Active vs Passive Learning

Let’s talk about active versus passive learning.

What do those really mean.

Well just based on the name it should give you a clue that active learning is probably what we want

to do and passive learning is probably not the best.

You see you learn more by active engagement instead of passive learning which is something like passive

listening.

For example listening to podcasts watching YouTube videos watching other people demonstrate things is

what we call passive learning.

You’re learning by just doing the easy things active learning on the other hand actually involves being

involved practicing and actually taking down notes trying to solve problems yourself.

Practice is key here to connect the dots.

In order for connections to form in your brain you need to actually take the action and practice not

just be passive you see passive feels good.

Passive is easy.

It makes us feel like we’re being productive.

So we do it and we think that we’re learning efficiently.

For example you’re learning how to play soccer.

Well just watch a couple of videos on YouTube.

You’re learning how to program.

Well just watch a bunch of tutorials on YouTube and never build your own project.

That’s passive learning.

Anybody can be a passive learner.

You can listen to podcasts on two times the speed and pretend like you’re learning something.

But the people who actually learn who actually excel and surpass those who do passive learning are those

active learners.

They actually practice what they learn.

They actually go out with a soccer ball and start kicking it around start practicing.

They start coding and building their own projects and making mistakes.

Let me ask you a question.

What’s better is rereading material better or is recalling or remembering material better.

For example if I gave you a sentence and this sentence.

You can either reread five times or you can read it once and then try to remember it.

Well it turns out that practice and recalling is the better way of learning before you create a mind

map or connect the dots.

Recall comes before connecting the dots.

The key is that you are the one problem solving you’re trying to remember information from your brain.

Bring it to your working memory and actually use it.

So you’re the one that’s trying to bring that information back.

If somebody gives you a problem and you just look at the solution that doesn’t help your brain has a

work to to reproduce those steps.

And this is what we call the illusion of competence.

You need to actually create the connections in your brain actually practice and actually do things and

link your brain work as if you’re doing that task in order to truly learn.

You see retrieving knowledge from your long term memory actually improves one’s ability to retrieve

it again in the future.

And we learned that in the previous lecture.

Right.

Practicing this retrieval of retrieving information from our brain produces actual meaningful long term

learning.

For example when I was in grade 7 I had a geography teacher that all she wanted to do was to teach us

every single country and every single capital in the world.

That’s it.

That entire semester that geography class all we needed to do was remember all the countries and all

the capitals of the world.

And to this day I know all the capitals and all the countries in the world just from that one class

because throughout that semester what we had to do is constantly recall and get tested.

What we remember of the world map so that instead of just watching a map and just reading letting her

talk about each country instead we got a test every week to try and recall every country and every capital.

And we did that over and over and over until it became so ingrained in my mind that it’s a knowledge

that I still use to this day even though I learned it in grade 7 and that’s why the pillar of the Feynman

technique is so useful because with the Feynman technique of teaching somebody a concept that you learned

it creates that recall in our brain.

And it also allows us to take away the key important parts of that information when we share something

with a friend.

We recall that information but also digest it in a way that just keeps the important concepts when you

have something like Google to always search things for you when you have Google Maps to always find

directions for you when we use a calculator to always do our math problems.

It weakens the part of our brain that allows us to solve math problems ourselves.

But the key takeaway from this video is that one hour of study versus one hour of test are two different

things.

The test the one hour testing is actually better for your learning than the one hour of study.

That’s why you re reading is usually a terrible strategy because rereading something or watching YouTube

videos it’s too easy.

In the book make it stick by the following authors these days that the more you repeat in a single session

the more familiar it is and the less you struggle to remember it therefore the less you learn learning

that’s easy is like writing incent here today and gone tomorrow so although it doesn’t seem intuitive

just repeating something blindly is not as good as recalling you had to actually struggle to remember

something and passively consuming information is an inefficient way to transfer that information to

your long term memory where you can put it to use later on to engage our brains.

We must move beyond just reading a text viewing a lecture actively start taking notes write summaries

ask questions apply what you’ve learned and get regular feedback to assess what you just learned.

That’s why I’m not a big fan of courses that teach you how to be a fast reader to double your reading

time because that’s not actually improving your learning.

Fastest doesn’t mean most efficient and note taking is a great way to slow down you learn complex concepts

by trying to make sense out of the information you perceive not by having someone else telling it to

you.

You need to put your knowledge to practice.