Sarah Allen's Weblog

incidental learning

In reading more about the spacing effect, I found some interesting research on incidental learning, which maps more closely on how I learn best and how I enjoy learning.

"For cued-memory tasks (e.g. recognition memory, frequency estimation tasks), which rely more on item information and less on contextual information, Greene (1989) proposed that the spacing effect is due to the deficient processing of the second occurrence of a massed item. This deficient processing is due to the increased amount of voluntary rehearsal of spaced items. This account is supported by findings that the spacing effect is not found when items are studied through incidental learning." -- Wikipedia on the spacing effect

"Incidental learning is unintentional or unplanned learning that results from other activities. It occurs often in the workplace and when using computers, in the process of completing tasks (Baskett 1993; Cahoon 1995). It happens in many ways: through observation, repetition, social interaction, and problem solving (Cahoon 1995; Rogers 1997); from implicit meanings in classroom or workplace policies or expectations (Leroux and Lafleur 1995); by watching or talking to colleagues or experts about tasks (van Tillaart et al. 1998); from mistakes, assumptions, beliefs, and attributions (Cseh, Watkins, and Marsick 1999); or from being forced to accept or adapt to situations (English 1999). This "natural" way of learning (Rogers 1997) has characteristics of what is considered most effective in formal learning situations: it is situated, contextual, and social." -- Sandra Kerka (2000)

I find that I learn best when I provide myself the opportunity to see something from different perspectives and in different settings. I don't memorize bash commands, I use them on the command line and in scripts until I know them without thinking. Neither do I memorize vocabulary when I learn a language, I learn to say it, write it, see an object and think of it, use it in a sentence or in a song.

By blogging about the "spacing effect," I incidentally learned about incidental learning. Blogging gives me a framework to dig into a topic, as I seek primary sources or at least URL references. Understanding an idea well enough to write about it, even for a short blog post, means that I need to think about it from a few perspectives.

Frete (2002:92:93) quoting Roger Schank (also via edutechwiki) writes: "The trick is not to teach the facts at all, but rather to have the facts be along the way to getting to something the student naturally wanted to know in the first place. Using the Acquisition Hypothesis, we assume that how one learns a fact is as important as what fact one learns. Thus we should have students learn facts while engaged in a process similar to the one in which they will use the facts. We should use students' natural interest so they come across such facts incidentally, in the course of pursuing their interests."

Of course, the problem is that sometimes you need a thousand small fact building blocks to get to the point of what you want to learn. I'd like to learn Chinese, but I can't get past learning thousands of vocabulary words. However, I'm fascinated with etymology and I am an artist. I've been looking for a book or multimedia Chinese language instruction that will teach groups of words together where the Chinese characters have base characters in common and still tell me what the spoken words are in Mandarin. However, I haven't found that yet, so all I can say is "How are you?" which I use as a sort of PTA parlor trick amongst families who speak far more English than I do Chinese.

I think that the more connections we establish between memories, the more we remember. Nonetheless, there is still a place for memorization when seeking to gain entry into a new field or new language. When we can't provide enough opportunities for incidental learning at the pace we want to learn, tools like SuperMemo and Mnemosyne can work to augment that learning.

extreme learning: overcoming the spacing effect

Gary Wolf writes in Wired a fascinating story of Piotr Wozniak's quest for an effective method of learning that he has built into his SuperMemo software (via Chris Pettit, who recommends Mnemosyne, open source software based on the same algorithm which will run on a Mac). While I'm not sure I'm ready to dive into this technique, I loved reading about Wozniak's passionately focused approach along with Wolf's detailed background on scientists who have studied how we remember and forget.

In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus studied memory by repeated experiments of how long it took to learn (and remember or forget) a series of nonsense words. "Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first to draw a learning curve. Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions." He called this phenomenon the spacing effect.

Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, professors of psychology, sought to understand the spacing effect more recently. They noted a "paradoxical tendency of older memories to become stronger with the passage of time, while more recent memories faded... Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength."

"One of the problems is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely correlated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have to work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precisely those things that seem to signal we're learning well -- easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something -- are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future."

"It is a common intuition," Wozniak later wrote, "that with successive repetitions, knowledge should gradually become more durable and require less frequent review." Wolf details Wozniak's life study of how to remember effectively through refreshing that knowledge in the moment just before you are about to forget it. He adjusted this technique over many years, applying it to whatever he was studying: English vocabulary, facts from biology, and eventually anything he wanted to read. All of his early work was done on paper. It was in the day of the punch card, and lines to computer use at his university made automating the process impractical. Later he got a friend to encode his technique into Atari software and it is now available on Windows and Palm. SuperMemo allows you to enter a series of Flash Cards which it will present to you in intervals which are optimized for your learning.

