5 Techniques of Every Successful Student

hey guys it's Justin and today we're going to be talking about what makes a successful student so I've been helping students become more academically capable and confident and increase their studying efficiency for quite a while now and there's definitely some trends that I've noticed between my students that are more successful and the ones that aren't now when I say success I'm really talking about just academic performance and academic achievement here we're not going to go into the whole Myriad of different definitions of what success really means I know that that's a whole other topic but we're already talking about just being able to have a high level of academic achievement not only in high school or early University but later on in education as well with more advanced or competitive degrees what is it that sets a successful student apart from a not so successful student before I share with you my insights let's actually take a look at the research and what that says first and when we do a search for student achievement or academic achievement we find that there are a lot of articles that talk about managerial things for example how good are the teachers how good are these schools and all of that sort of things things outside of really the students control so what we really want to be thinking about is what are the things that a student can directly control an influence that will change their ability to be successful now when we look at the research that's on this topic there are certain terms that start popping out to us and these are the terms that we need to become familiar with we see words like deeper learning coming up very often in the research now this isn't to be confused with deep learning when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence which is a completely separate Topic in fact deep learning when we're talking about students and student learning is actually talking about the ability to make more meaningful connections and another common terminology that's used alongside deep learning that we can find is something called Active Learning and another term called threshold Concepts and this is really where the money is going to be so threshold Concepts refer to Core Concepts in a subject where understanding these Concepts is key to transforming the way students understand a whole subject a threshold concept can be described as transformative probably irreversible integrative and sometimes bounded to particular disciplines and potentially Troublesome so these would be things that cause you to have a light bulb moment once you've already crossed over it now threshold concepts are an incredibly important part of learning and it's one of the first principles that I learned that really attracted my attention because it cleanly explains so many different complicated aspects of learning and actually it's where I started researching from and then built outwards to develop the knowledge that I have now so really threshold Concepts is talking about a concept that provides some kind of barrier to understanding something a certain way it's important not to get confused with this and just a difficult concept a difficult concept is just something that you find it hard to wrap your head around it may just be difficult to understand a threshold concept is actually a concept that allows you to access an entire way of looking at it you're not necessarily learning anything new you're learning the same information but you're suddenly able to see it in a way that you previously weren't able to see it and so the experience of encountering a threshold concept is like stumbling over a threshold Block in the dark and you're suddenly lost and confused and you don't know where you are and you're disorientated you're listening to the teacher and suddenly you have no idea what they're talking about anymore and you're lost or you're reading a book and suddenly you have no idea what the page you just read is about you're suddenly lost and you don't know really why but somewhere along the way you lost your way English do you speak it but somewhere along the way you somewhere along the way you got lost and so when you overcome a threshold concept we often talk about this as a light bulb moment and so when we're able to elicit these light bulb moments more readily more under our control and more frequently we're able to increase the speed of our learning so we want to be able to access and overcome these threshold Concepts as quickly as possible to become a learner who just gets things a lot faster and in order to do that we fundamentally need to understand that there are a few aspects of learning that are fixed for example learning tends to be what's called recursive what that means is that you're not learning it the perfect way the first time you're often learning something once and then going back onto it to learn it again and again it's not to say that you didn't learn it properly the first time it's just that certain things make more sense when you've learned more already or the pieces have kind of come into place a little bit more you're able to see the big picture and so those details that previously didn't make sense to to you now they suddenly make a lot more sense so learning is recursive in nature and that's the first important point we need to understand and the second part is the direct opposite which is that it's an excursive approach which means that there is a Learning Journey that occurs that has allowances for diversions what that means is that you can progress through the material and you don't have to always go in the same straight linear line you can go back and forth you can have multiple different ways that you're actually learning something and so what that means is that you don't have to learn everything the best way the first time it doesn't have to be a straight line from beginning to end not only are you going and then recursing back but you're also going and then being pulled on a side tangent and taking diversions and side routes so the learning process is very non-linear it's inherently very in a way messy and disorganized and chaotic but actually it's not truly chaotic it's only chaotic when you rest restrict it to the order that a book or a lecture might lay it out for you because it's so clean in a book or a lecture or a video but in reality it is ordered in that it's in the order that our brain is able to make sense of it so what that means is that initially the book might lay out a concept as a then B then C then D but maybe in reality it makes more sense for you to learn it as B then a then D then back to a and then C and that will be the order that your brain finds makes the most sense so we need to allow for that to occur in learning and so this thing called Active Learning which has been well studied is a way for us to tap into these threshold Concepts and it includes but it's not limited to class pose quizzes group discussions game based learning and really it's anything that allows us to do that kind of chaotic messy learning in a way that keeps us engaged in our head and thinking and active rather than passive which would be just sitting there sort of letting the information absorb and rip through almost through sort of like an osmosis which it doesn't really happen that way so what are the techniques that allow us to engage in