93 terms

Learning How to Learn Glossary

The key vocabulary of Learning How to Learn, each term defined in plain language. Start learning in the Learning How to Learn subject, or drill these terms as flashcards.

Active reading: Reading with questions and engagement rather than passively passing your eyes over the page.
AI tutor: An AI system used as a personalized guide for learning, explaining, and practising a subject.
Attention residue: The lingering focus on a previous task that reduces performance after switching tasks.
Automaticity: Performing a skill with little conscious effort, freeing attention for higher-level thinking.
Calibration: How well confidence matches actual performance.
Chunking: Combining several items into one unit, expanding what fits in working memory.
Cognitive load: The total demand on working memory at a given moment.
Cognitive offloading: Relying on external tools or people to store or process information instead of one’s own memory.
Cognitive reserve: The brain’s resilience, built through lifelong mental and social activity, that helps it cope with aging.
Community of practice: A group that learns a shared craft by doing it together (Lave and Wenger).
Comprehensible input: Language you can mostly understand but that stretches you slightly, thought to drive language acquisition.
Consolidation: The strengthening and integration of memories, much of which happens during sleep.
Convergent thinking: Narrowing many possibilities down to the best single solution.
Cued recall: Producing an answer in response to a prompt or question.
Curiosity: A state triggered by noticing a gap; usually follows some initial knowledge rather than preceding it.
Deep work: Focused, distraction-free work on a demanding task, where the most valuable learning happens.
Deliberate practice: Focused work on a specific weakness with feedback, at the edge of ability.
Desirable difficulty: Difficulty arising from the work of learning, which improves retention despite feeling worse.
Divergent thinking: Generating many varied ideas or possibilities from a starting point.
Durable learning: Retention and capability that survive a delay and a change of context.
Effective feedback: Specific, actionable, task-focused information that helps a learner reach a goal.
Elaboration: Connecting new material to existing knowledge by asking how and why.
Elaborative interrogation: Prompting yourself with 'why is this true?' during study.
Encoding: Converting experience into a form memory can hold; depends on attention and connection.
Experiential learning: Learning through doing followed by reflection, as in Kolb’s learning cycle.
Extraneous load: Demand added by presentation; removable waste.
Far transfer: Applying learning to situations quite different from where it was learned; generally hard to achieve.
Feedback: Information about an attempt; most useful when specific, timely, and actionable.
Feynman technique: A method of understanding by explaining a concept in plain language and fixing the gaps this reveals.
Flow: A state of absorbed, energised focus that arises when challenge matches skill.
Fluency illusion: Mistaking ease of processing for knowledge.
Forgetting curve: The pattern of retention dropping sharply at first, then more slowly.
Free recall: Producing everything you can remember without prompts.
Friction: The effort required to start or continue a behaviour; the main lever on what you actually do.
Generation effect: Better retention of information you produced yourself than of information you read.
Germane load: Effort going into building understanding.
Google effect: The tendency to remember less information when we expect to be able to look it up later (Sparrow et al., 2011).
Growth mindset: The belief that abilities can be developed through effort and learning, rather than being fixed.
Habit: A behaviour triggered by a cue rather than by a decision.
Hypercorrection effect: Confidently-held errors being corrected more durably once shown wrong.
Illusion of competence: Confidence produced by exposure rather than by demonstrated ability.
Illusion of explanatory depth: The tendency to believe we understand how things work better than we actually do.
Immersion: Surrounding yourself with a language or skill so you practise it constantly in context.
Interleaving: Mixing problem types in practice, which builds the ability to identify which applies.
Intrinsic load: Demand from the inherent difficulty of the material.
Judgement of learning: A prediction of future recall; inflated when made immediately after study.
Learning: A relatively durable change in what you can do later, in a different context.
Learning styles myth: The popular but evidence-lacking belief that matching teaching to a preferred "style" improves learning.
Legitimate peripheral participation: How newcomers learn by starting at a community’s edge and moving inward with skill.
Long-term memory: Storage with no practical capacity limit.
Massed practice: Concentrating study into one block; good for tomorrow, poor for next month.
Math anxiety: Fear or tension around mathematics that can impair working memory and performance.
Memory consolidation: The process, aided by sleep, by which new memories become stable and lasting.
Mental model: An internal structure of how something works, tested by what it predicts.
Metacognition: Monitoring and directing your own understanding and strategy.
Method of loci: A memory technique that places items to remember along an imagined familiar route or "memory palace".
Misconception: A faulty model that works on the cases encountered so far.
Mnemonic: A memory aid, such as an acronym or rhyme, that makes information easier to recall.
Near transfer: Applying learning to situations closely similar to the one in which it was learned.
Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to change its structure and connections in response to learning and experience.
Performance: How well you do something during or immediately after practice; not the same as learning.
Procedural memory: Memory for how to do things — skills like typing or cycling — distinct from memory for facts.
Procrastination: Delay that usually signals an undefined, oversized, threatening, or meaningless task.
Productive failure: Attempting before instruction, so the eventual explanation lands in a prepared structure.
Productive struggle: Wrestling with a hard problem at the edge of your ability, which deepens learning.
Protégé effect: The finding that people learn material more deeply when they prepare to teach it to others.
Recall: Producing something when it is not in front of you.
Recognition: Knowing something when you see it.
Reconstruction: The assembly of a memory from fragments, shaped by expectation and later learning.
Recovery rule: A decision made in advance about how to resume after missing a session.
Reflection: Deliberately reviewing an experience to extract lessons from it.
Retrieval: Rebuilding a memory when it is needed.
Retrieval cue: A prompt, context, or association through which a memory is reached.
Retrieval practice: Deliberately recalling material rather than reviewing it.
Scaffolding: Temporary support that helps a learner do what they cannot yet do alone, withdrawn as they improve.
Schema: An organised structure of prior knowledge that new material can attach to.
Second brain: A personal, external system of notes and links that captures and connects ideas to support thinking.
Self-directed learning: Taking charge of your own learning: setting goals, choosing methods, and monitoring progress.
Self-explanation: Explaining material to yourself while studying, which forces generation.
Self-regulated learning: The cycle of planning, monitoring, and adjusting your own learning.
Spaced repetition: Reviewing at increasing intervals as recall strengthens.
Spacing effect: Better long-term retention from distributing the same study time across sessions.
Split attention: Load created by holding one piece of information while looking at another.
Storage: Maintaining a memory over time.
Task switching: Moving between tasks, which costs time and capacity each time.
Teacher's mindset: Approaching learning as one who will teach, which deepens understanding from the start.
Testing effect: The finding that retrieval strengthens memory more than re-exposure.
Transfer: Applying knowledge in a context different from where it was learned.
Transfer of learning: Applying knowledge or skill learned in one context to a different context.
Unlearning: Deliberately updating or discarding outdated knowledge, habits, or beliefs to make room for better ones.
Working memory: The small, briefly-held store of what you are currently thinking about.
Zettelkasten: A linked "slip-box" note method, associated with Niklas Luhmann, in which ideas connect and compound.
Zone of proximal development: The gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with help (Vygotsky).

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