Cognitive load theory points out that many activities which increase the effort involved in learning tend to result in worse outcomes for typical students. These activities include solving problems you haven’t been taught how to solve, having to split your attention between different sources of i...

A key strategy for getting better at things is hill-climbing: Try different things, keep doing the things that work, stop doing those that don’t.

The strategy is named because you can envision it as finding the highest spot ...

When you mix practice between two similar ideas or concepts, you’re better able to notice the difference between the two.

This discriminative account in favour of variable practice holds true for many problem-solving skills. Math problems are often taught in a blocked fashion. You learn so...

Desirable difficulties are actions that appear to work worse in the short-term but work better in the long run.

These include:

Spacing. Practising something ten times in a row vs. ten times spaced out (over hours or days). The latter feels harder but results in more ...

What we learn is never erased from our minds. Instead, we forget things as our ability to retrieve them becomes weaker through competition with other memories.

Successful access to hard-to-recall memory boosts retrieval strength more than if the memory was easier to access. It’s as if your ...