- authors
- Andy Matuschak
- year
- 2019
- url
- https://andymatuschak.org/books/
- every learning tool (books, lectures, note-taking, etc) have an underlying model of how humans learn (cognitive model)
- transmissionism: the cognitive model in which it’s enough for lecturer to say words for students to understand
- the real learning, though, happens after the lecture when people try solving the problems
- to understand something, you must actively engage with it
- books also implicitly assume transmissionism
- textbooks (with exercises) have an explicit cognitive model
- that still leaves a lot of metacognitive burden on the students: evaluation which exercises are worth doing, whether student understands the underlying concept behind exercises
- courses help with metacognitive burden: provide feedback on exercises (group and/or individual), fine-grained help if students are stuck
- courses also have social and emotional parts
- instead of trying to fix books, we can design new mediums altogether
- people struggle to absorb new material when their working memory is already overloaded (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4207727/)
- e.g., if you were just introduced a lot of new terms, you likely won’t absorb much from a sentence that uses many of those terms at once
