#higher order learning

[mbti-notes]

with regards to learning it may be important to know about IEOD(illusion of explanation depth) which may sometimes lead us to believe we understand more about the world than we think this can be especially true for those with an intuitive preference i write this because I've fallen for it too I hope this helps

I have discussed such learning problems in previous posts. After spending many years teaching, tutoring, and coaching students from a variety of backgrounds, in a variety of subjects, it never ceases to amaze me just how little people understand about learning. I believe that basic knowledge of learning theory is necessary for optimizing the learning process, if one hopes to be a good student of anything.

With so much information at the fingertips, it's more important than ever that people are mindful about how they learn. Being in the role of "student" is hard because you're a newbie and you're ignorant and you don't know the best way to tackle a big subject. Without a good teacher or an expert to guide you, you might come to rely on dubious sources of information, misinterpret what you read, misapply the ideas, or hit a seemingly insurmountable block/plateau.

Unfortunately, there are not enough good teachers to go around. Unfortunately, many teachers in public education are tasked with "babysitting" rather than teaching, to the detriment of learning. As a result, too many students get to high school, i.e., into adulthood, without a solid foundation of study skills.

Just recently, I was helping a twelfth grade student with essay writing. Being a good student, they couldn't understand why they kept getting low marks in writing despite putting a lot of effort into the assignments. Turns out, they kept submitting summaries of the literature when the teacher was explicitly asking for analysis of the literature. When I brought this problem to their attention, they were even more confused, because they thought they had been doing analysis all along. They had no clue that there was a difference between summary and analysis, so they were incapable of getting to the level of depth that the teacher was demanding.

One of the first things I often have to do with students is explain the difference between lower order vs higher order learning. Lower order learning is usually enough to pass the class throughout K-12 or achieve basic competency. Higher order learning moves people into expert territory. Without a clear vision of what they should be aspiring to, students tend to get stuck in lower order learning.

The difference between lower and higher order learning is neatly summarized by Bloom's Taxonomy, a conceptual framework for evaluating cognitive/intellectual ability. It breaks down the learning process into six categories/levels: 1) remember, 2) understand, 3) apply, 4) analyze, 5) evaluate, 6) create. Since it's hard to quantify exactly what's happening in a student's mind during learning, this framework helps by asking concrete questions about what the student can or cannot do.

My student got stuck at level 2 when the average requirement for the class was 4. They gave me a sample essay that their teacher considered to be "excellent" and it was easily at 5. While they could "feel" that there was a difference between their own essay and the excellent essay, they weren't able to articulate the difference at all.

One learning problem that people, Ns especially, often suffer is that they tend to get ahead of themselves, which is related to illusion of explanation depth. It's basically trying to run before walking. For example:

they believe "gist" is enough and dismiss details

they conflate knowing (theory) and doing (real world)

they judge/conclude without proper analysis

they try to create without mastering the basics

The above problems arise when a person doesn't realize how much they don't know (and in the case of an unhealthy personality, they refuse to acknowledge it). My student (N) is a good example. They believed that being able to do level 2 stuff (paraphrase, summarize, interpret, give examples) qualified as level 4 "analysis" and that this meant they had "mastered" the material. They simply didn't know any better or that more was possible. It wasn't until I explained to them the differences between lower and higher order learning that they began to realize how low-level their writing actually was.

I've talked before about the differences between a good student vs a good learner. A simple way to think about it: A good student is preoccupied with proving how much they know, so they are mainly motivated by extrinsic rewards or egotistical gain. By contrast, a good learner is preoccupied with how much they don't know, so they are mainly motivated by intrinsic rewards or intellectual humility that naturally breeds intellectual curiosity.

[starry-eyer]

literally so done with rhaegar antis at this point. we know practically nothing about this character besides all the good things other characters say about him and the fact that robert baratheon hates him and says things about rhaegar that ned disagrees with. and robert baratheon is a pos so being hated by him only does favors for rhaegar’s character imo.

but somehow all these characters who think well of rhaegar are just lying. even though almost all of the characters who have spoken/thought well of rhaegar come from different families and have different allegiances. make it make sense. explain it to me like i’m five. what do jamie and ned have to gain by thinking positively about rhaegar? what about jorah? and barristan?

seriously. stop with the “prophecy obsessed freak” and the “rhaegar was mad” bs. none of this is supported in the books.

for 1) the prophecy is real! this is a fantasy series! and it’s very likely that jon snow (his likely son) is one of the azor ahai/prince that was promised figures! the other completely certain azor ahai figure is his own sister! so yes this prophecy seems to be centered around rhaegar’s family.

