Chunking - The Essentials

Introduction

• Illusions of competence in learning
• Overlearning
• Interleaving

What is a Chunk

• Some time it is hard to see the whole picture when learning new abstract concepts.
• Chunking helps uniting useful information together.
• New logical whole makes the chunk easier to remember.
• Focusing attention is different from thinking in defused mode

• When focusing, we most probably can use 4 working memory slots at once, making connections with our 4 slots

• When in defused mode, we could let connection makes anywhere.
• Working memory octopus does not work well when we are stressed

Definition of chunks

• Meaningful pieces of information that can bound together through meaning or use.
• Chunking is not the only way to learn, but it is one way to help us learning more efficiently.
• What is important is it helps us to get the main idea, and that's enough.

More about Chunking

• Breaking complex stuff into small parts.
• Understand, practice small parts until it became natural.
• Connect natural small parts, into large natural chunks, and practice those larger chunks.
• If the small chunks are ingrained so well, we will not need to worry about them anymore.
• Our job after having natural chunks is to figure out why the chunks are connected the way they are.
• Chunking does not only mean we are dividing the information, but also the way we could take out those knowledge easily and naturally.
• Take learning Science or Math as an example:
• We often learn the concepts through examples
• It can be all too easy to focus too much on why an individual step works and not on the connection between steps.
• Every subject/ domain has different way of chunking

Steps of Chunking:

1. Focus your undivided attention on the information you want to chunk, in other words, avoid noise!

2. Understand the basic ideas that you are trying to chunk.

3. Gaining Context

Be careful

• Understanding a concept does not mean a chunk is created that we can easily to call to mind later.

• A-ha is not the end of learning, practice afterwards until it became natural is.

• We have to try to close our book and try to do what we thought we understood is one way to speed up our learning.

• Actually understood something === Actually can do it yourself.

• Seeing something and even understanding it does not mean you can actually do it.

• Only doing can create neural patterns

• Seeing context provide us information on how and when to use the particular chunk.

  

• By practicing, we will not only know when to use it but also when not to use it.

  

• Top Down Learning (Big Picture)

• What you are learning and where the chunks fit in.

• Context (Practice, that big picture & chunking meet)

• Bottom Up Learning (Chunking)

Concrete Example

Chunking is like building small areas of the whole big picture with zoomed in mode.

Big picture (Top down Learning) is reviewing all small chunks together and try to put other pieces together as well.

Eventually we will almost get the whole idea, even thought some might still be missing, but we will get a pretty good idea of the puzzle already

Illusions of Competence

Recall

• Re-read material is good but not efficient.
• Re-reading is only benefit when you are using spaced repetition.
• Recall on the other hand, does much better job, within the same amount of time.
• The retrieval process itself enhances deep learning & helps us to begin forming chunks.
• Drawing concept maps or making connections even before you made chunks, does not work well at all.
• Recalling outside the place you study or work also enhance your efficiency because we subconsciously take our environment as a helper or clue to recall, recalling outside can prevent that and increase the strength of our chunks.

Illusions of competence

• Illusions of competence is after we have done several things, that might lead us to think that we have understood the concept, but the fact is that the chunks aren't actually built. Hence there is no way we could form a proper connection between the chunks.

Mini-testing

• In order to know whether we have successfully formed the chunks and "learned" the study, we have to gave ourselves testing, to test out whether we truly understood them.

Value of making mistakes

• When we are doing recall, we try our best to map out the chunks that we possessed.
• It is important to acknowledge that making mistakes is not entirely a bad thing because the more we practice or made mistakes, the stronger our synapse will be (of course it is no good if we keep repeating the same mistakes).

The principle behind chunking

• Working memory is limited.
• New concepts or ideas easily take places and overload our working memories.
• The only way to not overloading is the concepts that we are processing could be retrieved naturally (without much thinking or mind power).
• After we are able to process one complex concept naturally, we will have more room of the working memory to process with other new concepts.
• That's why "smart" people can learn and understand difficult concepts much easier, they have gone through this process earlier than we do.

Seeing the Bigger Picture

What Motivates You?

• Acetylcholine
• The part which control our focuses.
• Dopamine
• The part that control our decision making and behavior to unexpected rewards, such as future expectation.
• Drugs only tricked us that something wonderful happened to our lives, in fact, it is the opposite that just happened to our lives.
• Serotonin
• it is about the power of risk taking
• The alpha male among the apes got the highest Serotonin level, while the lowest layer got the lower Serotonin level.
• The lower the Serotonin level is, the higher chance that they will take the risks.

Remarks

• Recent studies have shown that emotions are not separated from cognition.
• Our learning effectiveness is greatly influenced by our emotions.

Compaction

• Building chunks day by day eventually grant us a chunk library (mental library).
• Whenever we need to solve a problem, we will access our chunk library and see if we could solve the problem with the defused mode.
• Chunking is not all, but it is an important component.
• The more chunks you have, the stronger you are.
• Same as before, our chunks grow stronger if we had review before.

Problem solving

• There are two ways to solve problem:
• Sequential (step by step, in order)
• Holistic (defused way, not in order, with thinking the problem with intuition)

Transfer

• There are connections between chunks, which makes us a professional at a certain subject can actually help us to understand other subject, this process is called transfer, it helps us to learn.
• Defused mode will have more resources to use for thinking of something creative.

Law of Serendipity

• We will not know unless we tried, try to build as many chunks as possible, luckily we might be able to achieve something big.

Overlearning

• Sometimes keep practicing the same thing over and over will not gain you any more benefit but a waste of time.
• Space repetition is another story, but we are talking about learning new ideas, that you already full understood.
• Overlearning could also cause pros such as automation of the task, so you could focus less on the actual task but the accident that it might happen (IMO).
• This could be only Naive Practice, not Deliberate Practice

Choking

• Choking means the accident during a performance?

Einstellung

• Einstellung means mindset in German.
• It means we tend to think with the same track if we only specialise in only one expertise.
• We could break through Einstellung effect by meeting younger generation or expertise from other domain.

Interleaving

• Interleaving means switching back and forth with another mindset/ domain.
• Interleaving means switching back and forth in studying the problem that requires different techniques or strategies.
• Sometimes even you don't understand, but browsing future chapters of the book might actually help you understand the current content.
• It builds flexibility and creativity with your chunks

Interview with Dr. Norman Fortenberry

• You will always be intimidated.
• Try to turn on different learning mode, e.g. visual learning, sound learning... Switch from these patterns help.
• Having the notes from teacher/ lecturer does not mean you have learned it.
• Mechanic writing can help memorizing.
• Form a serious study group.
• You gave support, and you will receive support.
• Teaching is the best way of learning.

How do you avoid illusion of competence?

• Find out the your own weak spot by doing as soon as possible, that is the spot that your study is missing and stopping you from getting the whole picture.

What id Self-explanation?

• Try to pretend that you are teaching someone, usually when you got to a point that you can only provide vivid or vague statement, that's you weak spot and you must spend time to revise.

What would you do if you need to learn a subject that you are not motivated?

• No one is naturally bad at something.
• You will enjoy everything that you are doing well.
• Spend time to start mini projects/ small tasks, build confidence by making small achievements.

Any tips on effectively use the online resources?

• You can basically learn everything with MIT OpenCourseWare.
• Other MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) is still young, might not have enough resources to support medium - intermediate learner.

What do you mean by studying less to study more?

• Less time to spend on studying but the time has to have high quality, that increase your study value.