Category: Learning

Practice is not the key faster learning: it’s something much easier.

Short rest periods are as important as the practice itself in learning a new skill, new research concludes.

Far from needing an overnight sleep, 10 seconds rest may be enough to help new learning bed in.

People’s performance actually improves while they are resting, not when they are practicing, the scientists found.

Rest periods are even more important in the early stages of learning, when the brain is doing the most work.

Dr Leonardo G. Cohen, study co-author, said:

“Everyone thinks you need to ‘practice, practice, practice’ when learning something new.

Instead, we found that resting, early and often, may be just as critical to learning as practice.

Our ultimate hope is that the results of our experiments will help patients recover from the paralyzing effects caused by strokes and other neurological injuries by informing the strategies they use to ‘relearn’ lost skills.”

For the study, right-handed people learned a simple typing task with their left hand.

They did 10 seconds practice followed by 10 seconds rest.

Looking at the electrical activity in the brain during both learning and rest, though, Dr Marlene Bönstrup, who led the study, saw something interesting:

“I noticed that participants’ brain waves seemed to change much more during the rest periods than during the typing sessions.

This gave me the idea to look much more closely for when learning was actually happening.

Was it during practice or rest?”

Analysis of people’s brain waves showed that the consolidation of memories occured in the rest period when they were not practising.

Dr Cohen said:

“Our results suggest that it may be important to optimize the timing and configuration of rest intervals when implementing rehabilitative treatments in stroke patients or when learning to play the piano in normal volunteers.

Whether these results apply to other forms of learning and memory formation remains an open question.”

The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Bönstrup et al., 2019).

Double your attention span by doing your learning here.

Learning outside in a natural environment can double the attention span, new research finds.

The study of 9 and 10-year-olds found that when taught outside, they became more attentive and engaged.

Because of the ‘nature effect’, teachers were able to teach for twice as long as an indoor lesson.

Parks, trees and wildlife have been shown in many studies to increase the attention, motivation and physical activity of adults.

Studies have already shown that students demonstrate higher attention when they have a view of greenery from their classroom.

This study takes it to the next logical step.

Dr Ming Kuo, the study’s first author, said:

“We wanted to see if we could put the nature effect to work in a school setting.

If you took a bunch of squirmy third-graders outdoors for lessons, would they show a benefit of having a lesson in nature, or would they just be bouncing off the walls afterward?”

For the study, teachers held classes indoors and outdoors and compared the difference.

They counted the number of times they had to tell children to sit down and refocus on their work.

The results showed that children were more engaged during the outdoor session.

Outdoors, the teacher only had to redirect their attention half as many times.

The research also included a teacher who was skeptical about the benefits of teaching outdoors.

Dr Kuo said:

“Our teachers were able to teach uninterrupted for almost twice as long at a time after the outdoor lesson, and we saw the nature effect with our skeptical teacher as well.

We’re excited to discover a way to teach students and refresh their minds for the next lesson at the same time.

Teachers can have their cake and eat it too.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Kuo et al., 2018).