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Actually, people learn for hours this way. It just needs to be tempered with support. This is literally what a teacher does when they give you an assignment, give you feedback on it, then give you another activity. You're thinking of hard testing - where you get a lot of things wrong. I did research on how to keep learners engaged, and as long as they were getting over 50-60 precent of the problems/activities "right" they kept going - so we actually built an adaptive system that optimized for this type of growth, which means throwing them an easier question every now and then so that they have some confidence to go with the knowledge.

The reason some kids are not motivated to do math is because they believe they are bad at it, and nobody likes to do something that makes them feel dumb or not good. The kids that love math (like myself - I remember I was SO excited about math as a kid) are good at it, and teachers are constantly complimenting them.

You can hack the brain to feeling good while learning. I just need like 200M but I might be able to do it without.

by authorfly2 days ago|

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So that adaptive system sounds really cool and useful for those bursts of formative assessment. And if the baseline is 100% boring textbook reading, ofcourse that is better. But if they work 9-5 every day, why don't schools do that at the moment do you think?

I don't mean to be negative, but can you name a research paper where a normal students 7 hour school day was changed to formative assessment all week long for a semester or more, and the grades improved? Or identify why students on Duolingo don't tend to learn as well as those taking in person classes? Why does the effect of the Testing Effect/formative assessment tail off when it is used more and over greater time periods?

The point is, the research on learning methods usually researches them in isolation and in 5-15-60 minute study sessions. Maybe doing 15 minutes of formative assessment improves your grades, but puts you off doing other work or makes you less effective in later lessons, when done regularly. There is a lack of useful longitudinal research in Education for the depressing reason that the two main effects are your genetic background, and private teacher attention.

I don't think kids are not motivated about math because they are bad at it. It doesn't seem like a subject that most kids see themselves using every day, because the adults they see around them don't seem to (and in fact largely don't) use Maths. While I value and enjoy Maths, and know how knowing maths makes a massive difference to your experience or life, kids can't, and really won't have good reasons to understand or be motivated through that. e.g. it's not a fear of negativity (though in class under pressure it is). It's an absence of motivation in the first place.