
Repetition and Learning – misconceptions about effective studying - raffaelSenn
https://theeffortfuleducator.com/2020/06/08/repetition-and-learning/
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monster_group
I teach Sanskrit to adult enthusiasts. It is mind boggling how people think
that they can learn a language by being a passive consumer - that I need to do
all the talking while they just sit and listen and take notes. I repeatedly
tell them you need to be a producer and not a mere consumer. Creating your own
sentences forces you to actively recall what you have learnt and is going to
be far more productive than reading what is written. (Though reading is
important too in learning a new language.) Being a producer and "active
recall" require both effort and time and people give up quickly. Only the
tenacious ones remain and they are the ones who learn.

~~~
hyencomper
This is how I have learnt various languages - by speaking while learning.
However, Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis expounds that language acquisition
occurs only during exposure to new language and not while speaking. Do people
who give up learning a language still understand what is being spoken by the
other person in that lang, even if they themselves may not be able to
construct a sentence?

~~~
lqet
> However, Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis expounds that language
> acquisition occurs only during exposure to new language and not while
> speaking.

I think exposure and actively speaking are the wrong categories - your learn a
language by using it to participate in a common experience with another human
being. For this, you both have to use the same protocol, and at the beginning,
you have to figure out this protocol using a simpler fallback feedback
protocol. This is something I am currently realizing as a father of a one-year
old. This _involves_ of course exposure and speaking, but I strongly doubt
that you could learn a language just by listening to it and re-producing the
words. I expect this would only result in text/speech resembling GPT-2.

I also think that you can have a common experience _without_ actively
producing text or speech, for example by watching a movie / TV show were you
want to follow the story and participate in the lives of the actors. In fact,
I know many people who effortlessly learned a second language by watching
foreign movies and TV shows for years.

------
bildung
The author doesn't seem to differentiate the different types of learning as
they are defined in educational science: associative learning (think Pavlovs
dogs salivating if the bell rings), instrumental learning (Skinners rats
learning labyrinths for snacks), cognitive learning (grasping abstract
concepts, like a "comment form", or "democracy"), and know-how, knowledge
about processes, like driving a car, or successfully talking to a bank
manager, or approaching a programming problem.

Rote repetition is indeed important for the first (and to a lesser degree the
second) type of learning. These types of learning are what the famous
forgetting curve experiments dealt with: aquiring non-sensical knowledge. It
is mostly unneeded for cognitive learning, which usually happens by having
those lightbulb moments when exposed to the concept. And learning about
processes is done through practicing (which is different to rote repetition
because it involves _meaning_ , i.e. the topic _makes sense_ ).

~~~
kiba
_It is mostly unneeded for cognitive learning, which usually happens by having
those lightbulb moments when exposed to the concept._

Meaning? Spaced repetition still work there.

~~~
bildung
Let's use the concept "3D printer". Imagine time travelling 50 years into the
past and wanting to get people to learn what that thing is. You would
essentially show a single time how the plastic goes in, gets heated, and flows
out in molten state, according to a pre-defined program.

Almost every human observer would have an instant lightbulb moment and would
probably not forget this for years. The observing people would have instantly
formed a mental model - the concept.

~~~
Ma8ee
That works for the right level of novel concepts. But just because I
understand the Taylor expansion of cosine doesn’t mean I will remember it.

~~~
photonemitter
taylor of e goes something like 1 + x + x^/2! + x^3/3!...

Well if we look at cos and sin, we know that these correspond to e^x if x = i
x So then it’s easy to plug that in to the expression for e and get e^{i x} =
1 + ix - x^2/2! - i x^3/3! ... Taking the imaginary part gives us sin, and
taking the real gives us cos.

So all we have to remember really is the pattern for e and to put ix instead
of x. e^(ix) = sum((1/n!) * (ix)^n)

This was the Aha! that I got from a professor in my bachelors. Of course
there’s still like two or three things to remember, but it’s a whole lot
easier to unpack from there than to memorize the expansion of cos

~~~
Ma8ee
Oh, I don’t have problems deriving the Taylor expansion of anything. It’s just
that when I need it my main focus is on something else. My productivity has
increased a lot since I started putting those often used things in Anki so I
used could use them without having to look them up or derive them every time.

