Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Novukus 2207 days ago
> Repetition can be incredibly useful. I can't imagine memorizing vocabulary or simple facts (when was FOO born?) without repetition. Of course, actually using the facts (or vocab) makes them stick better. But use is also repetition.

What exactly do you mean by repetition? If I'm memorizing vocabulary, repetition to me means recalling and writing the words down in some way (often according to some prompt or quiz). The repetition with this method works because of 1) recall strengthens the memory and 2) muscle memory of writing helps solidify it. But repetition by repeatedly reading? That simply doesn't work for me (and going by studies, it's a very poor strategy compared to retrieval/recall practice). Nobody who recommends retrieval practice says repetition by recall and producing it on paper (or however else) is a bad idea. Spaced repetition is also just a form of repetition. He doesn't demonize these forms of repetition.

Let's go back to what he said:

> One of these false beliefs is that repetition is the key to remembering; the more someone encounters material, the better the likelihood of retaining the information long-term. I can still remember, after receiving a test grade that I wasn’t thrilled with, believing that I would’ve done better if I’d just gone over the material more times.

Key words are "the more someone encounters material" (note the passiveness) and he emphasizes it with his own experience of thinking how he should've "gone over the material more often". It's really not that uncommon. I knew plenty of people in school and even in university whose only conception of learning was reading, re-reading and highlighting and maybe making notes. It was sub-optimal in so many ways. So to pretend that nobody does it ("Does anyone actually ever just read a thing over and over again hoping that it sticks?") seems a bit ignorant to me of how many people simply never learn good studying strategies.

1 comments

Btw, found this while I was looking at research

https://www.apa.org/images/2016-06-psa-karpicke-fig2_tcm7-20... (Source: https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/06/learning-memor...)

> An emphasis on getting knowledge in memory shows up on surveys of students' learning strategies. In one survey (Karpicke, Butler & Roediger, 2009), college students were asked to list the strategies they use while studying and to rank-order the strategies. The results, shown in Figure 2, indicate that students' most frequent study strategy, by far, is repetitive reading of notes or textbooks. Active retrieval practice lagged far behind repetitive reading and other strategies (for a review of several learning strategies, see Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan & Willingham, 2013). A wealth of research has shown that passive repetitive reading produces little or no benefit for learning (Callender & McDaniel, 2009). Yet not only was repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy, it was also the strategy most often listed as students' number one choice, by a large margin.