this Active Learning in a sustainable consistent way that anyone can start applying straight away to take their first second to 100th step to becoming a more effective learner well let's break down those steps as you might expect there's actually a number of different techniques that we can use and they're all kind of effective but they all have a certain Trend behind them so what I'm going to teach you is not the technique itself but the trend and a few examples of techniques that follow these trends so pretty much every single good learner is going to be able to do the following five things so these are the five attributes of a good learner the first thing that a good learner is able to do is they're able to include something called priming which is often just called pre-study but they're not quite the same thing now there's actually lots of different forms of what's called priming and so when I use the term I'm using it pretty Loosely what I'm talking about with priming is specifically the ability to look at a certain piece of information and instead of learning it in full rigor from the beginning all the way to the bottom what we do is we quickly scan the text first and get a general understanding and a framework for how to think about this before we even know what to know so this could be as simple as going through and reading the headings looking at some of the diagrams some of the images that seem relevant and important and making a very simple wireframe mind map on how the big pictures connect together now the most important thing here is that you don't want to get sucked into all of the detail if you do you're gonna sacrifice that big picture understanding which is the primary purpose of this step and what this means is that because you have a better big picture understanding you're going to be able to make those light bulb moments more easily because information that started at the beginning you're going to have a general idea of how that might be relevant to the things you learn later on and at the end so priming is something that can increase your learning efficiency by a huge amount and this is where a lot of people have a limitation with their learning and this is another area where if you were to make an improvement you'd probably make a disproportionate increase in your studying efficiency compared to some of the other areas that you can improve on so this is definitely step number one for most students the second aspect is when we're actually in the class or the lecture itself and how we stay attentive and active during the learning event which I'll just call event here so if you ever felt sleepy or drowsy or you're not paying attention or losing focus or by the time the class or lecture finishes you still don't really know what the hell is going on then this is probably the area that you should be paying attention to and there are a few different ways that we can do this one of the easiest ways that we engage that level of activity is first of all understanding that it takes effort to be engaged like if someone throws a ball at you you can't catch it just by being alive and existing you have to actually hold up your hands and prepare to catch the ball and this is sort of how we need to think about information when someone is speaking to us or when we're reading we need to be able to catch the information that we're consuming if we don't catch it it's just gonna hit us and we will think we have sort of absorbed it but we didn't it's more like we just got assaulted with information and the way that we can do this is through a number of different ways an easy way that if you're sitting there listening to someone speaking and increasing your engagement is by asking them questions either out loud or even just inside your own head and you want to be asking questions a lot lots and lots of questions multiple questions every minute so whatever information comes in to your brain to be processed in whatever way take that information and think what are the questions that I want to ask about this and there are certain editions at a higher yield than other questions so for example let's say that we learned something about a cell or about a muscle tissue we could ask the question of what is this muscle tissue where does it come from what are the features of this tissue or this cell and yes those are questions but they're not as good as questions that ask about why or how and this is because why and how questions Force us to relate it back to the big picture and the big picture again is what's going to allow us to make those light bulb moments faster so hopefully you're seeing a trend with these techniques so when we ask a why or how question it actually causes us to relate that information at a higher Mastery of knowledge and we are not only needing to understand a single concept but the relationship that that has with multiple other related Concepts to see how does it fit together so asking why questions or how come these questions are going to be a lot more high yield than questions that are more like what or very superficial looking the third aspect if you're following along the chronology is going to be after the event so this is when is the next time you revise that information now good students are going to have their first revision within 12 hours of the initial learning event and there's research showing that the longer you wait the more you're going to forget and that first window of first having consumed that knowledge and then consolidating it straight away is more important than the time that comes after it so if you revise it on the first day that's going to produce more of an impact than if you were to revise it on doesn't make sense so if you were to revise it on that first day you're getting disproportionately higher benefit than leaving it for two days which is only an additional day difference but that first day is just more important so ideally you want to be consolidating that information before you even go to sleep that night because then you get to maximize on something called Sleep dependent memory consolidation which is basically in a way studying while you're asleep kind of but not really and the fourth thing is actually related directly to this which is the way that you do this revision so the technique that you use when you revise is really important we want to make sure that it's as active as possible and that it relates it back to the big picture again so the techniques that we want to use here are going to be ones that accentuate the relationship of all of these details with the big picture so it means taking information that we've learned from the lecture or from the class and that we've picked up from our pre-reading and our priming which I just represent as this sort of lattice network of knowledge and we want to find a way to represent this in a connected big picture way and so a great way of doing that is using a mind map now if you're not familiar with how to do a mind map I've got a video explaining how to make the perfect mind map which definitely check out as well but there are a few guidelines to how you should do your notes and how you should do this revision that generally you should study whether you use a mind map or not the first thing is that you should try to make your notes reasonably non-verbal that means not using too many words and the reason is because