At the end of the article, Gary Wolf writes, "philosopher William James once wrote that mental life is controlled by noticing. Climbing out of the sea and onto the windy beach, my skin purple and my mind in a reverie provoked by shock, I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrote a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforward yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse interruption, and never resist sleep when tired."

Awesome advice, but either I'll never be a genius or I'm taking a significantly different path :)

Bullets don't kill Learning...

"Bullets don't kill learning, but improper use of bullets kills learning." --Richard Mayer

I enjoyed reading The Cognitive Load of PowerPoint, an interview by Cliff Atkinson with Richard Mayer.

Richard Mayer relates several principles from his book Multimedia Learning which are applicable to PowerPoint, as well as any type of presentation. While these seem obvious, I often find it helpful and interesting to have good sense boiled down to some basic principles presented in a handy list (is that the signaling principle?).

* multimedia principle, in which people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone;
* coherence principle, in which people learn better when extraneous material is excluded rather than included;
* contiguity principle, in which people learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented at the same time or next to each other on the screen;
* modality principle, in which people learn better from animation with spoken text than animation with printed text;
*signaling principle, in which people learn better when the material is organized with clear outlines and headings;
*personalization principle, in which people learn better from conversational style than formal style.

when faces are like rocks

Imagine if it were no easier to recognize a face than to identify a rock. Face-Blindness (Prosopagnosia) affects 2 of 100 people, making it hard for them to recognize faces, even of people they know very well.

Cecilia Burman makes this unusual condition easy to understand in a funny and enlightening essay explaining some of the challenges we might have learning to recognize stones and how we might overcome those challenges.

Meet Sten

Easy to recognize in his usual spot on the steps:

Harder to spot if you unexpectedly see him in the garden:

via findaface.org via techspace via Ron Jeffries

sudden spike in evolution?

"In fact, female performance in high school mathematics now matches that of males. If biology were the basis of that, we've seen some major evolution in the past decades."

According to a recent "study," women are being overlooked or actively ignored for promotion and the committee could find no reason for the discrepancy in gender representation. This committee of experts ruled out "biological differences in ability, hormonal influences, childrearing demands, and even differences in ambition."

Sigh.

memory enhanced by experience

Reading about the hi-res user experience reminded me about some interesting research I read about in "Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain" (Caine & Caine). I can't find the exact reference, but they discussed a study where people watched a scene in a move of people doing recreational drugs. When asked to recall details from the scene afterwards, people who had more drug experience were able to recall the precise drug paraphernalia; whereas people without that experience had trouble remembering the details of the scene.

In related reading today, Sylvie Noël notes an article Are expert users always better searchers?: "Results from an experiment revealed that expert users outperformed novice users in IR [information retrieval] when the elements of a system interface are organized semantically, but not when organized randomly." The article looks interesting but I can't quite justify purchasing it at (cough) $28.

Evidence that relates experience to effective recall has been seen in multiple studies. Master chess player deGroot studied grandmaster chess players and concluded that they had superior memory for chess pieces on a chess board. Later research showed that master chess players had greater memory than novices for well-known chess patterns, as well as random positions on a chess board.

"Similar differences were found by Berliner ( Brandt, 1986) in a study comparing expert teachers to novice teachers. Thus, when briefly shown a photograph of a classroom and asked to describe what is happening, expert teachers frequently noticed two children in the back of the room who were not attending to the teacher, whereas novices rarely noticed such patterns and focused instead on details of physical setting, clothing, and other less relevant characteristics." (Dimensions of Thinking and Cognitive Instruction by Lorna Idol, Beau Fly Jones; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990)

So, what does this have to do with human interface design?

Take advantage of domain expertise
If you are creating software for a specific group of people who have specific knowledge, use key words, icons, or layout that is familar from that domain. The web is a new medium, but most web sites or web applications are associated with off-line experiences. It can be effective to use design elements from offline counterparts.

Make it fun and interesting for people to become experts
Software can be itself a destination. There is value in learning a tool well. I fondly remember the first time I saw Joe Sparks use a 3D modeling tool (sorry I can't remember what it was), and it was like watching a musician play an instrument. Effectiveness with a tool can lead to superior creative performance. Make sure that is true with the tools you create and entice the people who use them to become experts.

