How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine …

Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Instead of skipping around distractedly gathering bits, when you read you are transported, focused, immersed.

in the vast majority of cases, and as soon as learning concerns high-level cognitive properties, such as the explicit memory of word meanings rather than their mere form, learning seems to occur only if the learner pays attention, thinks, anticipates, and puts forth hypotheses at the risk of making mistakes. Without attention, effort, and in-depth

Accept and correct mistakes. To update their mental models, our brain areas must exchange error messages. Error is therefore the very condition of learning. Let us not punish errors, but correct them quickly, by giving children detailed but stress-free feedback. According to the Education Endowment Foundation’s synthesis, the quality of the feedbac

parameters: the quality and accuracy of the feedback we receive determines how quickly we learn.2

There’s no shame or intellectual dishonesty in doing this, say the formalists. It’s all very well to say that we learn things best when we discover them for ourselves, but this is to deny the heritage of ideas that go to constitute just about every understanding of contemporary life. If you ‘discover’ how light is broken into the colours of the rai