Doing something yourself always teaches you better than watching it, or just being told the answer.
A neat result from pedagogical studies is that being given the worked solutions to new problems to study from is much more effective for learning the material than simply practicing.
Students who were assigned practice problems performed worse on later tests than those given the same problems and all of the worked-out solutions for them. The explanation from the research was - when learning a new topic, immediate practice isn’t beneficial because the student doesn’t yet know what to practice. If they are lost when trying the problem, they can easily end up practicing the wrong skills by not knowing where to start. Those with the solutions have some of the cognitive burden removed, and are better able to internalize the task and generalize it to later problems.
I completely agree with you on LLMs and I think they’ll be a disaster for education. But I’ve always found it interesting that being given the answer can be useful for learning in certain circumstances.
A neat result from pedagogical studies is that being given the worked solutions to new problems to study from is much more effective for learning the material than simply practicing.
Finally, something to justify my still-existent hatred of my middle school geometry teacher for literally telling us ‘the theorems are on the board’ any time we asked her for help trying to solve a problem or for her to show us an example problem. Why the fuck were you even teaching.
That was one of my gripes with my experience in college vs hs. In my hs at least, we were taught the most difficult combination of a problem and then everything that we practiced would be able to be worked out from there. In college, we were often taught the simplest example and somehow expected to derive the most difficult version of it on the problem sets. That’s how you get students who study really hard for an exam and half of them fail. They never taught the proper way to solve the problem!
I was out of college by the time LLMs came out but I still believe they could be helpful in this scenario if fine tuned and limited as a tutor not an answer-giver. Obviously if you have access to a good human tutor (who doesn’t call you dumb like my friend had at the time), but I didn’t have access to one.
There are different ways to learn, some work better for certain people than others.
I would think that the best way to learn is neither of these options, but to be taught how to do the work by someone who understands (like a teacher) and then made to do it after it has been thoroughly explained to you and practiced with you.
That’s what works best for me anyhow, that or literally reading the textbook, lol, but that’s less efficient time-wise.
Immediate practice on something you haven’t been walked through yet? I guess the way I phrased it made it sound like jumping in yourself with no guide is better. You definitely need to be taught first, or at least as you go, and not figure it out on your own. The point was that simply watching someone do something isn’t enough, you have to develop the process of getting to that point yourself. But only after seeing that route, otherwise you will take lots of wrong paths.
A neat result from pedagogical studies is that being given the worked solutions to new problems to study from is much more effective for learning the material than simply practicing.
Students who were assigned practice problems performed worse on later tests than those given the same problems and all of the worked-out solutions for them. The explanation from the research was - when learning a new topic, immediate practice isn’t beneficial because the student doesn’t yet know what to practice. If they are lost when trying the problem, they can easily end up practicing the wrong skills by not knowing where to start. Those with the solutions have some of the cognitive burden removed, and are better able to internalize the task and generalize it to later problems.
I completely agree with you on LLMs and I think they’ll be a disaster for education. But I’ve always found it interesting that being given the answer can be useful for learning in certain circumstances.
Finally, something to justify my still-existent hatred of my middle school geometry teacher for literally telling us ‘the theorems are on the board’ any time we asked her for help trying to solve a problem or for her to show us an example problem. Why the fuck were you even teaching.
That was one of my gripes with my experience in college vs hs. In my hs at least, we were taught the most difficult combination of a problem and then everything that we practiced would be able to be worked out from there. In college, we were often taught the simplest example and somehow expected to derive the most difficult version of it on the problem sets. That’s how you get students who study really hard for an exam and half of them fail. They never taught the proper way to solve the problem!
I was out of college by the time LLMs came out but I still believe they could be helpful in this scenario if fine tuned and limited as a tutor not an answer-giver. Obviously if you have access to a good human tutor (who doesn’t call you dumb like my friend had at the time), but I didn’t have access to one.
There are different ways to learn, some work better for certain people than others.
I would think that the best way to learn is neither of these options, but to be taught how to do the work by someone who understands (like a teacher) and then made to do it after it has been thoroughly explained to you and practiced with you.
That’s what works best for me anyhow, that or literally reading the textbook, lol, but that’s less efficient time-wise.
Immediate practice on something you haven’t been walked through yet? I guess the way I phrased it made it sound like jumping in yourself with no guide is better. You definitely need to be taught first, or at least as you go, and not figure it out on your own. The point was that simply watching someone do something isn’t enough, you have to develop the process of getting to that point yourself. But only after seeing that route, otherwise you will take lots of wrong paths.