Help is for experts [update]
"in usability tests we see it again and again: novices and intermediates click around and experiment, experts try to reason things out and look them up in help...experts are the people most likely to know the 'magic' words to bring up what they're looking for." (Jensen Harris via guuui) Jensen notes: "if you're authoring your help system for newcomers, you might be designing for the wrong kind of person." Of couse, you should do your own usability tests -- what's true for MS Office may or may not be true for your software. Personally, I like to focus on his first point about novices learning through exploration. Think about how to make your software resillient and productive when poked at.

writing more, learning more

"the web is making us more literate - better readers, better writers" writes Elise Bauer (Not Always On). I agree wholeheartedly. I have found that keeping a blog has made me a better writer. I still find it challenging sometimes to publish even one or two paragraphs, as evidenced by the vast number of "draft" entries lurking in my movable type personal publishing system. Nevertheless, I have written dozens of blog entries while I struggle over the draft of a single full-length article that I've been working on for about nine-months. Without the practice of regular blogging, it would probably take even longer.

Bauer also writes about how the web makes us more literate by providing easy access to definitions of words, as well as pronunciation. I discovered the same thing recently when I was preparing to talk to a group of first graders about the exploration of Titam. I kept reading about Huygens probe which landed on Titan, named after the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. I know a Dutch phrase or two but had no idea how to pronounce this name. The internet to the rescue! A kindly soul had wondered the same thing and after doing some research, he posted his findings. I am consistently delighted with how I can indulge my idle curiosity, as well as semi-serious scientific inquiry, with a quick search of the web.

less grammar, more play

"Brains love play. Find a way to bring more play (or at least a sense of playfulness) into someone's life, and you might just end up with a fan. (...) Brains evolved to play, and apparently the bigger the brain, the more likely it is to play. Play turns the brain on." Creating Passionate Users (via InfoDesign) suggests a number of ways to make work more playful: games, festivities, and diversions.

I keep thinking that there are more ways we can take a playful approach to work. That we do, in fact, learn better and are more productive when we are having fun.

"It's when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won't make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It's when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time."
-- Common sense has much to learn from moonshine: less grammar, more play

The above is quoted from an article about teaching children to write. I found it relevant to my own pursuits of teaching science and writing software. User interface design is education. The study of chemistry can be boring, but mixing baking soda and vinegar is inherently fun, especially the first time you do it. I think software can be fun too, even if there are no games, puzzles or cartoon characters.

"True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility."

pictures of algebra

I wish Oliver Steele had been my algebra teacher. He has wonderful illustrations that he calls grounded proofs . For example, multiplication is commutative:

Oliver's lovely illustrations make these abstract mathematical concepts concrete and simple.

I didn't really get math until geometry. Word problems were the worst. They never seemed to make pictures for me. They didn't seem to have anything to do with reality, although in retrospect I imagine that they were trying to accomplish exactly that.

roots of ambition

This is the second part of my response to Anna Fels' thought-provoking, yet unfortunately titled article that was discussed in my last post.

Psychological Foundations of Ambition

Fels introduces a psychological basis for ambition, citing a wide range of research. This provides new insights into how the different treatment of women and girls leads directly to gender imbalance in the workplace. Fels asserts that ambition is fueled by a drive for mastery in the context of recognition:

Approximately half a century after Freud postulated his drive theory of motivation based on sex and aggression, researchers and theoreticians alike realized that a huge portion of behavior simply could not be explained in those terms. Jean Piaget and other developmental psychologists who focused on children's need to master both intellectual and motor tasks discovered that children would repeat a task over and over until they could predict and determine the outcome. Theorists such as Erik Erikson began to posit that at a certain stage, children develop a "sense of industry," or the need to do things well, even perfectly. Robert White, one of the seminal investigators of motivation, named this drive toward mastery "effectance." "It is characteristic of this particular sort of activity," White noted, "that it is selective, directed, and persistent, and that an instrumental act will be learned for the sole reward of engaging in it."

Multiple areas of research have demonstrated that recognition is one of the motivational engines that drives the development of almost any type of skill. In the typical learning cycle, recognition fuels the next stage of learning. The early-learning theorist Albert Bandura was clear on this point: "Young children imitate accurately when they have incentives to do so, but their imitations deteriorate rapidly if others do not care how they behave."

Naturally if someone does not receive positive feedback it is likely to dampen their ambitions. It has been well-documented that in our society girls and women are not encouraged (or actively discouraged) from pursuing many careers and even from many areas of learning.

