Multi-tasking: great way to do more than one thing poorly at once?

My friend David Grebow emailed me:

I was talking with a teacher last month about learning and she mentioned that repeating and testing do not work. She uses the 10-24-7 rule. Teach a new concept, repeat it 10 minutes later, repeat it 24 hours later and then one week later to transmute short-term memory into long-term. She swears by it. I thought okay … I tried the 10-24-7 rule on learning something new - the army alphabet - and it worked. delta alpha victor india delta

great site for learning it http://www.goarmy.com/life/basic/army_alphabet.html … used the web as a teacher … learn it, come back in 10, then 24 then again in 7… it’s a very weird blobby thing that someone put inside my head … it even talks to me … I think it’s writing this email (but I’m not sure)

10-24-7. Sounds good to me. I’m setting a timer to measure how long it takes Will Thalheimer to comment that it’s bunk.

Here’s a tougher issue from David. Is multi-tasking useful or is it a pipe dream?

New brain research suggests that distractions that divide students’ attention–such as surfing the web or sending instant messages–can affect the way they learn, making the knowledge they gain harder to use later on. The study could have important implications for today’s students, many of whom are accustomed to multitasking while completing homework or listening in class….

The study, published in the July 24 edition of the journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” also provides a clue about why this happens.

“What’s new is that even if you can learn while distracted, it changes how you learn”–making the learning “less efficient and useful,” said Russell A. Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The research methodology smells questionable. Fourteen subjects were wheeled into an MRI. They were told to explain a weather forecast. Some were asked to also count the number of tones they heard simultaneously. The latter group didn’t remember as much about the weather as the first. I could have told them that without the study. The article states that today’s kids are ‘media multitaskers’

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