|
Beyonder
Netherlands15103 Posts
As a high school drop out at the age of 16, I had no real hope or plans for the future. My only skill was gaming, as I was quite good at StarCraft, Quake and various other games. But I could not do much more than that.
At one point, I decided to try and get my life back on track. I started making new friends, started working out, and eventually went back to school. My first goal was to help other people, so I signed up for a part-time education where I largely worked as an activity coordinator with demented elderly and mentally challenged individuals. This was a pleasant experience and taught me a lot. It developed my skills and gave purpose to my life.
Around this time I had to make a choice. Would I try to become a professional poker player? Such as many others around me. Or would I make my dream of becoming a professional gamer come true? Or perhaps I would really go back to school, and try to see where my intelligence and determination could take me. Poker was a bit too random for me and professional gaming was not nearly as established and developed as it is now. Plus I might not have had what it takes. Consequently, an adventure back in to formal education felt like it would be the most rewarding and the right choice for me. So I signed up for a vocational study to become a primary school teacher. Again, I learned a lot and made new friends. However, again this educational level proved to be somewhat easy for me and did not feel my need for a deep level of knowledge. So after one year, I took a gamble and signed up for university: Psychology it was.
Luckily, in this country it is possible to move up on the educational ladder. Psychology answered a lot of the questions I had, and provided me with meaningful new questions. Basically, it was everything I had always wanted and more. Although the first two years may not have been my best result wise, I experienced no real problems and passed these years easily. During the pre-master year of the bachelor, that is, the third year, I followed the track of educational and developmental psychology. My grades slowly started to rise while my intrinsic motivation did too.
During my Masters year, something changed. The trend continued and I challenged myself, both during the final courses and the Master's thesis. I realized that if I wanted to be able to do anything I wanted, I would have to work as hard as I could and make sure that I could have no regrets. And then I wrote this blog. But I never answered the questions people asked me as a response to that blog. And that motivated me to write this blog.
I got offered a PhD job, working together with a very inspirational professor. It is rare to obtain a PhD position. So I am extremely fortunate. The study that I described in the blog led to this publication and this article on Psychology Today.
I have been fortunate to meet the right people at the right time, and received help from those around me. Some sacrifices were made to be able to move up four levels on the educational ladder. For example, I'm 28 and only now working on getting my own place. But it has been worth it. I set goals and tried to challenge myself, and succeeded in doing so. And funny enough, TeamLiquid and its IRC channel has been awesome to me throughout all of this.
Now maybe it is time for new goals. For example, someday I hope to bring research and educational practice closer together. Maybe try to become a professor, but when I see those around me, I honestly am unsure whether I truly want that.
Anyways, I thought that the one's who asked me what the study was about deserved an answer.
+ Show Spoiler + Retrospective evaluation of the pain or pleasure associated with past episodes (i.e. remembered utility) is mainly determined by how the episodes felt when they were at their peak, and when they ended (Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber, & Redelmeier, 1993). Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether this memory bias known as the peak-end rule also affects the remembered utility of learning episodes and shapes study behaviour. Both the first experiment, which focused on unpleasant learning experiences imposing a very high cognitive load, and the second experiment, which focused on pleasant learning experiences imposing a low cognitive load, presented primary school children with a short study list and an extended study list with English–Dutch word pairs. Results showed that study experiences that ended on an experienced peak affect were evaluated as easier to learn and easier to cope with. These measures of remembered utility shaped children's immediate and delayed study behaviour. In addition, the pattern of affect induced by the word pairs that were added to the extended study list in both experiments suggests that the experience with new learning tasks is relative to the affect induced by the original learning task. The findings are congruent with the peak-end rule and support the position that the design of learning environments could be improved by taking remembered utility into account.
 
|
Well done! You've come a long way and worked really hard to get there. This is good and quite inspiring. However, when I read your story I could not help but be reminded of a medieval poem that I thought I'd share:
"rex sedet in vertice
caveat ruinam!
nam sub axe legimus
Hecubam reginam."
"the king sits at the summit
let him fear ruin!
for under the axis is written
Queen Hecuba."
|
How many times are you going to change the title? :D
|
On February 08 2013 20:30 Cokefreak wrote:
How many times are you going to change the title? :D
Keeps trolling me, third or fourth time I open the blog.
|
Netherlands13554 Posts
Sounds amazing Vincent, it's awesome that you're doing so great now.
Gotta love it when people find their true destiny :D
|
Beyonder
Netherlands15103 Posts
On February 08 2013 20:31 Vaelone wrote:Show nested quote +On February 08 2013 20:30 Cokefreak wrote:
How many times are you going to change the title? :D Keeps trolling me, third or fourth time I open the blog.
Haha I didnt find an appropriate one, sorry :D
On February 08 2013 20:59 Twisted wrote:
Sounds amazing Vincent, it's awesome that you're doing so great now.
Gotta love it when people find their true destiny :D
Hehe aw! So glad I found mine indeed. Wish everyone found a job that they can truly love, opposed to forcing themselves to do something that they do not truly enjoy..