our brain is divided into multiple hemispheres and you get a larger degree of learning when the knowledge is not just sitting in one area of the brain but we're able to process it in multiple different areas of the brain using not words to express an idea allows us to use parts of our brain that would normally not be activated so you want to make words and sentences a last resort when it comes to writing notes and related to that we actually want to make these notes reasonably minimal so there's a myth that in order to learn effectively you need to write lots of notes but this isn't actually the case humans have been learning for a really long time before we even learn how to read and write especially to the level that we do now learning is a process that occurs really authentically and our brain is really good at it so we don't actually need to be right writing things down to learn in fact it can actually make it worse when you write too many notes you reduce this thing called cognitive load and that's sort of the level of confusion in our brain while we are trying to learn something and confusion is actually a good thing when it comes to learning we want to optimize the level of confusion not too much because then we're too lost but not too little because then our brain isn't trying to figure it out and organize the information and it's this process of organizing and relating it to the big picture that allows us to learn more effectively so we want to make that cognitive load or confusion in that perfect optimal band and in order to do this we can do something called delayed note-taking which is when instead of writing everything down straight away we simply just hold it off for a bit and keep it in our head think about it let that confusion settle in and let our brain do its thing asking lots of questions asking those how and why questions and then figuring out how it all fits in to simplify by the information and then that new simplified information we can then write down so a technique that a lot of students will use is something like a summary sheet but they often do this after already having written a bunch of copious notes well people will paraphrase their notes in a certain way but we can really skip all of those early stages and we can jump straight to the point where we're writing our simplified notes and we can do all of that simplification not on paper because it takes a lot of time we can do that in our head and not only is it saving time it's also training our brain to be able to do that Learning Without relying on writing down everything and when we get rid of that sort of uncertainty and fear of having to write constantly in order to learn we unlock an enormous huge opportunity for more effective learning moving forward and a lot of the more Advanced Techniques rely on your ability to not need to be writing down constantly and the fifth and final aspect is in the revision Vision leading up to a test or an exam and this simply means that you need a revised material in a way that's actually effective so this pre-test or pre-exam revision is the final part and there are a few guidelines that we can follow here as well the first is that we want to make sure that it's always challenging we have a tendency when we're learning to only really test ourselves and challenge the things that we already know but the weakness obviously there is that we're systematically going to miss the things that we're weakest on which is sort of counter-intuitive always make the revision challenging in a meaningful way and easy ways to make this challenging that good Learners will use is by using things that use recall and recall is simply when you're taking something from memory and recalling it rather than just recognizing it so for example if I hold up a pin you can look at it and you recognize it it's a pen but it doesn't mean that you'll be able to draw a perfect replica of this pin so our ability to recognize is usually much greater than our ability to recall and we don't want to be studying in a way that's unnecessarily easy because there's no real learning going on there and when we're in a test or an exam we're getting tested on our ability to recall so at a minimum we should always be trying to recall and in my view there is no place for recognition based revision anywhere and anyone's revision strategy we also want to learn in a way that is different each time and the reason we want to learn in a different way is because we want to be testing those connections and that knowledge in a new and unique way if we learn something the same way every single time then we actually saturate out the amount of learning that we can get from that particular mode so re-reading notes is one of the worst ways that you can study because not only is it not challenging it's also the same method of learning that we used the first time which was just reading and it's also using Oni recognition rather than recall so while rewriting notes based on memory would be better than just re-reading because because it uses recall it would be even better to try to represent our notes through Doodles or diagrams or mind maps or some other form a great technique that most of my students will use is teaching and you teach as if there's someone legitimately sitting next to you an imaginary student who doesn't know anything and by teaching it forces you not only to recall it forces you not only to draw and annotate while you teach in a way that's different to how your notes look but it also forces you to look at the big picture and figure out what's the most effective way to teach this person this topic which means that you're again relating it to the big picture and finding those weaknesses so every good learner is going to be able to have a reasonable level of Competency or Mastery in these five aspects the priming the event itself and maintaining your engagements throughout it when you do your first revision how you do your first revision and the subsequent revisions that come after it this is the foundation and on top of that we add other things like space repetition or more specific techniques like flash cards or how to write specific mind maps or active listening or active reading strategies or how to do the priming and pre-study more effectively but all of those are fundamentally sitting on a scaffold of these foundations and if you're able to do all of these in this way you're going to see massive improvements in your efficiency of study but as we all know learning is always individual and what might work for some people doesn't necessarily work the same way for others the things that I've talked about today are really considered the fundamentals and I haven't really met a student in the thousands of students that I've worked with where these principles fundamentally didn't work for so I'd love to know what your experience has been have you tried some of these have you nod and are you excited to have you learned something new from this video whatever your experiences leave a comment down below and let me know I'd love to hear your thoughts on this if you liked this type of video make sure to hit that Thumbs Up Hit hit the Subscribe button and I'll see you in that next video [Music]

Channel: Justin Sung

Views: 1,226,609

Keywords: studying, learning, a level revision

Id: RJKNtXgo39o

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020