odd or silly associations can cement the detail you need to recall in several areas of your brain. It’s a “the more the merrier” idea. As you will learn when we discuss a central feature of the brain in Chapter 2, there are times when we need to work on creating a lot of associations. One example I’ve heard is for trying to remember the difference between stalactites and stalagmites: Stalactites have to hold on tight so they don’t fall down! And stalagmites are just little mites on the ground. None of this is literally true, of course, but it is of great aid and comfort to your brain to help it remember.

Don’t! Try to Use Learning Styles

This is where I may part ways with a number of you who are positive that people have differing learning styles, preferring one of these over others: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, or reading/writing.

But researchers have not been able to find any probative evidence for this. They have identified people who have expressed ways they prefer to learn. However, there is little evidence that teaching them according to this preference makes any difference in subject retention. Further, people who express a learning preference tend not to take steps to use their preferred method. This last one I totally understand. If you’re assigned a textbook, how hard would it be to learn its contents by having someone else read it aloud to you instead of reading it yourself? But even when this problem is solved for people, by delivering information through their preferred method, they do not learn better. 

The reason for this persistent idea is that we’ve been told it’s true for a long time. Today many teachers are trained and even certified based on their knowledge of learning styles and how to teach the same material by tailoring it to each. Given the lack of evidence that this tailoring works, it is a huge time sink, unfortunately. A piece on the American Psychological Association’s website, “Belief in Learning Styles Myth May be Detrimental,” is explicit about the consequences of this persistent notion.

Even after I explain all this in my workshop, a sizable number of people still answer in the affirmative when asked whether research supports it! I’ve heard the speculation that we humans enjoy the notion of “personality type,” and this fits that mold. I tell the learning workshop participants—and now you—that you may go ahead and believe this, I can’t stop you! In fact, it might inspire you to do your own research to offer support for the idea that there are embedded learning styles that differ among people, the way blood types do.

Do! Take a Pre-Quiz Even If You Think You’ll Make Wrong Guesses

Now it’s time for a quick rant. I really don’t like this one! I gave you a pre-quiz, and you have probably been getting some of the answers wrong. To me this feels counterintuitive—people are getting unsupported ideas in their minds! How can that be good for learning? But the data supports this strategy. The idea is that it is most helpful in showing people the major concepts, rather like setting the stage for the learning to come.

In my extensive experience and research, pre-quizzes are not a common way to introduce material to people. I know of just one book that has done this, Factfulness by Hans Rosling et al. (Flatiron Books). Having experienced its pre-quizzes and having answered incorrectly in them, I must admit that I learned a great deal in the process. In that spirit I have given you these pre-quiz questions, gentle reader.

Do! Go to Different Rooms/Places to Study

This is arguably a lot more fun than a quiz, but it is odd. Wouldn’t you think that changing locations would prove a hassle and a distraction rather than a help? But again, our mysterious brains appear to be storing elements of our surroundings along with the material we’re absorbing, forming extra associations we’re not aware of. As noted, this is strange indeed. It is also difficult for many of us to dig out of our habit of studying in just one place or two. In my workshop on learning, most participants label the task of going to a new venue as “somewhat difficult.” 

Do! Mix Different Things Rather Than Studying One Thing at a Time

Like focused versus diffuse thinking (don’t worry, we’ll get there soon), this mixing—called interleaving—requires its own section later for explanation. The basic idea is that, contrary to the way we’ve been taught, people end up retaining far more knowledge if they mix up (interleave) the examples rather than drilling on one artist or basketball play for a while, and then move to the next. The old method can be visualized as AAA BBB CCC. The better method is ABC ABC ABC. 

In art history, for example, this would mean studying the work of several artists side by side, rather than spending a week on Picasso, another week on Renoir, and a third on Braque. The same principle is true for algebra: rather than studying polynomial arithmetic, complex numbers, and polynomial factorization separately, mix it up and look at problems for all three. Or you could learn about each until you understand it, and then work on a pool of problems that requires you to decide which concept is most relevant. 

Many workshop participants ask whether switching between subjects rather than between topics within a subject works the same magic. For example, if I am studying art history and use the ABC method, interleaving some algebra, will I learn both subjects better? It is a clever question, but I can’t find an answer for it! There is evidence to suggest that if I study chemistry and then interleave it with biology, that will help me make associations between those subjects in the realm of science. In any case, it seems plausible to give the brain a rest from art history after an hour by switching to algebra. 

Summary

Many thanks for indulging me—and the data—by taking the pre-quiz. I hope you didn’t find it too annoying. The pre-quiz aided your learning, and you may have found out that some of your assumptions about effective learning are wrong. I hope you were surprised by the findings, which means that you learned something! The next chapter entails a reprise of these findings in the form of two characters, as a handy way for you to remember what was in this hefty first chapter. We will also have that brief visit from your brain that I alluded to earlier.