2) rhaegar being “mad” is not supported whatsoever. prophecies and magic are very real in asoiaf. so believing/trying to figure out prophecies is not an act of a madman. if anything, we should praise rhaegar for having the foresight to be actively concerned about this world ending threat! he was right. and one mention, if not the first mention, of the song of ice and fire comes from a vision in the house of the undying… from rhaegar. please remember what the title of this series is…

now, it is fair to criticize rhaegar for how he treated elia at the tourney at harrenhall. he was wrong there and that was a terrible thing to do to elia. however, saying that rhaegar was awful to elia throughout their whole marriage is not supported. and saying that rhaegar was awful to his children is not supported at all.

also, getting angry at a fictional character for needing a son to secure the succession to the throne is hilarious, especially since it was necessary for not just rhaegar, but also for elia to secure their own positions at court. they both needed a male heir, but elia needed to have a son more than rhaegar to secure her position. so why are people so mad that rhaegar and elia had aegon? andal tradition says that a son comes before a daughter and a daughter before an uncle… but aerys had viserys to threaten rhaegar with because aerys was king and had the power to change the succession. having aegon was very important for both rhaegar and elias futures and protected rhaenys position as well. just look at what happened to alys karstark when all of her male brothers were gone. she was almost usurped by her uncle. do you really think aerys would let the throne pass to a girl? aerys??

anyways, we don’t know enough about rhaegar and elias relationship to actually make any concrete statements about them, but, from danys house of the undying vision of rhaegar and (likely) elia, their relationship seemed fine and they seemed open with each other. not every marriage of duty ends in nedcat and five kids, but their marriage was clearly far from the robert and cersei nightmare.

another thing rhaegar antis love to harp about is how he is a pedophile. i’m literally so sick of it. rhaegar, someone who seemingly struggled with some form of depression, finally found some joy outside of a marriage of duty. the author himself called rhaegar a love struck prince. ned never thinks ill of rhaegar, even though if the stories robert baratheon would have us believe were true then ned would be the first character who thinks rhaegar is some sort of monster. but ned doesn’t. back to the pedo argument… anyways i have issues with the age gap as well. but i know where to lay my criticism. with george. he’s weird about ages and it pisses me off. however, i won’t let this change the way i see a character, especially since westeros doesn’t have any age of consent laws.

god just criticize george already.

but to be clear, rhaegar, a tragic character who died trying to protect his family, who’s daughter hid underneath his bed for protection, is not some monster. he was born in grief, lived in grief, found some joy, and died whispering the name of the woman he loved. that’s sad. and it’s horrible that he’s blamed for his family’s deaths even though he fought and died trying to protect them. and then robert baratheon sat on his throne and drunk and whored the realm into debt. thank you mr. boar. and good riddance. cersei slayed with this one.

now if you want to blame someone for the war and what came after, then blame aerys for his cruelty. blame brandon for his foolishness. blame robert for his warmongering. blame tywin for his monstrous actions. blame gregor and amory for their terrible violence.

stop blaming the guy who died trying to protect his loved ones.

and tbh, we literally have so little knowledge of what happened before the rebellion and after harrenhall. we just don’t know what happened between rhaegar and lyanna besides what george has told us and whatever small scraps we get in the book. we don’t know if it was a rash decision or if there was some plan in place when rhaegar and lyanna ran off. we just don’t know.

so please stop treating your headcanons like canon facts. especially when your headcanon isn’t supported anywhere in the books! it’s so tiring to see! i get it! you hate this character! whatever! but stop acting like what you’re saying is canon!

rhaegar is simply a ghost haunting the narrative. but his legacy lives on in dany and (likely) jon. and both of them are saviors fighting the good fight. and based on the descriptions we have of rhaegar, i can say that he’s likely very proud of his sister and son.

[spock-adoodledoo]

i think one of the things i'll always appreciate abt maomao is that even though she's the protag, it's not really that the world revolves around her or that things always happen to her, it's more that she gets involved in things (usually at the request of other ppl but whatever) that usually don't affect her immediately. idk but it's nice that she's kind of our dispassionate window into palace life instead of the person everything happens to

[drawnbythestream]

Me thinking about my Jedi temple adventure game: What if you talk to this one Master and he mentions his missing Padawan and then you find the Padawan looking for a rock or something that he lost that was given to him by that Master?? 😃 wouldn’t that be neat? Wouldn’t that be fun? And while you’re walking around talking to people and looking for random things you learn basic moves like how to jump, and occasionally you solve some sort of puzzle game! Ooh!

