As I teach my summer class and prepare for Fall semester, I’ll be incorporating lessons from these books:
- A Mind for Numbers, by Barbara Oakley
- How We Learn, by Benedict Carey
- Make it Stick, by Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III
- How to Read a Book, by Charles van Doren and Mortimer J. Adler
The TL;DR: Students are trying to learn by highlighting, re-reading, and trying to memorize diagrams and equations the way one would memorize hieroglyphics. This isn’t a particularly good strategy for long-run retention, and while we can try to jawbone students into having better study skills we rarely if ever actually set things up so that students have the tools and the incentives to study well.
I listened to all these with Audible. You can subscribe to Audible here.
