“In grad school I managed to take advantage of the pacing effect in an educational setting.” (comment)
recommended by 3 users | 2009 | btilly on: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to… | learning & memory | original thread |
btilly on Sep 11, 2009 | on: Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm | view on HN

In grad school I managed to take advantage of the pacing effect in an educational setting. I was teaching linear algebra. What I did was make the homework incremental - 1/3 of homework on today's material, 1/3 on the previous week, and 1/3 anything in the course. Those thirds were in increasing order of difficulty.

I also started every class with a question/answer period. The rules were simple, the questioning will last at least 10 minutes, and you don't want me to ask the questions. :-) Anything that had come up in the questions that seemed to be a point of confusion was sure to be added to the next homework set.

I won't go into what else I did with that class, but the end result is worth thinking about. First note that I gave a ridiculously hard final. Other grad students who saw it thought that the class would bomb. Secondly they aced the test. What do I mean by aced? Well I had a bonus question which fellow grad students thought nobody would get. 70% of the class got that question, and a good fraction were over 100% on the test. So they must have studied hard, right? Nope. I ran into some students several months later. They told me that they tried to study for the final and stopped after a few minutes because it was useless, they knew everything. And several months later they still knew much of the material cold!

The thing is that none of what I did was very radical. The principles have been known for a century. Psychologists have been trying to get people to listen for that long. I learned about it in the 80s from a university course I watched on TV. (British Columbia had a TV channel devoted to lectures for correspondence courses.)

Yet, despite how dramatic the effects are, nobody listens and nobody takes advantage of it.

3 users recommended this comment. What they said:
CarolineW Mar 21, 2016 | on: Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology (1885) | context

This is where the "Spaced Repetition"[0] system for learning was born. It's been discussed several times on HN[1][2], and one of the most useful comments I've ever read here occurred in one of those threads[3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=170542

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818157

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818367

gojomo Sep 12, 2009 | on: Ben Tilly: Effective A/B Testing | context

I presume this is the same btilly with the recent great story about random/spaced repetition in teaching. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=818367 )

The combination triggers the thought: what if online teaching used A/B testing, to continually optimize not for conversions/revenue but for retention/mastery?

Tomte May 22, 2017 | on: Ask HN: Favorite HN comment(s) | context