Repetition in Learning as Iteration.

Webster's dictionary informs us that the word iteration can have the following meaning: a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result. The desired result in this case is learning more each time through the sequence of operations. This kind of learning through the repetition of a series of operations, has been shown to be critical in the learning processes of very young children.

Meaningfulness. The word 'iteration' seems to nicely solve an apparent paradox in learning, namely that children learn by means of repetition. Yet repetition, as most understand it, is drills, rote learning and cramming, which are devoid of meaningfulness. The answer to this riddle, can be found in the creative endeavors of the clever people at "Sesame Street". The "Sesame Street" people were constantly testing their show in various ways to see if children were learning from it. Two interesting tests that they performed on groups of young children are reported in Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" as follows:

"...Lorch and Dan Anderson showed two groups of five year olds an episode of "Sesame Street". The kids in the second group, however, were put in a room with lots of attractive toys on the floor. As you would expect, the kids in the room without the toys watched the show about 87 percent of the time, while the kids with the toys watched only about 47 percent of the show. Kids are distracted by toys. But when they tested the two groups to see how much of the show they remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. This result stunned the two researchers. Kids they realized, were a great deal more sophisticated in the way they watched than had been imagined. 'We were led to the conclusion,' they wrote 'that five year olds in the toy group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.

Lorch for instance, once reedited an episode of "Sesame Street" so that certain key scenes of some of the sketches were out of order. If kids were only interested in flash and dash, that shouldn't have made a difference. The show, after all, still had songs and Muppets and bright colors and action and all the things that make "Sesame Street" so wonderful. But it did make a difference. The kids stopped watching. If they couldn't make sense of what they were looking at, they weren't going to look at it.

If you take the two studies together - you reach a quite radical conclusion about children and television. Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused."

Malcolm Gladwell's book "The Tipping Point" is about how epidemics work, not so much epidemics of disease as epidemics of ideas. In this book Gladwell identifies three causes for this, one of which was, what he called, the stickiness factor. It should not be surprising to us to discover, that what turned out to make learning sticky (made it memorable) turned out to be the message's connectedness to what the learner already new and its connectedness within itself. Stickiness in learning turns out to be all about meaningfulness.

Iteration and the James Earl Jones Effect.

Some people say that children love repetition. They say that children do things over and over again the same way, and they often watch the same thing over and over again. This is a complete misunderstanding. Nobody likes repetition, certainly not children or even babies. Why then the seeming repetition? Probably one of the cleverest shows ever put on television is a children's show called "Blue's Clues". Each episode of this show, if presented correctly, is shown five consecutive times, before a new episode is aired. Educationalists, who revere rote learning, drills and cramming, might be inclined to say "Blue's Clues" is therefore banging its message into children's heads by their drill method. This is not the case. In fact, everything children do that seems repetitious, is not really repetitious at all. The reason children watch things several times, or perform an action, seemingly several times, is in order to learn more about it.

If you look closely at children's supposed repeated actions, you will discover that each action is not exactly the same but rather a variation on a theme. In other words the child is performing an experiment to see if a bit of knowledge, about the universe, will hold true under varying conditions. Older people like ourselves, seeing this, and already knowing the limitations of the knowledge, see this as repetition but the young child does not know the limits within which this knowledge works, and thus, they are experimenting to find it out. As young children, we did not have this knowledge either, but once we have obtained this knowledge, it seems like something we have always possessed. The people who made "Blue's Clues" came out of the Sesame Street group, where they took special note of what the Sesame Street people called the James Earl Jones effect. In his book "The Tipping Point" Malcolm Gladwell explains the James Earl Jones effect as follows:

"Not long afterward (and quite by accident), the Sesame Street writers figured out why kids like repetition so much. The segment in question this time featured the actor James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet. As originally taped, Jones took long pauses between the letters, because the idea was to insert other elements between the letters. But Jones, as you can imagine, cut such a compelling figure that the Sesame Street producers left the film as it was and played it over and over again for years: the letter A or B etc., would appear on the screen, then there would be a long pause, and then James would boom out the name and the letter would disappear. 'What we noticed was that the first time through, kids would shout out the name of the letter after James did,' Sam Gibbon says, 'After a couple of repetitions, they would respond to the appearance of the letter before he did, in the long pause. Then with enough repetitions, they would anticipate the letter before it appeared. They were sequencing themselves through the piece; first they learned the name of the letter, then they learned to associate the name of the letter with its appearance, then they learned the sequence of the letters."

