Always cycle experiments from the previous Kolb's into your next one to ensure your marginal gains are compounding._
- Yes
- No
To see how valid measuring cognitive load is
Cognitive load measuring
What's the experiment from the past reflection and abstraction that you want to reflect on? (Originally: What experience do you want to reflect on?)
I tried:
Measuring my cognitive load every 20 minutes per this template
_Remember that marginal gains look different at different levels of the conscious competence model. Answer:
- _What's my current competence?
- _When am I this competent? (How do I know I'm this competent?)
- _What's the next competency?
- When will I be at X? (e.g. X = conscious competence)
From: UI. When I don't even know what I'm doing wrong.
To: CI. When I know if what I'm doing is a mistake.
- I opened some documentation on a thing called Discljord for to create a Discord bot using the Clojure programming language.
- I set a looping 20-minute timer
- I prestudied and TLS-ed it.
- Every time the timer went off, I measured my cognitive load.
Unsure when I went to try to measure my cognitive load. I felt like I didn't have an accurate recall of what cognitive load I was at. I also didn't know what "100%" felt like.
I felt unimpressed when I realized most of the session was low cognitive load, esp. when I got side-swept with a notification in my Github account or when I strayed into Discord.
Which aspects (if any) of the process felt especially difficult? Which aspects felt like they went well?
Knowing how much of my time was actually at each part. I tended to ballpark how much time was spent at each, but I couldn't be sure.
Allocating my time using the template. When I incremented "4" to "7" at 0% on my second time through, I then had to remember mentally that I had 17 minutes left to allocate. Then I incremented "6" to "13" at 20%, and I had to remember that I had 10 minutes left to allocate. Mental record keeping.
I learned that most of prestudy isn't cognitively challenging... until you get to comparing backbones. Relating the ideas themselves was 40%. I also saw my cognitive load spike to 60-80% when I asked "Why are events important?" and then I looked into unfamiliar code, seeing things like multimethods or a bunch of Discord-specific terms like "guild" and "snowflake" and also seeing binary encoding or the term "dispatch". I also saw new things with hard-to-find info like "impl", and I'm familiar with "spec" but I didn't understand how it worked... e.g. these are Clojure-specific terms.
Measuring my cognitive load every 20 minutes per this template
- I didn't truly know the time spent, but I ballparked it.
- I had a mental abacus in my head as I manually incremented the times in the template.
What were the triggers to you feeling the way you did? (What were the triggers to you feeling that X was difficult?)
- vague memory, forgetting, expected to recall re: the cognitive load durations.
- seeing most of my time spent at low cognitive load and knowing partially why
- I figured my estimate was better than nothing, and I at least had _some idea.
- My template doesn't support calculations... it doesn't let me just write out the current rounds' number.
What habits, beliefs, and tendencies can you identify from your reflection that explains why you acted the way you did?
(TLS the Kolb's... improve it)
- I'm likely not remembering my level of cognitive load accurately...
- Unfriendly template requires mentally tracking how much time is still unallocated
- Gathering concepts isn't high cognitive load
- Relating concepts is higher cognitive load
- Relating backbones is somewhat higher than just relating concepts?
- Newness/foreignness of material vastly increases cognitive load.
This can help you to identify the holistic impact of the habits and tendencies you found above.
- I don't remember my dreams that well, most of my day, nor lots of things in my past.
- Collecting keywords isn't demanding, but the relating of them is...
- When I'm in a new environment generally, in the physical world, it's tougher.
Keep your experiments concise, specific, and actionable. Avoid vague statements of intention. Imagine waking up tomorrow and seeing this list. You want to have a clear idea of exactly what you need to do to immediately act on your experiments.
Less than 3 experiments is ideal to improve your chances of success and make efficient progress with each cycle. More than 4 experiments is highly unadvised.
Do this again, but measure every ten minutes. Try it four times.
Other ideas:
- Do this re: teaching with SIR..
- Do this re: writing generated questions.
- Do this re: answering generated questions.