#09: How fast can you learn?
and how fast is too fast?
The opportunities available to learn new things have changed dramatically since I was at school, and a major difference is the way in which we can access resources.
YouTube is a popular go-to resource, even though we have to be careful about selecting quality content. Furthermore, many learning providers upload lectures and presentations to their own platforms. How we choose to access and use them, therefore, is important for those of us learning outside mainstream education. The recent pandemic has made this situation even more relevant as many educational institutions have been forced to deliver online.
My son started university last year. So far, his student experience has been dictated by a global pandemic; face-to-face seminars have taken place, but their frequency has been somewhat sporadic. Lectures are still largely online and pre-recorded, with all the advantages and disadvantages this entails.
The need for speed
One thing I did notice that intrigued me was that my son watches lectures at a higher speed, anything from 1.5 to 2 times normal speed, and this got me thinking: does such a practice impair learning?
It turns out that your average human speaks at around 150 words per minute and that once this reaches 275 words per minute, comprehension suffers. This makes sense, because we know from more than half a century of research that the amount of information we can keep hold of at any one time is limited in both capacity and duration. This is why we often need people to slow down their speech when we’re learning a new language, or when someone in explaining something complex to us. We can further explain this in relation to cognitive load, in that the faster the speech the higher the load.
But lectures invariably include both spoken and visual elements, so this multi-modality presentation may compensate when we increase the speed of the video. However, wouldn’t this just result in less time to encode only the visual material?
These questions, along with others, are addressed in a 2021 paper I discovered recently. Dillon Murphy, a Doctoral student at UCLA, experimentally examined how memory and learning are impacted by faster video delivery. Murphy and his co-researchers carried out a number of experiments on retention of information delivered via video. For example, in one experiment student participants were shown a video at different speeds, ranging from normal to 2.5 times faster. They were then tested on the content immediately, and a week later (immediate versus delayed).
How fast is too fast?
There appeared to be little difference in comprehension until the delivery exceeded 2 times normal speed, suggesting that people (students, at least) are able to process information that exceeds the average 150 words per minute.
In another experiment, participants watched a video once at normal speed and then twice at double speed. In this instance, there was very little difference between the two conditions.
The role of metacognition
So maybe I don’t need to worry too much. Of course, the advantage of video lectures is that we can pause and rewind them, and take notes at our own pace. The problem would be that we can become passive observers rather than dynamic, active learners if we’re not mindful of how we actually learn.
It’s also likely that it’s not going to work too well as complexity increases. Knowing how we learn and being able to work with that (or metacognition) is, I think, a vital component of successful learning, particularly when it comes to being able to transfer learning from one context to another. We also need to remain mindful that transfer takes time, and is much less likely to be successful if we don’t know the content of learning well.
While you’re here… Paul Penn has an excellent YouTube channel looking at effective study - lots of tips on everything from time management to writing essays.
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