To which extent are we able to evaluate our knowledge? Apparently we are not that good. There are several biases of the cognition that make us more comfortable with ourselves than we should be.
Take for example confirmation bias. We assume some line of thought. Now everything new we see makes us more sure in what we think. If we believe in god, we will see divine intervention in everything around us. If we believe in science we will see how it solves every problem it encounters. If we believe in a specific paradigm, we will discard any new evidence – and if we have enough self control to accept the new evidence we will have heroic task of convincing others.
Or take this research on active retrieval learning.
Active recall students got 60% correct. Repeated studying got 45%. Concept-mapping 40%, and studying only once got 30%.
The authors had the participants practice with all of the different methods and then asked them which was most effective.
The students here thought the ranking was: repeated studying was best, then concept mapping, active recall and finally one-time studying.
Aside from the obvious case that one-time studying gets beaten by doing some sort of review, the participants were completely wrong about the effectiveness of the other methods. And, again, this was after they had a chance to try all of them out for themselves.
Trial-and-error led them to believe repeated studying would the most effective, when active recall was almost 33% more effective, given the same amount of time. Why would students make this mistake? In the words of the authors:
“Students generally exhibited little awareness that practicing retrieval enhances learning. … When students rely purely on their subjective experience while they study (e.g. fluency of processing during rereading) they may fall prey to illusions of competence and believing that they know the material better than they actually do.”
In short, students went with what they felt like made them learn better. But because this intuition was based on the ability to recognize more easily, not recall, it was highly misleading.
Now, what happens with someone reading a text? 10 years ago I gave Anna to read 10 books about memory and speedreading and asked her what she learnt. She said: nothing new, everybody agrees with what I think. Subsequently, I challenged each of her theories using paragraphs from the texts. Her answer was quite typical “I dismissed that as it makes no sense”. After 2 years of active discussions, I managed to move Anna from her paradigm into the approach you now learn. Her reaction: “I am a teacher, and quite often I make mistakes. When a shoemaker does not have shoes it surprises nobody. I can teach anyone to read and remember everything, but I cannot clone myself to teach me.”. This is partially true, since I could not teach myself speedreading before Anna taught me.
Quite often I ask Anna and a student to evaluate the degree of text retention. Anna says “This particular student retains 25%” and the student claims to retain 85%. Why the discrepancy? The student simply dismisses all information he founds irrelevant. Anna does not have this luxury, and treats texts as plain unprioritized information.
The amount of things you can teach yourself is limitless, yet the amount of pitfall you may encounter is also limitless. If you can afford a coach or accountability partner [we provide this services in mastermind group], you are better of than your peers. This is not you falt – just the way human mind works.
