Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge,” shares psych writer Annie Murphy Paul. “We’re comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts.

But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself – the ‘meta-cognitive’ aspects of learning – is more hit-or-miss, and it shows.

If you’re going to learn anything, you need two kinds of prior knowledge:

• knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming
• knowledge about how learning actually works

Source : Independent