The Science of Learning

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

Does Explicit Instruction Cause Learned Helplessness?

Nidhi Sachdeva (University of Toronto) and Jim Hewitt have an excellent Substack called The Science of Learning. They just put up a great piece that takes apart one of the most widely repeated objections to explicit instruction — the claim that giving students a lot of teacher guidance somehow trains them into “learned helplessness.” It is the kind of claim that sounds serious in a workshop because the term itself sounds serious. The trouble is, the actual psychological construct is about a learner’s belief that no effort changes the outcome — exactly the belief that unguided discovery tends to produce when novice students are asked to find their own way through material they don’t yet have the background to navigate. That belief, once it sets in, is hard to dislodge. Well-designed explicit instruction (clear modeling, guided practice, checking for understanding, gradually withdrawn support) builds the independence that unguided approaches were trying to short-cut to. 

Teacher, Professor, or Programmer? Come to Copenhagen, September 28–October 2!

I’ll be at GOTO Copenhagen 2026 this fall, and this is the year I’d say it’s worth the plane ticket — whether you’re coming from Asia, the western hemisphere, or Europe itself. My keynote is “Grokking the Brain: What AI Reveals About How You Really Learn.” It turns out if you train an AI model long past memorization, something strange happens — it stops memorizing and “groks” (understands) the pattern beneath the data. That hard-won pattern can then be “distilled” into a lower-dimensional, faster model that runs it with almost no effort. The same thing seems to happen in us humans. We grok hard skills slowly, with conscious effort, then distill them into a fast, automatic thinking — our intuition — that needs no effort at all. But that training has a more subtle and insidious side to it. Our brains, like LLMs, are “aligned” by the data they face. Curiosity, and its dopaminergic underpinnings, can give us a way to overcome our cognitive traps.

I’m also giving a full-day workshop the day before the conference begins — “Learning How to Learn in an Age of AI,” Tuesday September 29. We will work through the techniques the cognitive science keeps showing matter most. And we’ll spend time on how to use generative AI well — as a metaphor generator, a Socratic partner, a custom tutor — without handing it the thinking that is actually keeping you sharp. Details and registration at https://gotocph.com/2026.

Patsy Bowden’s hobby that turned into a career

Last time my friend Patsy Bowden and I were in Singapore, we dived right into the bar at the historic Raffles Hotel. Since I was speaking the next day, I asked for a virgin Singapore Sling. As it turns out, there’s no such thing — every single ingredient in a Singapore Sling is alcoholic. Patsy meanwhile enjoyed herself immensely.

Patsy didn’t set out to make a career out of online learning. Back in 2012 she stumbled onto free online courses and took piles of them just because they looked interesting — and somewhere along the way, the hobby turned into her job at Class Central. Her latest piece shows how broad her interests are: it’s a roundup of more than 50 hobbies you can learn online, drawn from a catalog of more than 250,000 courses. Drawing, ukulele, chess, gardening, watercolor, pottery, yoga, sourdough. Check it out! From Guitar to Gardening to Chess: Thousands of Free and Paid Online Courses for 50+ Hobbies

Putting the Brain Back in the AI Debate

Everybody’s worried about what AI is doing to our thinking — the more we offload to our devices, the less we seem able to do ourselves. But here’s the odd part. That whole conversation is almost entirely about psychology: what people remember, what they forget, how they score on a test. The brain itself — the actual neural machinery being reshaped — has gone missing from the debate.

That’s the gap our new chapter steps into. “The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI,” just published in the Springer volume The Artificial Intelligence Revolution, takes the neuroscience head-on — declarative and procedural memory, why these systems are use-it-or-lose-it, what happens when we stop using them — in plain language, no neuroscience degree required.

And the chapter is just the opening move. It lays the groundwork for an Ernst Strüngmann Forum that Terry Sejnowski and I are co-chairing, with the able leadership of Managing Director Julia Lupp, in Frankfurt at the end of this summer — a week-long gathering of neuroscientists and edtech leaders from around the world, all turning the tools of neuroscience on what cognitive offloading is doing to how we learn. No one else is looking at the problem quite this way. Much more to come.

The full preprint is free to read here. Check it out!

I’m in Nova Scotia now, setting out to do the tourist thing today to check out Oak Island. Next, we’ll visit the Anne of Green Gables inspiration on Prince Edward Island. The world is full of wonderful adventures—what’s a little adventure you can plan near where you live?

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!