What happens to tech workers when their skills become obsolete?

Re:What happens to tech workers when their skills become obs... by barry-cotter on Thursday September 12, 2019 @09:21AM (#20951098)

Lifetime maintenance of high school mathematics content.

Harry P Bahrick, Lynda K Hall Journal of experimental psychology: general 120 (1), 20, 1991 An analysis of life span memory identifies those variables that affect losses in recall and recognition of the content of high school algebra and geometry courses. Even in the absence of further rehearsal activities, individuals who take college-level mathematics courses at or above the level of calculus have minimal losses of high school algebra for half a century. Individuals who performed equally well in the high school course but took no college math courses reduce performance to near-chance levels during the same period. In contrast, the best predictors of test performance (eg, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, grades) have trivial effects on the rate of performance decline. Pedagogical implications for life span maintenance of knowledge are derived and discussed.

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Re:What happens to tech workers when their skills become obs... by AstralStorm on Thursday September 12, 2019 @02:21PM (#20954618)

Correct, later courses force you to practice earlier skills. This is the mechanism these researchers stumbled upon. Plain spaced repetition explains a lot. SAT is definitely not meant to test performance of learning, though some people with very high SAT scores may be a bit more efficient or know tricks that are not widely taught - SAT is too easy to differentiate them.

Related knowledge strengthens already known things, and once critical maximum stability/retrievability is reached (optimally 7 or so precisely spaced rehearsals) it is pretty much cemented. Without optimal spacing, probably quite a few more repeats. At maximum stability/retrievability the exponential maintains "flat" form for a very long time. A refresher may be needed to get facile again, otherwise it may take a short while to remember and there may be mistakes. Even a trivial refresher will work though, chances to use basic algebra are many.

Principles SuperMemo SM-17 algorithm puts in quantification. Here's a link with all the history and references to some other research: https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/history

Thanks for the paper, though it's slightly wish washy, but still useful.

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Re:What happens to tech workers when their skills become obs... by bigred100 on Thursday September 12, 2019 @12:52PM (#20953647)

I only learned math up to maybe the level of a decent BA student but I feel like when you take a math course you learn how to “do a trick” (pass the exam) and then actually learn the material when you take the next course, where you need to figure out which parts of your last class you apply to “do the trick” in the current class.

So my question is what level of calculus is retained, and if students who take calculus then advanced calculus or introductory analysis or whatever you’d call it retain more.

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