Avoid Illusions of Knowing

• metacognition: monitoring your own thinking

• we are all hardwired to make errors in judgment

  • we overestimate our competence

  • we are easily misled

• two systems of knowing

  • automatic and immediate

  • controlled, slower process of conscious analysis

• memory can be distorted

  • imagination inflation: believes a vivid imaginary event is actually a memory

  • suggestion: the way a question is asked may distort the memory of an event

  • interference from other events

  • curse of knowledge / hindsight bias: our tendency to underestimate how long it will take to learn something that we’ve already mastered

  • accounts that sound familiar can create the feeling of knowing and be mistaken for true

  • fluency illusions: tendency to mistake fluency with a text for mastery of its content

• memories are subject to social influence and align with the memories of the people around us

  • social contagion of memory

  • false consensus effect: humans assume that others share their beliefs

• mental models

• Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetent people overestimate their own competence, so they see no need to improve

Get Beyond Learning Styles

• what you tell yourself about your ability plays a part in shaping the ways you learn and perform

• learning styles don’t really exist

  • when the instructional style matches the nature of the content, all learners learn better

• fluid intelligence: ability to think abstractly

• crystallized intelligence: one’s accumulated knowledge of the world

• Howard Gardner: there are 8 kinds of intelligence

• Robert Sternberg: analytical, creative, and practical intelligence