[shigarosie]

I gotta get smth out real quick feel free to ignore

I'm really stuck between staying with the non-conventional job that I love and am comfortable with and looking for a more conventional job with benefits that I probably won't like as much. This is the only type of job I've ever had (I've worked for several different people/groups doing the same kind of work) but at the rate things are currently going I'm struggling to see how I'll be able to continue working this job and also be able to support myself financially as things in the next couple years change and shift.

[fingertipsmp3]

My 2025 resolutions:

Don’t die unless it’s unavoidable

No fucking impulse buying! No! Fucking! Impulse buying!!!

Travel more (which means travel at all)

Read more and be on my phone less

[usagimen]

I always think about how Sayuri sees another female sorcerer && her mind instantly is just: you deserve more. The Kobayashi women understand the horrors of the patriarchal system they are force to endure under while defying it && reveling in being loathed for their defiance. It shows so much by her respect towards Uro, two kunoichi’s in a death battle but Sayuri is having the time of her life while genuinely wishing, in another life, they could have been more.

[antirepurp]

it's weird that while digimon world next order is like mechanically a better dw game and lets you have more control over how you raise your digimon, digimon world redigitize decode has a better gameplay loop to me anyway. like in next order after a few generations and lifespan upgrades the digimon just Don't Fucking Die which is a real ordeal when it comes to actually completing the beastiary, and it makes it really difficult to estimate when to do important story fights and when to fuck around bc your fellas are about to die anyway. redigitize seems to have a set lifespan for your digimon that doesn't increase with generations, it's just base stats that do, and it gives you this neat about 15 in-game day cycle of raising your dude up (which can be done entirely in the gym) and exploring in-between if you need to adjust your stats carefully for specific evolutions. if redigitize had the evolution control of next order i think i'd say it's the ultimately better experience just for that tbh

[lanliingwang]

grailed squad

[lilacerull0]

i really love histology

[whoviandoodler]

petition to stop making fun of people who like those pinterest-esque posts with sad quotes and whatever bcs to you they may be edgy and cringy but to someone out there it might be the first time that they are seeing someone put into words the confusing experience of being Human. same goes with those bad ya books like. yes they are objectively, technically bad and most times just badly mimic something someone else did but someone will see deep ideas explored in them for the first time and marvel. and maybe instead of going lmao dumb kids we should go 'hey if you liked that book you might like [a book that was much better at exploring trope from that angle'. peace on planet earth or whatever

[cosmic-kiwi]

[cirrem]

also since I'm posting, nobody knows what entropy is and whenever I see anyone (non-physicists) talk about it they're wrong

entropy is a measure of the possible ways a system can be in its state. for example, if you're flipping 4 coins, there is 1 way to get 4 heads, 1 way to get 4 tails, 4 ways to get 1 head, 4 ways to get 1 tail, and 6 ways (I think) to get 2 heads and 2 tails. the state of 2 heads and 2 tails has the highest entropy, because it has the most ways to exist.

Chaos is a completely separate concept, its how sensitive a system is to initial conditions -- the classical example is the double pendulum. if you have two double pendulums and only slightly change the angle of one, they are going to act completely different. As compared to a normal pendulum, where slightly changing the angle will be very similar to not changing it.

Chaos and entropy can be related, but that very much depends on the system. the most likely state a double pendulum will be in after a certain amount of time is straight down -- that is to say as time increases the entropy of the straight down pendulum increases, even though it is the least "chaotic" double pendulum system. (I may be butchering stuff I'm only an undergrad and I took thermo/statistical in the fall)

I kind of understand why people associate them so much, if I were to roll a bazillion dice and recorded their number, it'd tend to an even amount of 1,2,3,4,5, and 6, in a random order. the sequence of numbers would seem to be pretty chaotic, and we will have a high entropy system. But associating entropy with that instead of the fact that there is an even distribution of numbers, that we can predict the total sum of the roll, or the average of all the rolls, completely misses the point of what makes entropy useful and why we talk about it.

Entropy isn't a measure of chaos, its a measure of probability, and helps us know what we can from a systems most likely state.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I promised you some lions! Let's talk about manes, males, and management.

This is Tandie, the current male lion at the Woodland Park Zoo.

Notice anything odd about him? He's got one of those hilarious awkward teenager manes. Except... this cat is nine years old.

I was, of course, immediately curious.

Manes serve a lot of purposes for male lions, including being an indicator of health and fitness - it's actually a sexually selected trait and a social signal. Mane texture / hair quality / length is dependent on nutrition and the body having energy to grow (and carry around!) that much hair! The color is also a signal: males with darker manes have been found to have higher testosterone levels.

