Why Learning is not Intuitive
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #86
An issue I’m keen to tackle early in the academic year is how intuitive (or not) learning is. It’s an important idea, and one that underpins much of what I share in these updates.
The thing is, even though students often like to assume that they can reflect accurately on learning and make good decisions, learning is fundamentally not intuitive. That is to say, we often can’t just figure out things such as:
How best to study
How well we have learned or understood something
How long things will be retained before we forget them.
To put it another way, metacognition about learning is often flawed.
An analogy
An analogy that I like to use for this concerns healthy eating:
People can’t figure out which foods are good for their health just on the basis of how good they taste.
Similarly, if we judge how to study on the basis of how it feels (and especially, how easy it feels), this would lead to the study equivalent of junk food.
Most students can understand and engage with this analogy. It also highlights that what ‘works’ is not a matter of preference, and isn’t radically different from one student to another. Just as vegetables are healthy for everyone, no matter how much you like them, certain study strategies just work better.
Intuition
Why don’t we intuitively know how to study? One reason is that our memories didn’t evolve to do academic tasks. They evolved to help us survive.
Most of the effective learning strategies actually make good evolutionary sense. For example, spacing out practice (see update #39) – would have been helpful to early humans and animals, as we would have retained events that recurred periodically, and forgotten temporary ones.
More broadly, humans have intuition about a bunch of helpful things, but these are sometimes out of line with modern needs. Taste is another example – we like things that are sweet and fatty. Before supermarkets, these would have been scarce and essential for survival. Today we can draw on scientific evidence to choose healthy options instead.
In practice
In the classroom or during self-regulated study, flawed intuitions about learning and memory often pave the way for short-term strategies – things that feel useful at the time, but don’t lead to lasting memory.
For example, students might:
Prefer to highlight their notes rather than actively retrieve them from memory.
Prefer to work on things they find easy instead of tackling new ideas that seem hard and complex.
Misjudge how quickly they will forget, assuming that passing a progress test means that something has been ‘learned’.
This brings us on to the connection between learning and memory – two concepts that have overlaps but also subtle differences. I think I’ll leave it until next week to go into those further.
All the best for now, and if you are just starting out a new term/semester, good luck!
Jonathan
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