A key strategy for getting better at things is hill-climbing. The idea is simple: 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 in a landscape filled with fog. You can’t necessarily see the highest point, […]

It’s been almost a year since I started my current research project. My initial starting point was the intriguing, if somewhat pessimistic, research on learning transfer. However, crawling through citations has gotten me to some of the more interesting science on how people think the mind works. Having now read over 70 books and 250 […]

A common critique of school is that it leads to shallow memorization of facts. Deep understanding and practical skills are often pushed aside in favor of trivia, quickly forgotten after the final exam. The most typical reaction, at least from those endorsing the value of education, is to deny the charge. Yes, we all remember […]

Last week, I discussed John Anderson’s ACT-R theory of cognitive skill acquisition. ACT-R is an ambitious theory tackling a big question: how do we learn things? Anderson’s theory makes compelling predictions and has quite a bit of evidence to back it up. Yet understanding the mind is like the story of the blind men and […]