Review: How We Learn

 How We Learn is a book about how the human brain works as far as learning is concerned. You've probably know of the results from previous readings, but the book puts them all together into one place and is written in a clearly accessible manner. Here's my summary of the main poitns:

• Cramming works, but doesn't result in long lasting memory or learning
• Learning facts, vocabulary, or other feats of memorization is best done using a system of spaced repetition. There are many spaced repetition apps such as SuperMemo that can help you with this so you can have the optimal learning in the least time
• Interleaving problems is important for learning which tools to use when (STEM field classwork is mostly about learning tools, and STEM exams are about applying those tools to solve problems). That means whenever you're doing exercises you should not just do exercises on the current tool you're learning to use, but tools that you learned previously as well. By the way, this is an indictment of the way US schools teach Math, by separating it into subtopics like Algebra, Geometry, etc. The British system where Math is just Math and all the subtopics are interleaved is more effective.
• Distractions, far from being the disaster that many people assume they are, can be used as a tool to let your learning systems percolate what it's learn over time. A little distraction every hour or so is not a bad thing.
• When doing big projects, getting started is the hard part. Once you've started, a partially completed task actually sticks better in your memory!

I guess you don't actually have to read the book since I could summarize it so easily, but I enjoyed it anyway.