Stupid Questions May 2015

Gondolinian

This thread is for asking any questions that might seem obvious, tangential, silly or what-have-you. Don't be shy, everyone has holes in their knowledge, though the fewer and the smaller we can make them, the better.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Please be respectful of other people's admitting ignorance and don't mock them for it, as they're doing a noble thing.

To any future monthly posters of SQ threads, please remember to add the "stupid_questions" tag.

Has anyone ever studied the educational model of studying just one subject at a time, and does it have a name? While in college the last semester, it occurred to me that, with so many subjects at once competing for my time and attention, I cannot dedicate myself to learning any given one in depth, and just achieve mediocre grades for all of them. The model I had in mind went like this:

1) Embark on one, and only one, subject for a few weeks or couple of months (example: high school trigonometry);

2) Study it full-time and exhaust the textbook;

3) Take an exam in it;

4) Have a short vacation (1-2 weeks);

5) Pass on to the next subject (example: early modern history).

There could be yearly review sessions a couple of weeks long, so that students have their memory refreshed on the subjects they have learned so far.

Leaving aside some issues relating to the practicality of scheduling classes like that, does this work better/worse than the model in which students' schedules are diversified? Would it just get monotonous after a while, and does this outweigh the benefits of being able to dedicate your focus to one single subject?

It has been studied and it's actually usually not recommended. This is the principle of interleaving. See Make It Stick, especially chapter 3. See also the recently linked document by richard_reitz.

5wadavis11y

A few comments from my experience, these may not be applicable to all circumstances. I found material to have a digestion time, to much material too fast and I would stop learning. If understanding A depends on understanding B, which depends on C, It was easier to learn C, and sleep on it, then learn and sleep on B, then A. As opposed to taking ABC all in one bite. In addition to the short term, I experienced this in the long term; I would frequently look back at courses from the previous years and wonder how I ever found them challenging. When I had Calculus 1 and 2 back to back I struggled hard, When I had a year break, then Calculus 3, another year break, then Calculus 4, I felt I had a better grasp of the material. Also, as you approach higher levels of education and specialize, your classes overlap material more and more. In high school I took grade twelve physics then grade 12 calculus. I was very upset to discover after the fact the derivative relations between locations, velocity, and acceleration, and that the equations were simple to derive once the missing calculus piece of the puzzle was provided. Once I got to the end of my undergrad, every class I was taking was looking at the same problem from different perspectives, so any one taken by themselves would be without supporting knowledge to lean on. And lastly, Topic burn out would kill me. This has to do with mental digestion time, but some times it was nice to skip a class or two, not think about the topic for a week, and then jump back in with renewed energy. But of course also am full of bias, because learning is complex and I'm just latching on to the few patterns I've recognized.

2Elo11y

I predict higher test scores but lower long term information retention. it depends on which goal you are trying to achieve.