~~~
photonemitter
Of course. Yeah, what I was trying to illustrate is that with enough
contextual knowledge the amount of things one has to memorize becomes
comparatively smaller. Basically if one learns and remembers Euler's Identity
and the expansion of e^x = (x^n)/(n!), then you don't really need to memorize
the trigonometric expansions.

Reading over it I guess that may have been your initial point.

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clarry
Repetition can be incredibly useful. I can't imagine memorizing vocabulary or
simple facts (when was FOO born?) without repetition. Of course, actually
using the facts (or vocab) makes them stick better. But use is also
repetition.

Just last night, I needed skk a bit but I couldn't remember how it works. I
open the tutorial, see a familiar pair of kanji, type にゅうりょく into my
dictionary, and get the pair (入力) back. I don't speak Japanese but I memorized
some words sometime over a decade ago. I'm pretty sure I've never used this
information anywhere and I only remember due to repetition.

Of course, tfa makes a distinction between repetition and retrieval practice,
but to me they are pretty much the same thing -- they go hand in hand. Does
anyone actually ever just read a thing over and over again hoping that it
sticks? Without (say) closing ones eyes or stopping before a sentence to test
if you remember the answer before you spoil it? I don't know if I've ever
studied anything that way! And I don't think that people who claim repetition
is key to remembering are talking about passive repetition with zero effort to
recall. They're talking about active repetition, practice, and it goes hand in
hand with recall.

~~~
Novukus
> Repetition can be incredibly useful. I can't imagine memorizing vocabulary
> or simple facts (when was FOO born?) without repetition. Of course, actually
> using the facts (or vocab) makes them stick better. But use is also
> repetition.

What exactly do you mean by repetition? If I'm memorizing vocabulary,
repetition to me means recalling and writing the words down in some way (often
according to some prompt or quiz). The repetition with this method works
because of 1) recall strengthens the memory and 2) muscle memory of writing
helps solidify it. But repetition by repeatedly reading? That simply doesn't
work for me (and going by studies, it's a very poor strategy compared to
retrieval/recall practice). Nobody who recommends retrieval practice says
repetition by recall and producing it on paper (or however else) is a bad
idea. Spaced repetition is also just a form of repetition. He doesn't demonize
these forms of repetition.

Let's go back to what he said:

> One of these false beliefs is that repetition is the key to remembering; the
> more someone encounters material, the better the likelihood of retaining the
> information long-term. I can still remember, after receiving a test grade
> that I wasn’t thrilled with, believing that I would’ve done better if I’d
> just gone over the material more times.

Key words are "the more someone encounters material" (note the passiveness)
and he emphasizes it with his own experience of thinking how he should've
"gone over the material more often". It's really not that uncommon. I knew
plenty of people in school and even in university whose only conception of
learning was reading, re-reading and highlighting and maybe making notes. It
was sub-optimal in so many ways. So to pretend that nobody does it ("Does
anyone actually ever just read a thing over and over again hoping that it
sticks?") seems a bit ignorant to me of how many people simply never learn
good studying strategies.

~~~
Novukus
Btw, found this while I was looking at research

[https://www.apa.org/images/2016-06-psa-karpicke-
fig2_tcm7-20...](https://www.apa.org/images/2016-06-psa-karpicke-
fig2_tcm7-203617_w1024_n.jpg) (Source:
[https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/06/learning-
memor...](https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/06/learning-memory))

> An emphasis on getting knowledge in memory shows up on surveys of students'
> learning strategies. In one survey (Karpicke, Butler & Roediger, 2009),
> college students were asked to list the strategies they use while studying
> and to rank-order the strategies. The results, shown in Figure 2, indicate
> that students' most frequent study strategy, by far, is repetitive reading
> of notes or textbooks. Active retrieval practice lagged far behind
> repetitive reading and other strategies (for a review of several learning
> strategies, see Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham, 2013). A
> wealth of research has shown that passive repetitive reading produces little
> or no benefit for learning (Callender & McDaniel, 2009). Yet not only was
> repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy, it was also the
> strategy most often listed as students' number one choice, by a large
> margin.

