Learning Problems

Hi,

This week’s email is about common issues that we run into when we’re trying to learn things.

Here are the key practical points you should know (mainly from this research article):

• Amnesia occurs when people forget material shortly after they learn it (like when students forget what they learned in a class after taking its final test).

• Fantasia occurs when people wrongly think that they understand something that they don’t, and are confident about their illusory understanding, which can lead to entrenched misconceptions that interfere with later learning.

• Inertia occurs when people are unable to use knowledge that they have, other than to perform some basic operation with it, such as repeating it verbatim (a phenomenon also called inert knowledge).

• A related issue is nostalgia, which occurs when stakeholders like educators and administrators believe that educational problems can be solved by simply reinstating the way they were taught when they were the same age as their students.

These issues can be considered part of the epidemiology of mislearning and taxonomy of pedagopathology. They’re mostly discussed in the context of formal education, but can also play a role in other contexts where learning takes place, such as a child learning from their parents or an individual learning on their own.

As always, I’m happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar