A Huge Component of Learning System Design

... is that it has to be robust to all sorts of behavior arising from the various human emotional experiences associated with learning & intense training.

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.

A huge component of learning system design is that it has to be robust to all sorts of behavior arising from the various human emotional experiences associated with learning & intense training.

Those emotional experiences can sometimes be pretty intense and lead people to make self-destructive decisions that hinder them from making educational progress.

For instance, many people will abuse an “I don’t know button” if it’s provided on any task other than a diagnostic.

This can be intentional, e.g., adversarial students (typically kids – not all kids, but enough to cause a headache) will click “I don’t know” simply to avoid doing work, and then bamboozle their parents into thinking that they’re trying but the work is too hard.

Or it can be unintentional, e.g., underconfident learners may underestimate their ability and give up too early.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve worked with a student on a problem, and they said “I don’t know,” and then I ask them to tell me their best guess, and then they get it right, and when I ask them about their thought process, it turns out they knew how to solve the problem, but they weren’t confident about it, and they didn’t want to risk getting it wrong.

Want to get notified about new posts? Join the mailing list and follow on X/Twitter.