The Importance of Effort
The Importance of Effort
Transcript
A lot of the strategies that we gravitate towards as learners are strategies that help learning to feel easy, and in a lot of ways, that makes sense. It's intuitive to look for the moments when something starts to feel easy and use those as evidence that we've achieved mastery. But here's the thing. While that intuition is right in the long term, in the short term, learning is actually supposed to feel like a challenge. It's supposed to take effort. And it turns out that to a certain extent, the more effortful our learning, or in other words, the harder we have to work for it, the more effective it'll be in the long run.
The metaphor I often use with my students is going to the gym. If you bought a membership to a new gym and you went and worked out with a trainer, and at the end of the session, you weren't tired, and the next morning, you weren't even a little bit sore, you'd probably be pretty dissatisfied, right? I know I would. Feeling sore the next morning is part of how you know you got a good workout. It helps you to tell when you need to push harder. Those weights feel easy, I better scale up, or when you need to pull back. That feedback, that soreness, helps you walk the line between wow, that was an amazing workout, and I literally can't stand up right now, maybe I overdid it.
When we're thinking about learning strategies, the same principle applies. Rather than looking for natural talents and places where learning feels easy, instead, we should be looking for ways to feel the burn, so to speak. We should be setting ourselves learning goals that are challenging, and in our specific study practices, we should be looking to introduce that extra element of difficulty, those extra few pounds at the end of the dumbbell, to make sure that we're getting our money's worth for the time that we're putting in. How? One really important strategy for effortful learning is what's called priming the mind. In practice, that means trying to solve a problem before being taught the answer.
The goal is not to come up with a solution right away. Instead, it's to try to figure out what you don't know, and what you'll need to know in order to solve the problem so that you can treat your readings and your lecture like a scavenger hunt, searching for the pieces that you need. Metacognitively, this works by helping increase your brain's recognition of the practical application of the new information. If you know why the information matters, you're more likely to make connections and hold onto it.
The extra effort to try to understand the problem we're not ready to solve helps us build ourselves a context and a need that learning can help us fill. A second strategy is what's called spaced retrieval practice. Spaced retrieval practice works on the idea that forgetting is a really important part of remembering. Rather than sitting and drilling down on one kind of problem for hours on end, that do it until you can do it in your sleep mode of studying, it means breaking up your practice sessions into multiple shorter settings, with ample time in between. This works by allowing a concept to move out of your short-term memory and back into long-term storage, so that each time you sit down to study, you're practicing retrieving the information in addition to applying it.
Put another way, by giving your brain time to forget, you give yourself another opportunity to practice remembering, and each time we remember, it comes a little faster and it sticks a little better than the last time. Another strategy is what's called interleaving, moving back and forth between different kinds of problems and applications of a new concept. This helps us enforce spaced retrieval practice on a faster timeline, but it also helps us make things just a little bit harder. Moving back and forth between different tasks forces us to put forward just a little bit more effort to get our bearings and refocus.
That effort, even though it feels harder in the moment, produces better learning down the line. Think again of the gym. You don't do the same exercises every time you go. You alternate, you interleave, to make sure your muscles don't just adapt to the one task they're given so you don't hit a plateau. Interleaving types of problems does the same thing for our learning that interleaving exercises does for our bodies, upping the level of difficulty so that instead of our brains adapting to perform one specific task or one specific concept in one application, they have to continue to work to identify what task or concept is at stake and learn to apply it in many different contexts.
It takes away familiarity, and in doing so, it keeps us from slipping into studying on autopilot. What these strategies have in common is that they take the unconscious processes that are happening in our brains already, and they add in conscious effort. When it feels easy, it's because we're usually working on autopilot, and it's hard for us to tell how much we're really learning and getting out of a task, whether that gym membership is worth it.
On the other hand, when we choose strategies that take conscious, intentional effort, we've created a feedback loop, where we can feel the work we're putting in, and so we know if it's working. Just like our sore muscles the day after a hard gym session help us to assess whether or not we had a good workout, effortful study practice gives us a way of gauging how we're doing by moving studying off of autopilot and helping us to feel the burn.
The metaphor I often use with my students is going to the gym. If you bought a membership to a new gym and you went and worked out with a trainer, and at the end of the session, you weren't tired, and the next morning, you weren't even a little bit sore, you'd probably be pretty dissatisfied, right? I know I would. Feeling sore the next morning is part of how you know you got a good workout. It helps you to tell when you need to push harder. Those weights feel easy, I better scale up, or when you need to pull back. That feedback, that soreness, helps you walk the line between wow, that was an amazing workout, and I literally can't stand up right now, maybe I overdid it.
When we're thinking about learning strategies, the same principle applies. Rather than looking for natural talents and places where learning feels easy, instead, we should be looking for ways to feel the burn, so to speak. We should be setting ourselves learning goals that are challenging, and in our specific study practices, we should be looking to introduce that extra element of difficulty, those extra few pounds at the end of the dumbbell, to make sure that we're getting our money's worth for the time that we're putting in. How? One really important strategy for effortful learning is what's called priming the mind. In practice, that means trying to solve a problem before being taught the answer.
The goal is not to come up with a solution right away. Instead, it's to try to figure out what you don't know, and what you'll need to know in order to solve the problem so that you can treat your readings and your lecture like a scavenger hunt, searching for the pieces that you need. Metacognitively, this works by helping increase your brain's recognition of the practical application of the new information. If you know why the information matters, you're more likely to make connections and hold onto it.
The extra effort to try to understand the problem we're not ready to solve helps us build ourselves a context and a need that learning can help us fill. A second strategy is what's called spaced retrieval practice. Spaced retrieval practice works on the idea that forgetting is a really important part of remembering. Rather than sitting and drilling down on one kind of problem for hours on end, that do it until you can do it in your sleep mode of studying, it means breaking up your practice sessions into multiple shorter settings, with ample time in between. This works by allowing a concept to move out of your short-term memory and back into long-term storage, so that each time you sit down to study, you're practicing retrieving the information in addition to applying it.
Put another way, by giving your brain time to forget, you give yourself another opportunity to practice remembering, and each time we remember, it comes a little faster and it sticks a little better than the last time. Another strategy is what's called interleaving, moving back and forth between different kinds of problems and applications of a new concept. This helps us enforce spaced retrieval practice on a faster timeline, but it also helps us make things just a little bit harder. Moving back and forth between different tasks forces us to put forward just a little bit more effort to get our bearings and refocus.
That effort, even though it feels harder in the moment, produces better learning down the line. Think again of the gym. You don't do the same exercises every time you go. You alternate, you interleave, to make sure your muscles don't just adapt to the one task they're given so you don't hit a plateau. Interleaving types of problems does the same thing for our learning that interleaving exercises does for our bodies, upping the level of difficulty so that instead of our brains adapting to perform one specific task or one specific concept in one application, they have to continue to work to identify what task or concept is at stake and learn to apply it in many different contexts.
It takes away familiarity, and in doing so, it keeps us from slipping into studying on autopilot. What these strategies have in common is that they take the unconscious processes that are happening in our brains already, and they add in conscious effort. When it feels easy, it's because we're usually working on autopilot, and it's hard for us to tell how much we're really learning and getting out of a task, whether that gym membership is worth it.
On the other hand, when we choose strategies that take conscious, intentional effort, we've created a feedback loop, where we can feel the work we're putting in, and so we know if it's working. Just like our sore muscles the day after a hard gym session help us to assess whether or not we had a good workout, effortful study practice gives us a way of gauging how we're doing by moving studying off of autopilot and helping us to feel the burn.