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grodeni
While the thesis is interesting and while there is probably some truth to it,
the argument doesn't seem fair to me...

Sure if you repeat endlessly a task which is not related to the objective, it
may fail to prove successful (without much surprise). However, if I
repetitively compare images of one correct coin and one incorrect coin, I am
pretty sure that I would improve in some way, without putting so much effort
in the process. If every day someone recalls me the position of the nearest
fire extinguisher, I will certainly learn this information at some point, once
again without much effort.

And this type of wrong arguments can be reversed against the author thesis.
Try to learn a new programming language while doing a one armed handstand, the
difficulty will be way higher, however I doubt that it will generally improve
your learning pace. Does that mean that difficulty is not a key to
remembering? Nope, only that it is not per se a sufficient condition to
remembering.

~~~
ooobit2
This is difficult to express, but that difficulty inherent to my process of
describing my perspective to you is a motivator for me doing so. And that's
where difficulty/challenge as a component of knowledge acquisition is
important.

We memorize and recall within the limbic system. That's the same system that
also facilitates our emotional and physical responses to stimuli. And as I see
it (keep in mind I'm not a neuroscientist), increasing emotional activity
alongside the task increases the overall allocation of physical energy to the
limbic system. I believe this is the physical component that defines "flow",
or the ability to be so immersed in an activity or series of activities that,
as I am at this point in my writing, we forget time. (I need to go stir tea on
the stove. One moment...)

Alright. Um, our ability to sustain enough engagement in something to optimize
our retention of that activity is, I believe, critically dependent on emotion.
Think of reading a law book. Now, think of reading a law book on accounting.
Now, think of reading a law book on accounting while referencing the IRS.gov
web site for available white papers. The further we venture into emotional
detachment from the activity, the more willpower we need to engage, the more
energy we deplete through continuous activation and reactivation as we doze
off and have to return and restart a portion of the activity.

I agree though that the challenge has to be enjoyable. I'm not interested in
learning a new programming language while doing a handstand. I am, however,
interested in learning a new programming language if a boy I like also likes
it and likes to talk about it, and I want a reason to talk to him more often.
(I had a stint learning C++ for that reason. And it's still one of the best
things I've done because it expanded my understanding of paradigms and
language capabilities.)

------
jmilloy
Repeatedly reading/hearing/etc something doesn't help you produce it, but the
misconception isn't really the repetition, it's the reading. Repeatedly
producing something does help with production. What's more interesting is that
spaced repetition shows that increased frequency of repetition isn't actually
better for long term memory, either.

The article would also benefit from a clear distinction between recognition
and production of facts (memorization) and understanding concepts.

------
kalonis
In my experience this is not only true for memorizing theoretical knowledge
but for physical skills too. For example, if you learn the piano simply
playing pieces you know won't make you a better piano player. To get better
practicing really has to be difficult. This can be achieved either by learning
new pieces or by making the pieces you know more difficult to play (e.g. play
them faster, try to play them in a different style etc.)

~~~
sigsergv
The same for dancing. And actually the situation with (casual) dance lessons
is much much worse.

For musical arts we have vast instructions on fingering/stopping. But we have
almost nothing for dancing. Dance teacher often can't explain in words what
he/she expecting from the student and how exactly specific move must be
performed. As a result 90% of casual dance students leave the field because of
that faulty teaching process.

~~~
ooobit2
It's not a faulty teaching process. I'm white, and I can dance. Dance, at its
super basic foundation, is about physical awareness. The same way you teach
someone how to use a piece of gym equipment, hold a yoga pose, or even ride a
bike.

What I think is difficult to describe in dance is how to communicate emotion
through your body, not just your face. For me, the hardest thing to overcome
there is this fear that someone will make fun of me for taking it too
seriously. I don't know why I have this fear about becoming so immersed in
something that other people think I'm cringeworthy. If it wasn't an issue, I'd
pull every muscle in my body just to nail a routine to Celine's "My Heart Will
Go On".

Maybe the fear of humiliation is the culprit winning out more often than most
people will admit?

I now need to think about this. Like, that's a damn good song to me. And given
that it's my life, my time given to a performance of it, why in the world am I
concerned about a few assholes who think they're cooler than me in that
moment?

