How much of the math you’ve learned in school do you use in everyday life? For the majority of people, the answer is surprisingly little. This question is at the heart of the problem of transfer of learning—how we apply what we’ve learned to new problems and situations. As readers will note, I’ve spent the […]

A new paper argues that watching video lectures at 2x the speed has minimal costs to comprehension. From the abstract: “We presented participants with lecture videos at different speeds and tested immediate and delayed (1 week) comprehension. Results revealed minimal costs incurred by increasing video speed from 1x to 1.5x, or 2x speed, but performance […]

Setting goals can transform your life. Goals can help you get in shape, improve your finances, learn a new language, or finally launch that business. But goal-setting can also leave you miserable. Burnout, stress and disillusionment are high on the list of potential side effects. The crucial difference between success and burnout often comes down […]

Why is learning effortful? Why do we struggle to learn calculus but easily learn our mother tongue? How can we make hard skills easier to learn? Cognitive load theory is a powerful framework from psychology for making sense of these questions. Cognitive load theory, developed in the 1980s by psychologist John Sweller, has become a […]