Illusions of Competence

Merely glancing at the solution to a problems and thinking you truly know it yourself is one of the most common illusions of competence in learning. Students often erroneously believe that they are learning by simple rereading material that is on the page. They have an illusion of competence because the solution is already there.

Just wanting to learn the material, and spending a lot of time with it doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually learn it. Intention to learn is helpful only if it leads to the use of good learning strategies.

Recall and practice is important to learning.

You don’t want to wait too long for the recall practice, so that you have to start from scratch each time. Recall within a day. Once you got something down, you can expand the time between “upkeep” repetitions to weeks or months and eventually it can become close to permanent.

Try this:

1. Pick a concept from your notes or a page in the book.
2. Read it over, then look away and see what you recall, trying to understand what you’re recalling.
3. Glance back, reread the concept, and try again.

In building a chunked library (grouping information), you are training your brain to recognize not only a specific problem, but different types and classes of problems so that you can automatically know how to quickly solve whatever you encounter.

You can reinforce a “wrong” process by doing the same problems over and over the wrong way. Checking your answers is very important.

The retrieval process itself enhances deep learning and helps us begin forming chunks. By simple practicing and recalling the material, students learned far more and a much deeper level than they did using any other approach.

Remember, just staring at material that’s already on the page in front of you can fool you into thinking you know it when you actually don’t. Misplaced self-confidence in one’s abilities can sometimes reach almost delusional levels. When you whiz through a homework or test problem and don’t go back to check your work, you are acting a little like a person who is refusing to use parts of your brain. Your naively upbeat focused mode can still skip right over errors, especially if you’re the one who committed the original errors. Worse yet, sometimes you can blindly believe you’ve got everything nailed down intellectually, but you haven’t. If you or one of your study buddies thinks something is wrong in your understanding, it’s important to be able to explain so and not worry about hurt feelings. Criticism is not about you, it’s about what you are trying to understand. (Oakley, 2014)