~~~
monster_group
>> I'm white, and I can dance.

Confused by this statement. What has your ethnicity got to do with dancing?

~~~
wincy
At least in the US it’s a joke/stereotype that the white man can’t dance.

------
fullito
I would argue that spaced repetition does work and it is based on repetition.
That you can do that wrong by just 'browsing' over your learning material
again and again, okay but i would still connect good learning with repetition.

------
eska
As someone very interested in this topic I don't get this article at all.

I've been studying Japanese for 10 years. That means learning and retaining
thousands of characters, terms, pitch accents, multiple readings (about 2-10
per character), stroke orders, components of characters, example sentences,
levels of politeness, etc.

He says one shouldn't just repeatedly look at the information, but quiz
oneself. Even in school, as inefficient as our education system is, I wasn't
told to just reportedly read the information. Instead, one should cover one
part and guess it, so to speak. The whole spaced repetition aspect seems to be
missing in this article however, and it also was missing in school, since
you'd mostly be able to forget about things after the exam.

Looking at the penny example he seems to suggest that I should study the
character 犬 by putting 太 next to it and ask "which one means dog?". I think
this will only make you better at multiple choice tests and confuse you
because you conflate unrelated knowledge with each other.

~~~
Novukus
I'm not sure you read the article with good faith.

After the penny example, he goes on to talk about how important retrieval and
exertion is to solidifying memories.

> Quizzing/testing/assessing one’s knowledge via answering recognition or
> recall questions, for example, is more difficult than simply rereading
> notes.

He then quotes:

> “Effortful retrieval makes for stronger learning and retention. We’re easily
> seduced into believing that learning is better when it’s easier, but the
> research shows the opposite: when the mind has to work, learning sticks
> better.” (5)

Going by what he says, I would suggest that his preferred learning strategy
would be to, if you know you're going to be quizzed on what a penny looks
like, try to recall what it looks like from memory. Then compare it to the
actual penny, note what you got wrong, then try to recall it again. That's the
kind of repetition and retrieval practice he's recommending in the article.

------
tejohnso
>Look at the image below and see if you can pick out the penny that is
correct: It’s quite difficult to do, right? And, surely, you’ve encountered
the penny hundreds, if not thousands of times

Yes, but I don't _study_ the exact details of the penny. I was immediately
able to identify any one of the images as "penny", which is what I would
expect with the thousands of passing encounters I've had with it. I'm not sure
this example gets the desired point across.

It might be more on point to have one group of students study several facts
simply by reading them repeatedly, while a second group studies by recalling
and using the facts in sentences. Then compare ability to recall the facts.

------
frobisher
I'd argue that association is what drives memory. I can review something a
million times and still forget it.

It's when I sit down, focus, and "feel" the meaning of the thing that I
remember it thereafter.

~~~
mikekchar
It is incredibly difficult to remember something that you don't understand. In
fact, your memory often elides things that you don't understand to the point
where you will swear that something never happened when, in fact, it did.
Statistically speaking, repetition is required for learning, but
_understanding_ is at least as important. In fact, sometimes if you can find
no meaning for something, it helps to make up a meaning (for example the use
of mnemonics).

------
sebwi
I wondered why nobody has mentioned 'deliberative practice' yet when the
article emphasizes some of its basic elements such as the importance of
cognitive effort for learning.

------
brlewis
The article is 100% about passive vs active studying and approximately 0%
about repetition. Repetition is briefly touched on by pointing out that if
you're 100% passively receiving information, then repetition doesn't help. The
effect of repetition on active study is never brought up.

