A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra)

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Shirley Malcom, Head of Education and Human Resources Programs, American Association for the Advancement of Science When I started implementing these strategies during my 4th year in College, I was not only able to spend less time studying problems, but also enjoy it more. Your brain is capable of handling complex mental calculations and problems. Each day, you’re already making countless unconscious decisions involving distances, speed, and quantities. To get better at math and science, you must learn how your brain works so you can use it to learn faster and deeper. Focused vs Diffused Thinking Shortform note: Fogg identifies this same strategy of changing the behavior associated with a certain prompt. However, instead of highlighting the need for willpower, he advises designing the replacement behavior to take as little willpower as possible. To do this, he advises you to make the replacement behavior easier and more desirable (higher ability and motivation) than the old one.)

Procrastination can be like taking tiny amounts of poison. It may not seem harmful at the time. But the long-term effects can be very damaging.” Dr. Barbara Oakley gives us insanely effective strategies that she used herself to become successful at Math in her book, A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel in Math and Science (Even if You’ve Flunked Algebra). [afflink] Paralleling Oakley’s warning that knowing how to look something up isn’t the same as actually knowing it, they also identify a “fluency illusion.” If you can easily follow along when a process is presented in a book or a lecture, it is tempting to think you’ve mastered it, but just because you can follow along doesn’t necessarily mean you could reproduce the process or solution yourself. Despite the title’s clear mention of “numbers,”“math,” and “science,” as well as the biographical blurb’s reference of “teaching methods,” this book has nothing to do with any of those subjects. If you expect to learn a mnemonic device for factoring polynomials from Oakley’s book, you will be disappointed. The book, on the other hand, focuses on the mind, or rather the brain, and gives a wealth of material and practical applications to help readers create mental habits and behaviors that lead to successful learning in any subject or skill, not only STEM subjects. You don’t want to wait too long for the retrieval practice. Try to recall the material you’ve learned within a day.

A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science by Barbara Oakley is the 22nd book I read in the Read 30 Books in 30 Days Reading Challenge . This is an excellent book, but I read her other book, Learning How to Learn and there’s a lot of overlap.

Several recent studies have shown that regular exercise can make a substantive improvement in your memory and learning ability. Learning to Appreciate Your Talent It’s easy to say ‘work smarter, not harder,’ but Barbara Oakley actually shows you how to do just that, in a fast-paced and accessible book that collects tips based on experience and sound science. In fact, I’m going to incorporate some of these tips into my own teaching.”Over the past decades, students who have blindly followed their passion, without rational analysis of whether their choice of career truly was wise, have been more unhappy with their job choices than those who coupled passion with rationality.”

Your short-term memory or working memory holds whatever information you’re processing consciously. It has a limited capacity, and can hold about 4 main clusters of information at any point in time, like a juggler who can keep only 4 balls in the air.Thus, “distraction” as used by Eyal seems to be functionally synonymous with “procrastination” as used by Oakley, and Eyal’s description of the root cause of distraction is compatible with Oakley’s description of the procrastination habit model. As such, we can compare Oakley’s strategies for avoiding procrastination to Eyal’s for additional perspective. We’ll discuss both Oakley’s and Eyal’s strategies in the next section. Strategies for Overcoming Procrastination Getting a concept in class, versus being able to apply it to solving a genuine physical problem, is the difference between a student and a full-blown scientist or engineer. Oakley’s focus here is on developing positive mental habits. The four key components of habits are discussed: rewarding small bursts of work, cultivating diffuse-thinking mode, engaging in mental contrasting, and avoiding multitasking, which disrupts the learning process. Successful learners, according to Oakley, prioritize process over product.