What is the learning curve and how may it be applied

In psychology[ edit ] The first person to describe the learning curve was Hermann Ebbinghaus in His tests involved memorizing series of nonsense syllablesand recording the success over a number of trials.

The Power Law of Learning: Psychology and UX 11 Summary: Across many tasks, learning curves show an initial learning period, followed by a plateau of optimal efficiency.

New interfaces compete with much practiced, old ones that have already reached this plateau. In response to one of our recent articles on centered logos vs. Do things exactly the way every other website already does them, or your users will be confused.

As disappointing as it may be for designers to have to follow the same beaten path, we preach consistency again and again for reasons deeply rooted in basic human behavior. In this article, we explain the most fundamental of these reasons: Learning Studies and Learning Curves The best way to measure how people learn a task or an interface is by running a learning experiment.

In a learning experiment, people come into the lab and do the same task multiple times. Each time the person does the task, the experimenter records one or more quantitative metrics usually, the time it takes to do that task and the number of errors.

If the measures get better, people have learned from their previous experience, and the numbers show how much. The repetitions of the same tasks may or may not be separated by different activities, and sometimes participants are even sent home between two measurements, and asked to come back after a day, a week, or a month.

One of the first rigorous learning experiments was described by Hermann Ebbinghaus in in his book on human memory. Since then, many other learning experiments have been reported in the psychology, human-factors, and HCI literature.

The chart below shows the results from one such study by David Ahlstrom and colleagues, who were investigating pie menus and comparing them with other types of menus. The learning curve shows that the mean selection time decreases with practice.

This type of graph that plots the results from a learning experiment is a learning curve.

A learning curve describes how a specific quantitative measure of the same human behavior changes as a function of time. In the menu experiment, the measure of interest is the task time — the mean time to select an option inside the menu.

Learning Studies and Learning Curves

But the measure can vary from one learning experiment to another: For example, if we were interested in UX education, we may ask people with the same background to facilitate a user test once, and measure how many facilitation errors they make.

We would give them feedback on those errors, and then we would ask them to come a second time to facilitate a user test. After a few such repetitions, we would plot the average number of errors made for each test. That graphic of errors over time would represent a learning curve.

Our newly-expanded blog brings together the HE learning and teaching community to debate and share innovation. If you would like to contribute to the blog, please email [email protected] with your idea.. The views expressed in these blogs are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect those of the Higher Education Academy. The learning curve for acquiring proficiency of MS Notepad is generally steep, but it may be steeper for Mary than it is for John. I think the key is to first understand what the curve is being applied to. So, if the learning curve refers to what is known, this kind of undertaking would surely diminish. It would be a downward curve. But if it refers to what can possibly be known, then it would increment, since what was adhered to earlier could still be known through remembrance.

The Power Law of Learning In the s, Allen Newell, a famous Carnegie Mellon cognitive scientist, analyzed reaction times for a variety of tasks reported in learning experiments and he noted that the learning curves obtained in all these studies had a very similar shape: Power laws have a nice mathematical property: The power law of learning says that 1 the time it takes to perform a task decreases with the number of repetitions of that task; and 2 the decrease follows the shape of a power law.

Newell focused primarily on time as the quantitative measure of learning, but there is evidence that the power law holds for other measures as well.

For each design, we ask participants to complete the task in different, repeated trials and we measure the task time for every trial. Then we plot the average task time corresponding to each repetition and we obtain three learning curves like the ones in the figure below.

Three learning curves for three different interfaces Notice that in the first trial participants take roughly the same amount of time with all designs. But by the second repetition, design A is much faster than designs B or C.

By the 3rd repetition design A speeds up even more, and after the 4th repetition the reaction times reach a plateau: There are no more improvements to be expected, and extra repetitions will only decrease the reaction time insignificantly.

We can say that, with design A, learning is saturated after the 4th repetition or that 4 is the saturation point for design A. The learning curve for design C also flattens, but the plateau is reached later, by approximately the 10th or 11th repetition. So design C requires more practice to stabilize the performance.

In other words, it takes people more trials to learn how to use design C than design A. Moreover, design A exhibits more improvement: Design B also reaches saturation later than design A approximately by repetition 11but the improvement is bigger.

More importantly, the expected task time after the interface has been learned is lower for design B than for design A 1s vs.I added a number of updates on May , marking 15 years of successful commercial beekeeping in my operation without the use of synthetic miticides.

Steep learning curve. Discussion in 'Members Vehicles/Projects' started by resto_d1, May 6, Page 28 of 28 may kill me.

Synonym study

I'm going to have to get land rover tool box vids on to build the axle back up. In management, models of the learning curve effect and the closely related experience curve effect express the relationship between equation and efficiency .

Get Free Course Advice and Guidance Please provide your details and one of our specialist course advisors will contact you shortly. Machine Learning Applied to Weather Forecasting Mark Holmstrom, Dylan Liu, Christopher Vo [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] The learning curve for the sequence comparison model, using the This may be because the sequence comparison.

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