Digging Deep Vs Diving In

At a basic level, we can contrast two ways of learning. One way is to memorize, by rote, the answer to every possible question in a domain. The other way is to learn a process for generating solutions in the domain.

Children seem to do exactly this when learning arithmetic. They begin with ...

Say you need to learn a complicated skill: physics, French or computer programming. How much time should you spend building your background knowledge before you start practicing the actual skill?

Consider machine learning. One way to learn this field would be to master first the underlying...

When performing skills, we use a variety of methods, from following a procedure to retrieving an answer from memory. With increased practice, the memory component becomes dominant for routine situations. Even when we can’t get the exact solution from memory, we may find parts of the answer which ...