I wanted to write a post on self-learning for already quite some time. And today I stumbled upon a very interesting research paper, that reviews how students perceive their self-studying, what are common pitfalls and mistakes. The paper is:
Bjork RA, Dunlosky J, Kornell N (2013) Self-Regulated Learning: Beliefs, Techniques, and Illusions. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 64:417–44
It is a psychological paper, written in a very clear language, which is easy to understand for non-professional, as long as you know basic terminology from cognitive sciences. One of the major conclusions there is that people in overall are not really efficient as self-learners. The main reason for that is biased decision-making when judging efficiency of learning techniques and methods. In particular the paper says that spacing and interleaving is often overlooked and underestimated, whereas methods that improve short-term memory (like cramming) are perceived as more advantageous due to their quick benefits.
