LEARN Logs

Moderate overall, strong for discrimination — Brunmair and Richter (2019) meta-analyzed 59 studies and found an overall Hedges' g = 0.42. Brunmair and Richter, publishing in Psychological Bulletin, pooled 59 studies of interleaving versus blocking. Hedges' g is a standardized eff...

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

Generating explanations forces you to integrate new material with existing knowledge (schemas), creating more retrieval routes and exposing gaps. A schema is your organized web of prior knowledge on a topic. When you explain how a new fact fits that web, you're not just storing t...

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

The claim (popularised by Barbara Oakley) that the brain has a concentrated "focused" mode for deliberate work and a relaxed "diffuse" mode where connections form on their own. The intuition: when you're stuck, stepping back — a walk, a shower, sleep — lets the mind wander across...

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

Because it sacrifices the exact sleep-dependent consolidation that would have locked in what you studied — you trade the mechanism that saves the material for a few extra hours of cramming. Sleep amplifies learning that already happened; it cannot encode what you never studied. S...

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

Strong: sleep-dependent consolidation. Moderate: the general "breaks help" principle, Cornell notes and SQ3R (structured note-taking/reading routines that smuggle in retrieval). Preliminary/contested: the 25-minute Pomodoro interval, laptop-vs-longhand, mind-mapping, and Zettelka...

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

Distributing study across time beats cramming it — one of the most robust findings in learning science, backed by a meta-analysis of 254 studies. The spacing effect says the same total study time produces more durable memory when it's spread out rather than massed. Cepeda, Pashle...

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

It interrupts the forgetting curve just before you'd forget (spacing) and forces you to recall rather than recognize (effortful retrieval) — the two strongest results in memory science. This is the payoff of the whole mission — and it's why this very app works. A well-designed sp...

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

Metacognitive illusions are stubborn — even after directly experiencing that a hard method works better, many learners revert to the easier method that merely feels productive. You can show someone their own data — they recalled more after self-testing than after re-reading — and...

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

DEBUNKED as a personality claim. Specific functions can be lateralized locally, but no individual has a globally dominant hemisphere network. Nielsen et al. (Univ. of Utah, 2013) analyzed brain imaging from 1,011 people looking for evidence that individuals lean on one hemisphere...

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

Students who repeatedly re-studied scored HIGHER on a test taken 5 minutes later than students who had practiced retrieval — a misleading short-term win. Roediger & Karpicke (2006, Psychological Science) had students read a prose passage, then either re-study it repeatedly (study...

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