"An adult considers constant repetition boring, because it requires reliving the same experience over and again. But to preschoolers repetition isn't boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way."

Blue's Clues.

"For younger kids, repetition is really valuable. They demand it. When they see a show over and over again, they not only are understanding it better, which is a form of power, but just by predicting what is going to happen, I think they feel a real sense of affirmation and self-worth. And 'Blue's Clues' doubles that feeling because they also feel like they are participating in something. They feel like they are helping Steve."

The same thing applies to movies and DVDs. We can stop a DVD, rewind and go over certain parts of it again; we can use the DVD chapter selection to view specific parts a second time, or we can simply watch the whole DVD a second or third time, (but perhaps less attentively). People who make movies, experience them quite differently to the average movie viewer. They notice how the lighting was done, how the camera is being used, how the movie cuts from one scene to another. They are in fact, seeing how the artist (director) did his work. The presentation of all knowledge is like this. It has many layers of which we absorb only a few. There are of course many reasons for watching a movie many times, but some movies are so clever, that each time you watch, you see something new, or you learn something new. Such movies, like books, have many layers of meaning or knowledge. Thus they can speak to different people in different ways.

It is well established that good fictional books have several levels of meaning. Likewise, good textbooks can have also have layers, although they are layers of expertise rather than meaning. TV shows are no different. "Sesame Street" for instance is quite different in this respect to "Blue's Clues" for "Sesame Street" though it was made to entertain and educate children has layers of meaning that adults can find entertaining while "Blue's Clues" does not.

Iteration as a Superior Method of Learning. Textbooks are of course, meant to be structured in a linear fashion. Each section, in a good textbook, tries to provide you with the knowledge you will need to understand the next section in the book. This is obviously helpful in learning. This said, it is probably not essential to be linearly structured. In fact, to structure a book perfectly is impossible without making it too easy. Thus a person can never understand everything when he reads a good text book anyway. If he can understand all of it, he already must know most of it before he reads it. Thus, if he reads it all, he is actually reading some of it a second time, which would be boring because nothing new is being learned.

This leads to the idea, that there is no such thing as a book that is too hard, provided the person is motivated to read it. Children, in all likelihood, can read and learn from much harder books than we give them credit for. Also, any kind of structure, imposed by the order of material, may be restricting to how it can be understood, and thus restrictive to new ideas and creation. The important thing about this iteration method of proceeding is that you the learner, are reading where your interest is, and developing interests as you read. For young children scanning a book several times may in fact be a better way of reading and thus learning.

Scanning as a Superior Method of Learning. While iteration is helpful and necessary for very young children, it may well be that as children get older, exact repetition in iteration may become unnecessary. Instead of going back and reading the same book again, or parts of it, it may be better to simply move on and read other similar and connected books, with similar information. There is still a sort of iteration going on, but not real repetition. The important part of this process in reading may be the act of scanning or skimming.

John Holt clearly illustrates the importance of this scanning (reading the parts that interest and skipping the parts that do not interest) with a story in his book "The Underachieving School". The story concerned a young girl in a class where he had decided to let the students read what they wanted to read, and had informed them they would not be tested on what they read. This particular girl, who had not been good at reading, decided to read some very simple books far below what was supposed to be her level. After some time, John Holt decided to give her a little push. He gently suggested that since she liked to ride horses she might like to read "Black Beauty" which was about the level of most of her classmates. She read it and liked it, and John thought she would then continue at about that level, but he was in for a surprise. His story continued as follows:

"During the spring she really astounded me, however. One day in one of our many free periods, she was reading at her desk. From a glimpse of the illustrations I thought I knew what the book was. I said to myself, 'It can't be,' and went to take a closer look. Sure enough she was reading Moby Dick, in the edition with the woodcuts by Rockwell Kent. When I came closer to her desk she looked up. I said, 'Are you really reading that?' She said she was. I said, 'Do you like it?' She said, 'Oh yes it's neat!' I said 'don't you find parts of it rather heavy going?' She answered, 'Oh sure, but I just skip over those parts and go on to the next good part."

