Top Hacker News Book Recommendations in Science & Math (all time)

All Time Past 6 Months

The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception

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Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple

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Honeybee Democracy

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The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness

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Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry

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The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees

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Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives

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How the Brain Works: The Facts Visually Explained (How Things Work)

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Flourish (A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being)

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How the Brain Learns

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Plague: One Scientist's Intrepid Search for the Truth about Human Retroviruses and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS), Autism, and Other Diseases

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Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers

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Revolt Against the Modern World

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Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Information Science and Statistics)

Christopher M. Bishop

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There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids (from Friluftsliv to Hygge)

Linda Åkeson McGurk

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barikonApr 20, 2012

As another poster pointed out, I see these numbers and variants often cited, even in professional educational conferences. Perhaps that is because it so closely and cleanly matches our own personal intuition about teaching. Unfortunately, it turns out there is no scientific basis for the "Learning Pyramid". And please don't use (Sousa, 2001) as evidence, I have the book "How the Brain Learns" and it simply punts on the citation to yet another institution. As an instructor, I still believe the idea has general merit even if the numbers are basically made up, but let's not take it as dogma.

I've tried to find the original scientific research myself and have concluded that it does not exist. I'm not the only one who has come to this conclusion either. [1] I would love to be corrected on this matter though. These days, I tend to use the following instead, which also matches my intuition about learning:

http://xkcd.com/519/ :-)

[1] J. P. M. Lalley, “THE LEARNING PYRAMID: DOES IT POINT TEACHERS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION?,” Education, vol. 128, no. 1, p. 64, Fall 2007.

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