In the era of extremely fragmented time, how can we learn effectively?

36Kr has specially set up a 36Kr reading column for reading, screening some books worth reading and providing some book abstracts. I hope you have a satisfactory book at hand to keep the reading movement going.

Introduction

In the era of lifelong learning, how to learn effectively is as important as persisting in learning. The learning skills we have acquired may no longer adapt to the current situation, especially in such an era of extremely fragmented time. How to systematically learn has become a problem that everyone must solve.

Effective Learning is an excellent research achievement. Birdzell, a senior researcher in American think tank, will show you the new international achievements on the subject of "How to Learn" and the corresponding simple skills. These ideas and skills are explained by inspiring stories and language, which will subvert the learning style you accepted before and transform learning into a process that everyone can master.

About the author

ulrich-Birdzell

center for american progress, a senior researcher in the American national think tank, is devoted to the study of learning ability. His related articles were published in The New York Times, Washington post, The Wall Street Journal and other international first-line media.

book excerpts

Overconfidence will hinder effective learning

Daniel Kahneman is one of the most important psychologists in the contemporary era. He won the Nobel Prize a few years ago for his pioneering research on human thinking deviation. Together with his colleague Amos Twowski, he founded behavioral economics. If you have ever read books such as Weird Behaviors and Boosting, or watched the movie moneyball, these works are all based on Kahneman's research results to some extent.

A few years ago, a reporter from The Guardian interviewed Kahneman. The interview was arranged in a small room next to the lobby of a hotel in London. Kahneman was over 8 years old at that time, and his voice was almost inaudible. The reporter asked such a question: "How can people make their thinking more efficient?"

"If I had a magic wand, what would I most like to get rid of?" Kahneman considered his words, "overconfidence."

kahneman's understatement doesn't seem to show the importance of this answer. In fact, most of us suffer from overconfidence. We think we know more than we actually do. Almost everyone thinks that we are smarter, more beautiful and more skilled than the average person. At work, we always feel that we are more efficient than others; At parties, we always feel more attractive than the average person in the room.

everyone has this kind of overconfidence. In the political field, the most typical example is the Iraq war, which is far from over, and the slogan "Successfully completed the task" has been hung on warships. In business, only overconfidence can explain those explosive events: the merger of AOL and time warner Inc., or the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the real estate crisis. In sports competition, boxer lenox Lewis was knocked down by nobody in the street after winning the heavyweight championship.

Overconfidence will eventually hinder effective learning. When people are in a state of overconfidence, they stop learning. They won't practice again, and they won't keep asking questions. Overconfidence is particularly harmful in learning methods that require more hard work. Once we think we have understood it, we will immediately give up our efforts to continue searching for the internal relationship of knowledge, and we will not consider the application of knowledge and skills in different scenarios.

Overconfidence can not only affect the monitoring of learning progress or metacognition, but also stop thinking hard, stop introspection, and stop trying to turn learning content into your own habits. It is such a question that leads us to pay attention to the last stage of learning: various methods of reviewing and reflecting on what we have learned.

do you know how the toilet works? I guess you will say "of course I know" because you use the toilet every day. Most people use the toilet every day, even open the water tank cover behind the toilet, look at the water shutoff valve, or fiddle with the connecting rod.

So, if you answer the above question on a scale of 1-1, evaluate your understanding of the working principle of the toilet:

1 point: not at all. I don't know how the toilet works.

5 points: medium understanding. I have a basic understanding of the working principle of the toilet.

1 points: expert level. I personally installed several toilets.

I guess most people will give themselves 5 or 6 points, that is to say, they think they are better than the average, but they are not skilled.

At first glance, the psychologist Astra Marchmann also thinks that she knows quite well how the toilet works. Marchmann said in the book Learn to Think that he spent a lot of time fiddling with the toilet when he was a child, and Marchmann remembered that his parents often shouted to him not to waste water. Therefore, when asked how much he knows about toilets, Marchmann is most likely to give himself a score of 5 or 6.

However, one day, Marchmann asked himself some questions about the toilet: How did the water flow out of the toilet? What is the raised part of the lower part of the toilet bowl for? Do I really understand how water flows into the toilet bowl? At that moment, Marchmann realized that his own understanding of the working principle of the toilet was far from enough, and he also lacked a systematic understanding of the device.