In one research report, wild males were much more likely to avoid a lion decoy when it had a longer or darker mane - but the girls really loved a dark mane. It's thought this is because a long, dark mane is an indicator of mate quality. Males with longer, darker manes have higher testosterone and were pretty healthy: meaning they had more energy for fighting, had a better chance of recovering if they got injured, and generally had a higher rate of offspring survival. Manes matter!

So, back to Tandie. He was actually born at the Woodland Park Zoo in 2014 alongside two brothers, to dad Xerxes and mother Adia.

This was Xerxes (rip).

Obviously, a very large, dark, lush mane on Xerxes here. So where did these blond muttonchops come from on his son?

I asked the zoo docents and got an answer that didn't make a lot of sense. They told me that after the three cubs grew into adolescents, they were moved to the Oakland Zoo together. But living together suppressed his testosterone, and he never grew a mane.

Hmmmm.

Here's a photo from 2016, when the brothers debuted at Oakland. They're a year and a half old in this photo.

(Photo Credit: Oakland Zoo)

And here's from an announcement for their third birthday.

(Photo credit: Oakland Zoo)

Okay, so these dudes obviously all were growing manes as of 2017. I think Tandie is the one on the left in the first photo, and laying down in the middle on the second. What happened?

I was just in the Bay Area for a zoo road trip, of course I went to Oakland and tracked down a docent to ask some questions.

It turns out that shortly after the brothers turned three, they started acting like adult male lions: they started scuffling regularly. It's a normal social thing for male lions to live in groups, called coalitions, but according to my lion experts there's generally a baseline level of some social jostling within them. It wasn't quite clear from what the docent said if they couldn't manage the boys together, or if they just wanted to avoid the scratches and small wounds that result from normal lion behavior. Regardless, they put all three of the boys on testosterone blockers in order to be able to keep them together as a social group.

Now, I don't know a lot about the use of hormone alteration as a form of captive animal management, except in the case of birth control. I don't think it's something that's unethical - there was just a webinar on it that I saw go by - but I don't think it's commonly done with big cats. Lions have kind of complicated reproductive cycles, and for instance, we've been learning that female lions can take much longer to come into estrus again than expected after coming off hormonal birth control.

In males, testosterone blockers (or being neutered) means they lose their manes. This is why a lot of rescues will do a vasectomy on their males instead of a neuter - it allows them to keep their mane and the social signals that accompany it.

Tandie returned home to Woodland Park Zoo after Xerxes passed in early 2022, and the docent told me all of the lions had been off their blockers "for while." I'd guess those things happened around the same time, since bringing the trio down to a duo at Oakland would reduce some of the social tensions.

Hormones are such interesting things, though. One of Tandie's brothers has a full mane again, and the other is still totally mane-less.

As for Tandie, his mane is growing back in, and it looks like he might rival his dad for length and coloration.

He started here, in February:

Yesterday:

What a difference four months (and maybe proximity to a girl) makes!

[tinfoil-catholic]

As recently published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Professor Rapport's senior doctoral student Sarah Orban and research team tested 62 boys ages 8 to 12. Of those, 32 had ADHD. Thirty did not have ADHD and acted as a control group.

And (emphasis mine)

That may not seem surprising. After all, weren't the children absorbed by the sci-fi movie and bored by the math lesson? Not so, Rapport said.

"That's just using the outcome to explain the cause," he said. "We have shown that what's really going on is that it depends on the cognitive demands of the task. With the action movie, there's no thinking involved - you're just viewing it, using your senses. You don't have to hold anything in your brain and analyze it. With the math video, they are using their working memory, and in that condition movement helps them to be more focused."

Reading the article helps. Not only were half the kids tested not kids diagnosed with ADHD, it doesn't sound like they were just watching a person talk at them, they were watching a video made to be engaging, but which required more thinking, than arguably the most brain-less part of the prequel trilogy. Something that, at that age, is something that they have seen just as often as the math video they were watching (which was about adding, subtracting, and multiplication).

I implore tumblr to read the articles linked before jumping to criticize it. I'm sure the actual research paper has even more details about the experiment as well.

Scientists once thought that ADHD symptoms were always present. But previous research from Rapport, who has been studying ADHD for more than 36 years, has shown the fidgeting was most often present when children were using their brains' executive functions, particularly "working memory." That's the system we use for temporarily storing and managing information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning and comprehension.

Here’s full study: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/478386

If you enjoyed this post, please give it a ❤️ and check out @scienceisdope for more science and daily facts.

[charmre]

everythibg's fine!! 😭👍🏼