Let me make this more concrete for you.
Let’s say you’re a developer. You want to get good at large scale software design. Or you’re a product manager and you want to develop better product judgment for your domain.
Which of the above techniques will work for you?
Conversation
Interleaving? Well, interleaving what?
Practice testing? On which exercises? Where?
Distributed testing? How? Do the tests exist?
Elaborating interrogation — of who? How do you identify existing good experts to interrogate?
Self-explanation — how do you know you’re right?
1
49
I’ve spent a huge amount of time reading classical education research, and much of it is of limited use for this reason.
Caveat: if you have to take exams as part of your career, then by all means use these techniques. They work + replicate well; the evidence base is solid.
1
2
42
But for most people, in most careers, the question of learning is really:
- how do you accelerate the acquisition of expertise
- how do you synthesise new ideas to develop an edge in your career
- forget expertise, do you accelerate basic proficiency in a skill?
2
18
132
The best place to find answers to these questions turn out to NOT be in the classical education/pedagogy literature.
You want to seek out papers on vocational training instead. Or organisational behaviour (especially if there’s a training component involved).
1
4
54
The organisation that has invested the most research money into effective accelerated training techniques in messy, real world, applied domains is the military.
I’m not joking.
You want to dig into work funded by military grants. These are likely the most fruitful for careers.
1
5
83
I’ve written a lot about this topic already. I’ll link out to a few threads before getting back to the meta-point (on finding learning techniques + papers that ACTUALLY work for your career.)
1
15
A thread on a US Department of Defence commissioned report that was eventually published as the book Accelerated Expertise:
Quote Tweet
1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise.
Yes, I know how that sounds like.
No, this isn't hype.
There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.
Show this thread
1
8
61
A thread on Cognitive Flexibility Theory, which comes from the study of accelerating medical expertise:
Quote Tweet
1/ Let's talk about how note taking can help you accelerate expertise.
Yes, I know how that sounds like.
No, this isn't hype.
There's some solid cognitive science here, and it has FASCINATING things to say about the nature of learning in messy, real world domains.
Show this thread
3
3
44