"This is exactly what reading should be and in school so seldom is - an exciting, joyous adventure. Find something, dive into it, take the good parts, skip over the bad parts, get what you can out of it; go on to something else. How different is our mean-spirited picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of 'understanding' that can be dug out of a book."

Though this story concerns literature, the principle is the same for textbook reading. For the writer will have maybe hundreds of thousands of readers and can in no way anticipate exactly what they will need to know. The reader is the only person who can possible know what he needs to know, and doesn't need to know, or already knows. So he should be the one to decide what to read. Schools seem to spend so much time checking what the student has not learned and then insisting that it be learned that there is often little time left for further interesting learning. This checking, apart from any other considerations, is a huge waste of the learner's time. He or she has already learnt those parts of the knowledge that were interesting and meaningful to themselves and further efforts to learn in this area will tend to be counter productive.

Repetition as Drills or Repetition as Iteration. The ordinary person does not need to distinguish between various types of repetition, and is probably unfamiliar with the word iteration, but it is used here because it actually has the appropriate meaning for this kind of repetition. Another more familiar word is probably reiterate which of course means to iterate again. When we reiterate, what we do is, provide a second or third chance for the listener to learn something more.

Elsewhere in this site, the problems caused, by using repetition to force a message into people's heads, has already been argued. However, from the above information, it is clear that not all repetition is harmful in this way. In the military they say, you tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. This seems to me to be a drill but it might be OK in the military where it is not necessary to know consciously, but rather to act instinctively or by reflex. The kind of repetition that is chosen by young children in their learning, is also a special kind of repetition that this site emphasizes is more properly called iteration, which is essential in their learning process. Clearly also this iteration is also not harmful for adults either, and it is often used by adults without them being aware of it.

All such activity, is using repeated viewing to absorb new and interesting information that was missed the first time through. Each viewing, each time through, can be seen as an iteration that allows an experience that is quite different each time. The critical matter here is choice. If we choose to go over something more than once, in order to learn, we are clearly learning something new each time. If we are forcibly exposed to something more than once it may be harmful to us.

Practice. Some people perhaps even dictionaries tell us that practice is simply doing the same thing over and over again as though we have found some perfect way of doing something and are trying to make it automatic. What we call practice, however, is not one thing but actually two uniquely different things which occur simultaneously. First of all there is no perfect way of doing things. When we do something again it is hardly ever an exact reproduction of what we have done before. The golfer who is trying to, so called, 'perfect his swing' is actually doing something quite different. The fact is we do not have some perfect swing already in our minds that we are endeavoring to make real. Oh we may have seen others perform a swing that we thought was perfect but even so it may not have been the way we are capable of doing it.

Iteration as practice. What we do is more like the iteration discussed above. We try to do the swing the way we saw it, but it does not work. We then examine the swing we made and try to eliminate or compensate for the errors that occurred. Each time through we may vary the swing a little to see what happens. In this way we will find a number of optimum ways for us to make the swing work in varying  conditions. In doing this we are not really perfecting a swing but rather eliminating errors for varying circumstances. This is learning as Popper would have it by testing a theory and eliminating the errors.

Automating as practice. Once we have obtained some of these optimum performance structures we do repeat them as exactly as we can to let them sink into our unconscious as schemas so we no longer have to think about them and they are burned into our muscles as a regular way of doing things. Even at this stage they are not kept as unalterable but still subject to error elimination at perhaps an unconscious level. Popper explains it like this:

"Learning by 'repetition' or 'practicing', as in learning to play an instrument or to drive a car. Here my thesis is that (a) there is no genuine 'repetition' but rather (b) change through error elimination (following theory formation) and (c) a process which helps to make certain actions or reactions automatic, thereby allowing them to sink to a merely physiological level, and to be performed without attention."