Learning How to Learn.
This week, I read a book called Make It Stick written by Peter C. Brown, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel. Roediger and McDaniel are cognitive scientists and Brown is a storyteller. They have teamed up to explain how learning and memory work through various studies and stories of people who have "found their way to mastery of complex knowledge and skills". Essentially this book teaches us how to learn anything the right way.
The information in this book is astonishingly useful. Coming towards the latter end of my academic career, it annoys me that I hadn't read this sooner! This is the article I wish I would have had back in high school.
Firstly the book has a prefacing statement that I want to draw attention to: "learning is an acquired skill, and the most effective strategies are often counterintuitive." - The truth is, some of the most intuitive and popular study techniques amongst learners today are among the least effective, and that might be a bitter pill to swallow if you currently use these techniques. That being said, here are some of the key principles I found most useful:
"People commonly believe that if you expose yourself to something enough times— say, a textbook passage [...] you can burn it into memory. Not so." Re-reading, highlighting and summarising lectures slides and textbook passages are among the most popular revision strategies among students today. However, investigations into re-reading have been carried out and the conclusions are clear: "Researchers found no re-reading benefit at all." Those methods seem intuitive because they make us familiar with the text and so give us the feeling of fluency, but this is an illusion of competence. It doesn't allow for a deeper understanding of the underlying principles.
Highlighting is not revision.
"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know" Re-reading doesn't give us an opportunity to check for these unknown unknowns.
The solution? Testing. This, along with 3 other principles form the building blocks of effective learning: Testing, Spacing, Categorizing and Interleaving - STIC. I'll focus on testing and spacing as these are the most important principles in my opinion.
Testing strengthens memory.
Testing
To strengthen our knowledge, we need to actively retrieve the information from memory. Flashcards are a simple example. Doing this has two benefits: (1) it allows us to distinguish between what we know and what we don't know. (2) Re-calling what we've learned causes your brain to strengthen your connections to that memory.
Even testing before you have learned the content is beneficial! - it primes the brain to look out for and retain the correct answer.
Spacing
Taking time between revision sessions for our knowledge to become a little rusty can actually be beneficial for more durable learning. Author of the book How We Learn, Benedict Carey puts it like this: “Some ‘breakdown’ must occur for us to strengthen learning when we revisit the material. Without a little forgetting, you get no benefit from further study. It is what allows learning to build, like an exercised muscle.” Intervals between revisions can grow further and further apart until that piece of knowledge becomes long-term memory.
A graph to show the effects of spaced testing.
One study had two groups learn Spanish. One group had 8 hours in one day. The other group had 4 hours one day and the next 4 hours a month later. 8 years later, the group that had spaced their study remembered 250% more with no further study.
Categorizing and Interleaving
The final two principles are categorizing and interleaving: Categorizing is simply the ability to break down complex topics into smaller chunks of information. It’s a key process in memorising large amounts of information. Interleaving is switching to different types of questions during a study session - This prevents us from ‘getting used to’ a certain type of problem and instead allows our brains to practice matching up a strategy to a type of problem.
***
Okay, I know what you're thinking. All these principals seem like so much more effort than re-reading and highlighting - but that's exactly the point: "Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in sand, here today and gone tomorrow" You might have to struggle a little, really wrestle with the concepts to wrap your mind around it. But the evidence is clear: These methods are the most effective use of your time, and if you do it right you can spend less time studying and more time doing the things you love!
***
Here are some personal favourites of mine to give you some pointers:
Flash-cards
I used flashcards for my A-Level subjects: Physics, Chemistry and Maths. While it was very useful, it was hard to keep track of such a large stack of cards and when I should be revising them. Memorising basic info became an easy task. However, for many reasons, I eventually switched to an application called Anki...
Anki
Anki is a digital flash-card application that uses a spaced repetition algorithm to quiz you on the only the cards you need to revise that day. The more often you get a card right, the more time passes until you are shown it again. Since I discovered Anki, I have used it with almost everything that I study. It's a game-changer.
An example from my flash-cards.
A few pointers to making good flashcards, without going into too much detail:
Use mnemonic devices - anything the helps you create a mental association between two pieces of information. Use pictures and words, draw when you can.
Use one question per card, and keep it simple.
Say your answers out loud before you check.
Study your cards in both directions.
Make smaller ‘decks’ of cards to make revision more manageable, deck by deck.
Textbook Questions and Past Papers
Chapter review questions exist for a reason. Testing myself using these questions helps me distinguish what I really know. Past papers also provide a series of different question types that I must know how to answer. I like to take a peak even at the start of term to see what I’m dealing with. These questions can have greater benefits than flashcards because you haven’t made these questions yourself. While flash cards are beneficial, 3rd party questions can help you further distinguish what you yourself may have missed. So, I often make flashcards from such questions when I find them.
Mind-maps and Drawings
Quite often in essay subjects, the topics are dense with information and I need to be able to retrieve that information from memory to write an essay. Mind-maps help me to break down topics into their component parts and it makes things so much easier to digest.
Having mental pictures associated with ideas is another memory technique I use. Drawing diagrams or little cartoons can be a really fun way to get things to stick. They don’t have to be perfect at all, the simpler the better.
***
To conclude, I definitely recommend you pick up this book. Despite the bland looking cover, it is an intriguing read filled with stories from all kinds of characters including fighter pilots and neurosurgeons. In trying to distil a few of the book's most useful lessons, I haven't done it justice. - Go read it. There's much more to see.
