LEARN Logs

Interleaved practice scored 77% vs 38% for blocked on a next-day test (d ≈ 1.21) — and the entire gain came from eliminating discrimination errors. Taylor and Rohrer had fourth-graders practice four types of prism problem either blocked or interleaved. A day later the interleaver...

Quiz: LEARN / Desirable Difficulties | updated: Jul 30, 2026

The explanation must be generated by YOU — reading someone else's is far weaker — and you need enough prior knowledge to generate a CORRECT explanation, or you reinforce misconceptions. The power is in the generation. Studying a worked, expert explanation is passive and produces...

Quiz: LEARN / Desirable Difficulties | updated: Jul 30, 2026

A time-management method (Francesco Cirillo) of working in roughly 25-minute focused blocks, each followed by a 5-minute break, with a longer break after every four blocks. The named "pomodoros" (Italian for tomatoes, after Cirillo's tomato-shaped kitchen timer) give structure to...

Quiz: LEARN / Focus, Sleep & Systems | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Notes help most when they force ACTIVE processing — reorganising, summarising, connecting, paraphrasing — not verbatim copying; so what your brain does matters more than which method you use. The value of note-taking is not the artifact of notes; it's the mental work of producing...

Quiz: LEARN / Focus, Sleep & Systems | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885) showed that memory decays roughly exponentially: a steep drop within the first day, then a slow flattening. Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist, ran the first rigorous memory experiments on a single subject — himself. He memorized long lists of "nonsense s...

Quiz: LEARN / How Memory Works | updated: Jul 30, 2026

A gap lets retrieval strength drop, so the next review becomes an effortful retrieval — which is exactly what adds the most storage strength. Spacing and the storage/retrieval theory are two views of the same mechanism. When you leave time between sessions, retrieval strength dec...

Quiz: LEARN / How Memory Works | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Metacognition is "thinking about thinking" — monitoring and regulating your own learning as it happens. It has two parts: monitoring (noticing what you do and don't know) and regulation (changing what you do next — more practice here, move on there). Almost every study decision y...

Quiz: LEARN / Metacognition & Myths | updated: Jul 30, 2026

Dual coding pairs a VERBAL representation (words) with a VISUAL one (diagram, timeline, labelled sketch) so a single idea is encoded through two complementary channels. Encode an idea only in words and you have one route back to it. Encode it in words and a meaningful image and y...

Quiz: LEARN / Metacognition & Myths | updated: Jul 30, 2026

DEBUNKED. Imaging shows essentially all brain regions are active across a normal day, and the brain is metabolically expensive precisely because it's all in use. The whole organ pulls its weight: the brain consumes about 20% of the body's energy while making up only about 2% of i...

Quiz: LEARN / Metacognition & Myths | updated: Jul 30, 2026

The tables flipped: the retrieval group recalled 61% versus 40% for the re-study group. One week after studying, the group that had tested themselves decisively beat the group that had re-read: 61% vs 40%. The lesson isn't subtle: re-study wins in the next five minutes; retrieval...

Quiz: LEARN / Retrieval Practice | updated: Jul 30, 2026