Marchmann's understanding of the working principle of the toilet can be regarded as an illusion of thinking. He thought he understood it and explained it clearly, but in fact, Marchmann could not clearly describe how the device was constituted and how it worked, and it was certainly impossible to completely disassemble the toilet and reassemble it.

it's not a matter of time. Marchmann, like us, has full time to figure out the technology of laying pipelines; He is not lacking in ability, because he used to be the executive director of the Cognitive Science Society. But in the end, Marchmann overestimated his ability. Marchmann wrote in his book: "Every time I watch the toilet work, I really don't know how the water flows from the tank to the urinal and how it is dispersed."

let's know the catch-22 of learning activities: the more we know, the more we think we know. Therefore, mastering a little knowledge is not as simple as being a little dangerous. It really confuses us. Psychologists have studied this view for many years, and have given this phenomenon many fancy names, such as experts' blind spots, fluency preferences, hallucinations caused by the depth of explanation and so on.

these various names all boil down to a core point: we usually think we know more than we actually do. We overestimate our abilities and we don't have a clear understanding of what we don't know. Therefore, if you give yourself 6 points for your knowledge about the toilet, you may actually get only 4 points.

therefore, our first lesson about reflection is modesty. In my research work, I also found the necessity of modesty. I asked in a questionnaire: Can you effectively distinguish good teaching methods? If people have an accurate understanding of their skills, then the answer should be divided into two equal parts-5% below average and 5% above average. But the result of the questionnaire is that 9% people think that their ability to distinguish good teaching methods is above average.

of course, this rashness has its advantages. Without a little overconfidence, it is estimated that no one will write a book or publish research results. Self-confidence can also provide an incentive. In the interview process, college students who exaggerate their GPA scores improve their scores more significantly than those who seek truth from facts. A researcher who did this research explained: "Students who exaggerate their grades have higher goals."

It's a shame to admit that "I don't know anything", and I'm still bitter about my overconfidence. Over the years, I have let swindlers get away with it on the road, and I have missed the date by catching a plane. A few years ago, I went to a legislature in California to give a lecture, and the result was so far off topic that a legislator said half jokingly, "I wish I could beat you up."

One of the reasons for overconfidence in learning activities is a high degree of familiarity. If an idea is too handy and used to it, people may think that they understand it deeply, even if it is not necessarily the case. This explains why people are overconfident about such problems as toilets-toilets can be seen anytime and anywhere; It also explains why people are overconfident in distinguishing good teaching methods-people see too many kinds of education and training.

we are also overconfident in some cases. For example, things that look simple and ordinary are easy to make people feel easier to learn; There are large pictures in the article, and people tend to think that they can understand the contents of the book; When a professor's course fascinates students, people will think that students can learn more from him, although the actual situation is not the case.

When I visited Astra Marchmann at the University of Texas in Austin, I heard him tell another example: the TED talk (you can see this talk program on the iPad). TED is a well-made speech program, and the topics of the speech range from juggling to morality and ethics. There are always many touching stories and dramatic moments in the spotlight and in front of the camera. These video contents have been viewed more than ten million times.

Marchmann thinks that from the perspective of learning, the disadvantages of TED talk outweigh the benefits. "The problem is not the speech itself," Marchmann said, "but the way we use the contents of these speeches. We watched a very smooth speech for 15 minutes and then moved on to the next speech. " In other words, a TED talk looks like a learning experience: an expert speaks on a spotlight-lit stage, but the content seems to be too easy to get, so it will be easily forgotten.

it doesn't seem to be a big deal. So, what happens when a TED talk presents a topic in an elaborate way? Who would be disgusted with making elaborate video content? The irony, however, is that such elaborate work will hinder our learning activities. Some psychologists call this phenomenon the "double curse" of learning activities: if you don't know whether you are right or not, then you don't know whether you are wrong or not; If things look easy, then less will be learned, because if things look easy, people will reduce their efforts.

In learning activities, there is another factor that causes overconfidence, and that is past experience. Past experience will affect our judgment on learning activities. If we always get a in chemistry exams, we may not spend much time on chemistry exams, even if the next exam may be much more difficult than the last one; If we often use PPT to give lectures, we won't spend a lot of preparation time on a new lecture, even if the new lecture is different from the previous one.