Effective learning strategies for programmers. Part 1 Installation on growth

In early September, I explained the main points about effective learning for programmers at Kiwi PyCon in New Zealand. My lecture consisted of two parts: one about the way of thinking, and the second about some strategies that we can use.

The articles that we publish are an ambitious and slightly edited version of the first part of the lecture on the way of thinking.

part 2

Recurse center

Before I joined Dropbox last year, I spent two years working at the Recurse Center in New York. Recurse Center is a kind of shelter for programmers. Participants 3 months working on what they are interested. That is, someone who has been writing in Java for ten years can come to RC and learn a new language, for example, Clojure; someone who has just graduated from a university with a degree in CS may come to work on their web development skills; or someone who has studied programming in his spare time may come to speed up his learning. The program has practically no structure - there are no deadlines, no orders, no studies. This is an experiment on unstructured learning for adults.
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My role as coordinator was to help people cope with the disorienting amount of freedom they received in RC. People who come with a traditional learning experience or after regular work, quite often simply do not know what to do with it. Therefore, I helped them with setting goals and gaining most of their experience.

One of the things that we often thought about was how to create the most effective training for programmers. Today I want to talk about some of the research on how to become an effective student, and how we can apply the results of such research in everyday life as programmers and engineers.

What do you learn from this article

Consider for a moment what you want to learn from this article. Perhaps you want to learn something new about how to be as efficient and productive as possible in your work. Perhaps you want to hear how to become the best teacher or mentor for junior engineers. Or perhaps you want to hear about how to make an institutional change in your organization in order to create a more comfortable environment for such activities.

All these topics are quite useful, and I will touch on the materials relating to each of them. However, I want you to basically think through strategies on your own. When I hear about such strategies, more often it seems to me that other people should follow them, but I myself should not do it. A little later, I will come back to this awkward situation.

Growing up: Carol Duke

Let's talk about the first key to effective learning. The sociologist Carol Duke has done a lot of interesting research on what people think about intelligence. She discovered that there are two main ways of thinking about the intellect. The first, which she called the fixed consciousness, is that intelligence is a fixed feature, and people cannot change how much it has. The second way of thinking is to set on growth. From a growth perspective, people think that intelligence is flexible, and people can increase it by making efforts.

Duek discovered that people's understanding of intelligence, then, they see it as a fixed or growing trait, can significantly affect how they choose the tasks they want to work on, how they react to difficulties, their cognitive work, and even on their honesty. In this article I want to consider a couple of the most interesting results of her work.

Different types of consciousness lead to differences in effort.

The first interesting result is that this separation affects the way people perceive effort. If you have a fixed consciousness, you believe that people are either smarter or not, and they cannot change it - thus, you also most likely believe that if you are good at something, it will always be given easy for you, and if something is too hard for you, you will never be good at it. This is a fixed consciousness. People with a growth attitude believe that you just need to make an effort and work harder on something to achieve success in this.

Several studies have shown that people with fixed consciousness may be reluctant to make efforts, as they believe that this means that they are not good enough in the area in which they have to work hard. Duek notes: “It would be quite difficult to maintain confidence in one’s abilities, if every time the task required effort it would call into question the intellect.”

Reverse effect of praise

The second interesting result is probably the most famous. Duek and her staff showed that praising students a little differently will significantly affect their performance.

In this study, Douk and her staff gave students a set of tasks. After the first set, all students coped pretty well. Then half of the students said, “Wow, you really did a good job with these tasks — you must be very smart,” and in the second half, “Wow, you did a really good job with these tasks — you probably did a very good job.” After that, they were given the second set of tasks, but let's return to the first.

In this case, the first group of students was given a fixed consciousness (your performance shows that you are smart), and the second group of students - a flexible consciousness (your efforts led to success).

From this experiment, they learned a lot of interesting things. The first aspect of the experiment is that between the first and second set of tasks they asked the students what tasks they want to get further - more difficult or simpler. (In practice, everyone got more difficult tasks). The duel and the others wanted to see what the difference would be between students who received different praise. And the results were not long in coming: 90% of the students who were praised for their diligence asked for more complex tasks, whereas in the group that was praised for the mind, there were only a third of such students. The children who were praised for their zeal turned out to be much more interested in overcoming difficulties.

The second thing that interested them was how the students coped with the third set of tasks. They found that students who were praised for their mind did much worse with the third set than with the first, while students who were praised for their zeal did a little better. The students, who were praised for their mind, were unable to effectively “come to their senses” after the second set of tasks, while the students, who were praised for their zeal, quickly returned to normal.

After that, all the students were asked to write letters about this study to their friends by correspondence, saying that "We took part in such a study at school, and that's what grade I got (a)." They found that almost half of the students who were praised for their brains lied about their results, and among the students who were praised for their hard work, almost no one had lied.

Three conclusions can be drawn from this: a growth orientation made pupils more often choose difficult tasks instead of light ones, to recover faster after failures, as compared with students with fixed consciousness.

What is most admiring is the insignificant difference in praise. If you tell a person that he is smart, he will give up all his efforts to maintain the appearance of intelligence, performing only light tasks that he does well and hiding his failures. If you tell a person that he has done a good job, he will try to preserve the appearance of hard work, and the best way to do this is to work really hard.

Confusion reaction

Another study examined what would happen when students faced temporary confusion. Duek and her staff developed a short course in psychology, which they presented to primary school students. The course was a book on psychology, after which the survey was conducted. In some books there was one rather complicated paragraph, and in the others it was not. The difficult part was not mentioned in the survey, but because the students could study the material, even if they completely ignored the difficult part. The researchers wanted to see how the students could recover after they were extremely puzzled in the middle of the book.

As it turned out, students with a growth attitude studied the material in about 70% of cases, regardless of whether there was a difficult paragraph in the book or not. Among students with fixed consciousness, if they came across a book without a complicated paragraph, about 70% studied the material. At the same time, pupils with fixed consciousness, who were faced with a difficult paragraph, showed a decrease in the absorption of material up to 30%. Pupils with fixed consciousness recovered rather poorly after confusion.

What is the best way to characterize the nature of people who mostly exist in such a way as to imitate others as often as possible? Are these people we want to be like because they are good, or are they people from whom we want to get approval?

I decided to give an excerpt from a complex paragraph, because I really like it.

Raise your hand if you ever started using a new instrument or documentation that sounded like this. (Hands raised almost 100%.)

This happens all the time - you get documents written by industry experts with a focus on beginners, or irrelevant documents, or face other problems. For programmers, this is a very important feature - discarding this kind of confusion and being able to successfully retain the rest of the information contained in the document we read.

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