The Science of Learning

Regardless of one's scholarly history, everyone learns throughout their entire lives, and Ulrich Boser's learning lecture looks at how people can get better at learning (which is to say, how people can get better at retaining the information they've learned.) For a long time, the assumption was that people who were good at learning were smart, and people who weren't were stupid. Science proves that that isn't the case; there are strategies that people can employ to retain information better, regardless of their intelligence.

One of those is that learning is sense-making. Whereas a computer can take data from the outside world and store it as it is, the brain needs to make sense of information in order to keep it. One tactic for sense-making is self-explaining. When studying, people should take breaks — be it at the end of the chapter, the page, or even the sentence — to explain to themselves what information they just gathered. These and other tactics can help to improve one's efficiency as a learner.