Assertion Supported
Oakley: Research Shows Visual and Auditory Learning Styles Are Scientifically Groundless
“There was a excellent study done by a woman named Beth Rogoski and what she did was she took one of the standard tests to kind of analyze a very widely used test that is used to distinguish an individual as to whether they're a visual learner or an auditory le…”
Assertion Supported
Oakley: US ranks dead last in student math ability among 22 OECD nations
“I think we're dead last in the group of 22 top nations in the OECD as far as the math Abilities of our students.”
Assertion Supported
Oakley's $5,000 basement course matched Harvard's entire online course enrollment
“Our one little course that was made for less than 5000 dollars, mostly in my basement had on this order the same number of students as all of Harvard's online courses put together, made for millions of dollars with hundreds of people.”
Insight
Oakley: Conceptual understanding is insufficient for mastery without memorization
“He'd heard for so many years that all he needed to do was understand something, and that was it. That's enough. That's like the golden thing, and it's not enough. It's not enough at all. Sometimes I will say to people, like, you'll hear Poets say, memorize the…”
Opinion
Oakley: Educational psychologists push learning theories that fail in advanced STEM
“A lot of the top professionals who are in, for example, educational psychology, it's again that, that pointy discipline problem. Like they know a whole bunch about this little tiny area of their discipline. And often, the people who are in educational psycholo…”
Assertion Supported
Oakley: Neuroscience proves math mastery requires practice and repetition
“When it comes to math, it's like, ah, let's not talk about how the neuroscience supports the fact that you also need practice and repetition for math, because it, then you start getting into the math wars.”
Insight
Oakley: Good managers must think Machiavellian to anticipate manipulative tricks
“I think that administer, being a good administrator is one of the world's most difficult jobs because part of it's a, it's, it involves vision and It involves being able to inspire people. It involves being able to be a little Machiavellian yourself, because y…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Oakley: Predatory bad actors will adapt with less detectable workplace misconduct
“But they're really, really intelligent people, and so it will find other ways to manifest itself, and what I'm interested to see is how, how will that manifest? Because it won't manifest in a way that's as easily detectable as what's going on now”
Insight
Oakley: Focused mantra meditation may suppress default mode activity and creativity
“The mantra meditation can be excellent in helping to even further build your focusing ability, but there's some evidence that at the same time it's also suppressing that default mode activity.
So it may be that you're focusing great.
You can get even better at…”
Insight
Oakley: Memorizing equations enables deeper conceptual understanding
“If you memorize an equation, you will also understand it more deeply.”
Assertion Supported
Oakley: Karpicke study shows active recall outperforms rereading and concept mapping
“There's a great study by Jeff Karpicki of Purdue about where he showed what is the best way to learn if you're reading, for example, a complex paper on some scientific study or subject. The best way is you read it, and then you look away, and you can, you see …”
Assertion Partly supported
Oakley: Poor working memory correlates with creativity and better simplification
“If you have a really bad working memory, in other words, the things that you hold temporarily in mind, that, that can be a great thing, because number one, there's good research that shows that you're more you're more creative, and another thing is it allows y…”
Assertion Supported
Oakley: Human working memory holds roughly four slots, not seven
“We used to think there are seven slots in working memory, so it's like seven things you can hold in mind. Like seven numbers. That's why, you know, it was four, five, three, seven, two, three, nine, or whatever phone number had seven digits in it, because they…”
Insight
Oakley: Many student claims of test anxiety reflect unverified ignorance
“So many students will come in and say, I suffer from test anxiety. And it's actually not true at all. It's just that when they sat down to do the test was the very first time they realized that they actually didn't know it.”
Insight
Oakley: Learning unrelated topics drives work innovation through cognitive transfer
“In fact, I think that's one of the best ways to be fresh, to maintain freshness in whatever you're working on at a day job, so to speak. Is to try to spend a little bit of your time, you know, either offline or online or at work or not at work, learning someth…”
Insight
Oakley: Pigeonholing into One Learning Style Degrades Other Sensory Skills
“And it's a bad thing to think of yourself as only being... One type. Yeah, because then what happens is you close yourself off to the other sensory channels and you become less expert at them because you're not practicing with them.”
Insight
Oakley: Parallel skill acquisition beats sequential learning for long-term retention
“Well, if I studied three languages for five years and kind of on a parallel track, I think I would be better at each of them
Than if I studied you know, three for, you know, one and a half years, or, you know, one of them for one and a half, and then sequentia…”
Opinion
Oakley: Second-Tier Universities Resist MOOCs Over Faculty Job Loss Fears
“The top tier universities are getting information out there with massive open online courses. It's the second tier Universities that often kind of go, oh no, we shouldn't have anything online because people will lose jobs. So we're not going to allow anything …”
Opinion
Oakley: The Best Teaching Often Occurs at Non-Top-Tier Universities
“Particularly universities that are not in the top tier, that those are the ones where there's the best teaching often going on, and that this needs to get out to the public.”
Insight
Oakley: Defense Language Institute learning techniques apply to STEM and music
“And I went to the Defense Language Institute, which is one of the greatest institutions in the world for learning another language, and the techniques they used are really the same great techniques that you would use to learn dance, to learn a musical instrume…”
Insight
Oakley: Doing homework once without deliberate repetition is a major mistake
“And I think that's one mistake we often make in in the U.S. At least, as far as doing homework. We just do it and throw it in, right? Instead of saying, oh, this is a key problem. If I've got this one, I should memorize, I should not memorize like just sort of…”
Insight
Oakley: Rapid learning requires deliberate practice on what hurts most
“Yes, we should look at what hurts the most and focus on that. So that's something called, ah, deliberate practice, ah, which I know you know of. But if it flows really easily and then you keep going with, you know, repeating this very easy stuff, you're not go…”
Insight
Oakley: Management cannot be optimized because it is an open-ended system
“I don't think there's a way to necessarily optimize being a manager because it is, it's a, it's an open-ended system and an ill-posed problem in a sense You just, you can't get there from here, but you can, in most cases, incrementally improve”
Insight
Oakley: Pairing intense focus with rewards enables cognitive consolidation
“This whole business of focus intently and reward yourself at the end, that almost trains your brain to be more comfortable in the focus mode, and to and to enjoy it, And then to integrate that, the consolidation that's happening in the diffuse mode at the end …”
Barbara Oakley