learning how to learn

Alexander Staenke, August 2014 Vienna, Austria (EU)

[email protected]

Top 3 Insights from Learning How To Learn

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Alexander Staenke, [email protected], August 2014

My Top 3 Learnings about Learning

Learning requires time and effort.

There are actionable strategies to avoid procrastination.

There are easy to use techniques that can make you a more efficient learner.

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Learning requires time & effort

There is no known way to become and instant expert in anything.

Yes, that is quite unfortunate. However much we would like to find the secret sauce which would allow us to go from novice to expert through some magic routine, it is not possible.

„How do you become an expert then?“, you might ask.

The answer is through plain old hard work - also known as learning.

Experts are experts because they invested a lot of time to learn things. They have built complex knowledge structures (chunks) in their brain which they can access in many different ways. This allows them to see relations and form connections that might be invisible for a novice.

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Learning requires time & effort

Chunks? What are „chunks“?

Learning means you acquire new information and try to make sense of it.

New information needs to be transformed into knowledge structures (chunks) so you can use it to solve problems. Without those chunks your working memory would would always be full, leaving you unable to think and work creatively.

Chunks are more complex objects of knowledge made up of simpler pieces of knowledge.

Think of the letters U,S,A. For you they probably mean „USA“ or „United States of America“. With these three letters you associate the knowledge that the USA have 50 states, occupy the north american continent and you might even know who is the current president.

All this and much more is part of the chunk „USA“. Once you have this knowledge it is easy to further build upon and to integrate more facts and make connections with new facts you learn about the USA.

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Techniques for efficient learning

Chunking and practice

Over time you should form chunks for important pieces of knowledge. This allows you to work creatively with your knowledge.

Also it is much easier to add new knowledge on existing chunks.

Practice is an important and necessary part of learning. Without practice you won’t get better at anything.

Practice also helps you to automate things. Automated things take up very little of your brain power and allow you to focus on more complex tasks.

The whole point of chunking is to create chunks for complex ideas so that you don’t have to think about conscientiously about all the parts that make up the chunk.

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How to create chunks?

There are four steps involved in creating chunks.

Focus your attention on what you need to learn. Use deliberate practice to become better. Try to understand the basic idea or concept that is involved. Look at the big picture to understand when and how to use the newly formed chunk (knowledge).

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Summing it up, chunks are best built with focused attention, understanding of the basic idea, and practice to help you gain mastery and a sense of the big picture contex

Focused attention

Understanding the basic idea

Practice to gain mastery

Look at the big picture



What is the best way to learn?

There are many ideas and recommendations floating around regarding „the best“ way to learn. Not all of them make the best use of your time.

A good learning technique is to space out your learning over time - say 20 minutes on three days instead of 60 minutes at once (avoid cramming!).

Repeating the same thing over and over again is also something that you should avoid. Interleaved practice - where you mix up different problems in one learning unit - is a much more efficient use of your time.

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Ok good - anything else?

Rereading and underlining are common learning techniques but they can fool you into thinking you have mastered the material when in fact you have not.

Test yourself continuously - try to (really) remember what you have just learned. By thinking about the new material your brain builds up all the necessary connections in long term memory.

Tip: If you don’t think about it, you won’t remember it.

Deliberate practice is what helps you to improve. You must go outside of your comfort zone to improve or learn something new.

If you look at physical exercises it is easy to see that practicing things you already can do well won’t make you better at those things you are not so good at. These are the things you need to practice deliberately.

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Use deliberate practice to improve your skills.

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Space out your learning over time.

Interleaved practice is better that repeating the same thing over and over.

Test yourself continuously.

Avoid procrastination (with the tips that follow)


What is Procrastination?

I’ll just quickly google that - and then I’ll start studying…

Why don’t we do what we intend to do? Mostly because we try to avoid things that make us uncomfortable and because we are creatures of habit.

Habits are great because they make life so much easier. A habit is like an automated routine that can be done by your brain without much thought (no need to focus on brushing your hair or tying your shoes).

Understanding habits better

Habits are not so great when they trigger the wrong routines like doing unimportant stuff.

Habits have four parts that work together: The cue, the routine response, the reward and the underlying belief. Let’s look at a brief example: You need to do some calculations in physics but have no real idea on how to do that (your cue: an uncomfortable feeling). Instead of working through the textbook and looking at the examples you start a search on YouTube because surely someone out there has done this before (this might be your routine response and reward because now you feel your are doing something to solve the problem). After 30 mins of surfing the web you finally find something that is similar to your problem. You have now strengthened your belief that you can find the answer on the web.

One procrastinates when one delays beginning or completing an intended

course of action*

*) The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure. Piers Steel. Psychological Bulletin 2007, Vol. 133, No. 1, DOI: 10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65

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What to do about Procrastination?

You can change your reaction to a cue!

Cues are often tied to a location, a specific time, your emotional state or external interruptions.

All of these cues can send you off into some automatic response and off you go doing something else (a.k.a procrastinating).

Tip: Try to identify these cues and then eliminate them as best as you can.

Another helpful tactic is to focus on process instead of the product. Let’s continue the example from before: What would happen if there was a power outage and you’d have no Internet? From experience you know that these outage usually take 20 minutes to fix. You could decide to spend the time going through your textbook again and then try again on the calculation.

By doing this you’d focus more on the process (spend 20 minutes reading the textbook) instead of having a solution for the calculations (the product).

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What you can do about Procrastination

Actionable strategy

1. Focus on the process not the product. To do so you can use the Pomodoro technique. Plan your study session as a series of Pomodoros. Write down what you want to accomplish and then take notes how well it worked.

2. Try to structure your day with small routines (e.g. breakfast, 2 x 20 min study time, jogging)

3. Find small rewards for successful learning units and delay them until you are done (coffee break)

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4. Watch for cues that trigger you into your old habits. Try to identify and eliminate them over time.

5. Do the hard stuff first and get it out of the way.


Book recommendations

Additionally to the material presented in the course I have found these books to be interesting to read and very helpful in understanding the psychological processes behind learning.

• Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn. John Hattie and Gregory Yates.

• Why Don’t Students Like School. Daniel T. Willingham

• The Cognitive Perspective on Learning: Ten Cornerstone Findings. Michael Schneider and Elsbeth Stern in The nature of learning: Using research to inspire practice (pp. 69-90). Paris: OECD.

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Appendix: The Cognitive Perspective on Learning: Ten Cornerstone Findings

Michael Schneider and Elsbeth Stern (ETH Zurich, Institute for Behavioral Sciences)

Nr Finding

1 It is the learner who learns

2 Optimal learning builds on prior knowledge

3 Learning requires the integration of knowledge structures

4 Optimal learning is about acquiring concepts, skills and metacognitive competence in a balanced way

5Optimal learning builds complex knowledge structures through the hierarchical organization of more basic pieces of knowledge

Nr Finding

6 Optimally, learning uses structures in the external world to organize knowledge structures in the mind

7Learning is constrained by capacity limitations of the human information-processing architecture and capacity

8 Learning results from the dynamic interplay of emotion, motivation and cognition

9 Optimal learning builds up transferrable knowledge structures

10 Learning requires time and effort

Source: Schneider, M., & Stern, E. (2010). The cognitive perspective on learning: Ten cornerstone findings. In Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) (Ed.), The nature of learning: Using research to inspire practice (pp. 69-90). Paris: OECD.

This is a list of the ten cornerstone findings on learning from a cognitive psychology perspective. In my opinion it sums up nicely many things that were covered in the course and can be used as a quick reminder or overview.

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