Day 33: Monitor & Adjust

Today we discuss the importance of monitoring your learning plan as you engage in learning sessions, then adjusting when necessary. We also cover how to monitor you learning plan quantitively and qualitatively.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific References

Summary

What does Monitoring and Adjusting Look Like?

As a self-directed learner, you need to make sure that you take a step back regularly to assess how your learning is going and adjust as necessary. You will assess whether you're:

• Actually progressing in your learning
• Using the best learning strategies

This practice of monitoring and adjusting is something you will do during the entire learning process.

• As you start engaging with the learning process, you often have a better understanding of the task, and you may have learned some things that make you want to update your goals.
• In some cases you won't be able to have the perfect learning approach because the resources that you need just don't exist.

Why it matters: Doing this practice and becoming a more self-directed learner can really pay off in the long run.

• One study [1] found that training students to become self directed learners could move them from the 50th to the 75th percentile.

How to Monitor & Adjust

To assess your learning plan qualitatively, ask yourself these questions:

• Have I done the research into what are the typical ways of learning this subject or skill?
• Have I interviewed successful learners to see what resources and advice they can recommend?
• How focused am I during learning sessions?
• Am I multitasking or getting distracted while learning?
• Is my schedule reasonable so I don't skip out on learning sessions?
• Am I motivated to do my learning sessions?
• How will this knowledge be applied? Am I learning the skill in the way it will eventually be used later?
• How am I practicing the way that I'm transferring the knowledge that I learned from a book or a video to real life situations?
• Am I spending my time focusing on the weakest points of my performance?
• Which rate limiting steps are the ones that are holding me back from learning more or mastering this skill?
• Does it feel like the skill that I'm mastering seems too complex? And if so, can I break it down into smaller skills and start practicing each one of those?
• Am I spending most of my time reading and reviewing, or am I solving problems and recalling things from memory without looking at your notes?
• Do I have ways of actively testing myself?
• Am I using techniques like space to repetition to see if I can explain what I've learned yesterday, last week, or maybe even a year ago?
• Am I getting the type of honest feedback about my performance early on? '
• Am I trying to avoid criticism about my skill practice?
• Am I focused on turning declarative or factual knowledge into procedures?
• Am I getting stuck with my current learning resources and techniques?
• Do I need to branch out and try new approaches to reach my learning?
• How can I go beyond mastering just the basics and create a unique style to solve problems creatively and do things others haven't explored before?
• Do I deeply understand the things I'm learning or am I just memorizing information?
• Can I actually teach these ideas or procedures to someone else?

To assess your learning plan quantitively, take tests to benchmark your progress over time.

• Take a test on the knowledge set before you start learning anything to get a benchmark of your knowledge about the subject or skill before learning it.
• Then as you go through the process of learning, regularly test yourself to see if you're actually improving on that learning.

If you feel like you are not really learning the material, change things up, switch out resources, switch out techniques, go back and interview people to figure out the best way to learn and then create a new learning plan for yourself.

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Activity

Setup a system for yourself to monitor your learning plan on a regular basis.

• Create a way that you can go through the questions as a simple check-in and a place to record and graph your benchmarks from tests.

Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.