I’ve been fascinated with how people learn for as long as I can remember.

That makes it all that much special to get to talk with the UCLA distinguished professor of psychology today: Dr. Robert Bjork about using cognitive psychology to enhance learning.
PODCAST NOTES
Guest:
Dr. Robert Bjork

Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA
Learning and memory; the science of learning in the practice of teaching.
The Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab

Common misperceptions
Belief that we work something like a man made recording device.
In almost every critical way, we differ from any such device." - Robert Bjork

How can it be that we have all these years of learning things and formal education and then end up really not understanding the process? You might just think by sheer trial and error during all of our educational experiences we would come to understand ourselves better than we apparently do." - Robert Bjork

We found all these different situations where the very same thing that produces forgetting then enhances learning if the material is re-studied again. Forgetting is a friend of learning." - Robert Bjork

The spacing effect

Delay in re-studying information

The environmental context

If you study it again, then you're better off to study it in a different place.
This is counter to the advice to study in a single place.

Retrieval practice
When you recall something, it does far more to reveal that you did indeed have it in your memory.

"Using our memories shapes our memory."- Robert Bjork
As we use our memories, the things we recall become more recallable. Things in competition with the memories become less recallable."- Robert Bjork

We should input less and output more."- Robert Bjork

Test yourself; retrieval practice
Low-stakes or no-stakes testing is key to optimizing learning."- Robert Bjork

"When I say they become inaccessible, they are absolutely not gone."- Robert Bjork
Interleaving
"In all those real-world situation where there's several related tasks or components to be learned, the tendency is to provide instruction in a block test. It seems to make sense to work on one thing at a time."- Robert Bjork

"We are finding that interleaving leads to much better long-term retention. It slows the gain in performance during the training process but, then leads to much better long-term performance."- Robert Bjork

"Forgetting is not entirely a negative process. There are a number of senses in which forgetting can be a good thing."- Robert Bjork

"The very same people who just performed better, substantially, with interleaving, almost uniformly said that blocking helped them learn better."- Robert Bjork
Desirable difficulties
They're difficulties in the sense that they pose challenges (increased frequency of errors) but they're desirable in that they foster the very goals of instruction (long-term retention and transfer of knowledge into new situations).

Interleaving vs blocking
Varying the conditions of learning and the examples you provide rather than keeping them constant
Spacing vs massing (cramming)

"The word desirable is key. There's a lot of ways to make things difficult that are bad."- Robert Bjork
The generation effect
Any time you can take advantage of what your students already know and give them certain cues so that they produce an answer,