How are you doing and what are you up to? Still mr poker?
|
|
|
Results showed that study experiences that ended on an experienced peak affect were evaluated as easier to learn and easier to cope with.
It isn't obvious (unless you read everything) what this means. What does it mean: "End on an experienced peak affect?"
Then there's the part of the abstract in psych. today.
- Easy tasks make subsequent harder tasks more attractive to cope with, and previous harder tasks maker later easier tasks less attractive.
- People are better at dealing with the harder tasks (afterwards) when they represent the ending of the studying phase.
I think this is an overlap with the primacy-recency effect (or almost just that, partial correlation!). Got to measure the performance for intermediate tasks in the series easy→intermediate→hard. The tasks were mnemonic, so this is especially important.
- People prefer choosing the harder tasks for studying cause
But when they were asked which type of list they would prefer to study next time, most students chose the extended list. They reported that it had been less difficult, less tough to cope with and had caused less overall discomfort
I don't really get this. They prefer the harder list cause it is...More easy to cope with?Leaves me kind of sceptical.Maybe I'm misunderstanding it.
Otherwise, nice story of yours. My education has been pretty flipfloppy, too. And still is hehe. But never had thoughts of becoming a progamer, I did play Poker for a while though.
Congratulations on the PhD!
|
that's an incredible story Bey. absolutely fantastic.
|
Beyonder
Netherlands15103 Posts
Hello Vivax. Perhaps this may answer some of your questions, as he can explain it infinitely better than I can. Going to try to elaborate a bit nonetheless in the hope that it helps.
First, a little context. In the past, people believed that for both positive and negative experiences, our affective memory (that is, how we felt about an event retrospectively) was the sum of feelings during that experience. So you average all the feelings you had during an event, afterwards, and that was basically your global evaluation. However, Kahneman showed that this is often not the case. Ending on an experienced peak affect refers to the finding that the two most important determinants for our memory of an experience are how the experience felt at the peak and the end. And if you put that peak affective experience at the end, then something interesting happens that can greatly influence our memory of an event, and subsequently influence our choices. I always explain this in a simplistic way by bringing up the example Kahneman also uses, namely, the difference between having a heated argument at the beginning of a vacation with your partner or at the end.
Now that both Finn and us have shown that our biased memory can influence choices made in education is interesting, because it had never been shown before. We usually think that for restudying, we judge whether items are difficult for us and therefore need restudying. And that was interesting for the study conducted by Finn, because they did not choose to repeat those items. Our judgments of learning, as research often calls it, are interestingly also terribly inaccurate at :p. So "They reported that it had been less difficult, less tough to cope with and had caused less overall discomfort" refers to global evaluations made at the end of an experience, that are biased (well, not based on the average and quite counterintuitive).
So basically:
Extremely unpleasant- unpleasant > extremely unpleasant (whereas in total, option 1 is overall more unpleasant; but option 1 is remembered more positively because of how it ends);
Extremely pleasant > extremely pleasant - pleasant (whereas in total, option 2 is overall more unpleasant; but option 2 is remembered more positively because of how it ends).
As you can see, this may be quite counterintuitive. Here, the ending determines what we remember. You are right when you say this may have something to do with a recency effect. Interesting, no such effect arises though when we place the items at the start ("Starting on a high note") or in the middle, which suggests that it is something different. And these evaluations are affective, which is not the main point of the recency effect.
Hope this explains it a bit.
Also, GENE <3
|
I wants to read your study Bey! D:
It's times like this I wish I was still at a University.
Finished both! As for the last pdf you sent me. That one really hit home considering I've had a colonoscopy before not to mention a lot of other procedures some people would think twice about. The cold water test makes perfect sense to me. As your hand gets numb you get a tingly sensation as the temperature drops. I could see myself experiencing more pleasure by keeping it in colder water for another 30 seconds. Still is fairly short for me. Doesn't hurt when you've had liquid nitrogen treatments for years for your bloody feet either. :<
I think any educator should have a read through your study and put it to good use to get the most out of their students!
On February 09 2013 00:54 Vivax wrote:- People prefer choosing the harder tasks for studying cause Show nested quote +But when they were asked which type of list they would prefer to study next time, most students chose the extended list. They reported that it had been less difficult, less tough to cope with and had caused less overall discomfort I don't really get this. They prefer the harder list cause it is...More easy to cope with?Leaves me kind of sceptical.Maybe I'm misunderstanding it.
Looks like you're talking about experiment 1, which was the unpleasant learning. I believe the students picked the extended list because there were 20 moderate words mixed in with the 20 extremely difficult ones, which led to a more pleasurable experience even though it was longer they didn't mind as much because it wasn't as grueling.
|
|
|
Netherlands13554 Posts
On February 08 2013 21:15 Beyonder wrote:
How are you doing and what are you up to? Still mr poker?
Yes! Still playing poker. Don't have a clue what to do otherwise anyway :p
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