Luke Hohmann talks about a similar topic in the context of how people become software architects:

"Humans are failure machines. We're not success machines. We're failure machines. We fail all the time. And it's only through processing the feedback of our failure that we learn how to correct for them and do better. That is why it is important to stick with the choices you make and understand how well they worked." -- Becoming an Architect by Bill Venners via HMK's "stciking with it"

One of the wonderful things about software, once you stick to it long enough to get hooked, is that it provides its own feedback. We all need social feedback as well, and it was good to read that Hohmann acknowledges the social aspects of being a software architect.

Call me an optimist. I believe that if we all keep working at treating each other well and fairly, one of these years we'll have a generation that can pursue their ambitions without regard to attributes of birth such as gender and race -- attributes that should have nothing to do with the likelihood of success.

creativity and play

"It is the essence of play that a new relation is created between the field of meaning and the visual field -- that is, between situations in thought and real situations." -- Vygotsky Mind in Society

"most of us are so busy trying to solve problems that we fail to notice that in solving problems we sometimes rob ourselves of the opportunity to learn something new." Michael Hamman offers an interesting equation:

Creativity = competence + a desire to create a problem.

I agree that creativity requires competence, or at least confidence. I have observed in the development of software that I experience two extremes. One is where writing software is work. I relentlessly chase a bug. I perfect a piece of code through sheer persistence and fortitude. It can be satisfying, but it is not fun. The other extreme is where writing software is play. I can't imagine that someone pays me for such challenging entertainment. Experimentation yields unexpected solutions. The patterns revealed by the trail of a bug lead to insights. Crafting a solution is a tangible, creative experience.

I often wonder what key factors create the experience of play. When I capture that way of working, I am undeniably more productive. I can see no down side to taking that approach all of the time, except that its not a state consciously achieved. One could argue that some things are just no fun. However, I don't believe that the level of play is inherent to the task.

parrots and abstract thought

Irene Pepperberg challenges the idea that the capacity for language and abstract thought is unique to primates. "If one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system."

THAT DAMN BIRD: A Talk with Irene Pepperberg provides an entertaining and thought-provoking review of her grey parrot studies and related research. I found particularly interesting a discussion of how playing with toys in physical space relates to the development of language. This has been studied in human children, chimpanzees, and grey parrots.

In the 1970s, [Patricia] Greenfield looked at young children and found that at the time they start serially and hierarchically stacking toys like cups and rings in perfect order, they also start combining their labels in somewhat regular syntactic patterns; that is, they begin to produce phrases like "Want cookie," or "Want more milk."

Greenfield argued at the time that these capabilities were unique to humans. Since then similar behavior has been observed in other primates and in grey parrots. It struck me as surprising, yet obvious, that both words and actions are reflective of abstract thought. Play is gestural language.

information foraging

"Information foraging theory...views humans as informavores, continually seeking information from our environment"
-- Do Your Links Stink? Techniques for Good Web Information Scent by Jason Withrow

I enjoy foraging for information, but I imagine that someday I'll be able to unleash virtual hounds who will go dig up information with just the right scent. It would be neat if there were some quasi-intelligent software that could read what I write and lurk as I browse the web and then dig up interesting reading for me.

Jason Withrow talks about information scent and other ideas from cognitive psychology, such as perception, memory and learning, in his boxes and arrows article.

2 horses + 3 cows = ?

In How Children Fail, John Holt describes how very young children approach the world as scientists with enthusiasm for learning. He observes how school teaches children to find the right answer. By fifth grade, school kids can get very good at the "right answer" game and appear successful without real learning.

What is real learning?

The better we understand something, the more places we can use it. He observes that when we teach arithmetic, we teach algebra.
2 somethings plus 3 somethings equals five of those things: 2x + 3x = 5x. When we learn about fractions, we learn that we cannot add unless there is a common denominator. This is true of whole numbers as well.

Without giving the children any preparation, Holt wrote this problem on the blackboard for a first grade class:

2 horses + 3 cows = ?

A number of children gave the answer "five animals," intuitively discovering a common denominator. Curious about this observation, I gave the problem to my 5 year old son. He also came up with the answer "five animals."

rules and freedom

Sam Wan comments that "the coolest toys are the ones that give users the freedom to find their own uses for that toy."

In Vygotsky's Mind in Society, he notes that "play is the realm of spontaneity and freedom." However, in his studies of imaginative play in children, he observes that children will subordinate their own wants to the greater pleasure of following the rules. He concludes that "the essential attribute of play is a rule that has become a desire."

Rules provide freedom. The really fun toys give you just enough constraints to inspire creativity and make it easy to create great stuff.