It’s weak evidence for the first, proposition, but I don’t think it’s any evidence for the second. I suspect you’re right, but to play devils advocate, it could be that training/selecting for grit could be more important for future success than the learning is.
It’s at least a little evidence that training people to endure boredom is a bad idea, since boredom is part of inefficient learning.
School has enough prestige that I think a lot of people come out of it believing that if they can’t learn in a school like environment, they can’t learn at all. Sometimes they just apply it to one subject, sometimes to all subjects commonly taught in school, sometimes they give up on learning.
Interleaving is great. After reading about this a few months ago, I realized how I did Anki was bad. I had separate decks for each subject. To interleave, you could put everything in one deck, but you’d only be able to organize by tag then.
I figured out a better way to interleave in Anki. Create a filtered deck which takes X random cards from all your other decks. You can make X as big or small as you want.
Incidentally, this also made me realize how much of a cue studying by deck was. The subject of some cards was no longer obvious because of how I wrote them, so I’ve slowly been disambiguating them. This is good, I think, as in reality you often don’t have such a strong cue that says “use knowledge from X subject”.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-interleaving-effect-mixing-it-up-boosts-learning/
Argues for mixing up what you’re learning (at least within a subject) rather than trying to just focus on one thing at a time.
The value of interleaving is evidence that a lot of conventional education is about teaching people to endure boredom, and this is a very bad mistake.
It’s weak evidence for the first, proposition, but I don’t think it’s any evidence for the second. I suspect you’re right, but to play devils advocate, it could be that training/selecting for grit could be more important for future success than the learning is.
It’s at least a little evidence that training people to endure boredom is a bad idea, since boredom is part of inefficient learning.
School has enough prestige that I think a lot of people come out of it believing that if they can’t learn in a school like environment, they can’t learn at all. Sometimes they just apply it to one subject, sometimes to all subjects commonly taught in school, sometimes they give up on learning.
Oh, yeah. Boredom is almost synonymous with school. :(
Interleaving is great. After reading about this a few months ago, I realized how I did Anki was bad. I had separate decks for each subject. To interleave, you could put everything in one deck, but you’d only be able to organize by tag then.
I figured out a better way to interleave in Anki. Create a filtered deck which takes X random cards from all your other decks. You can make X as big or small as you want.
Incidentally, this also made me realize how much of a cue studying by deck was. The subject of some cards was no longer obvious because of how I wrote them, so I’ve slowly been disambiguating them. This is good, I think, as in reality you often don’t have such a strong cue that says “use knowledge from X subject”.
For those interested in further reading: Robin Hanson’s take, popularly-written book.