How to study for exams - Evidence-based revision tips

hey guys welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Ellie I'm a final year medical student at Cambridge University and today we're kicking off a new series where I'm gonna be sharing with you evidenced-based revision tips so I'm gonna be giving you advice on how you can prepare for your exams but hopefully I'll be backing up everything I say with evidence from studies that have been done in the field of psychology one students like you and me over the last hundred years no one ever really teaches us how to study we tend to just go with what feels intuitively right and as we'll see the research is shown that actually the techniques that students think are the most intuitive often tend not to be the ones that are actually the most effective so if you've got exams coming up then hopefully by the end of this video you'll pick up some techniques that you can apply to your own studies to make everything a little bit more efficient and enjoyable so let's jump into it this is gonna be the structure of the video firstly I'm gonna be talking about the three very popular revision techniques that are shown to be less effective in the literature namely rereading highlighting and making notes are summarizing those are by far the most popular techniques but they're also not very effective if you look at the evidence behind them secondly I'm gonna be introducing the concept of active recall which is by far the most powerful effective study technique and that involves like testing yourself and practicing retrieving information from your brain because the very act of retrieving information actually strengthens connections in the brain and there's like a load of evidence behind this and finally in part 3 of the video I'll be giving you some specific tips on how you can actually apply this active recall thing to your own study so hopefully by the end of the video you'll have some practical strategies that you can apply if you feel like it as always everything is gonna be time stamped down below so if you want to skip to its own bit of the video feel free but now let's jump into it and let's talk about the three common but not very effective revision technique that students love to use let's start with rereading over here is gonna be a list of some of the various studies that have been done that showed that students really love rereading as like a really common revision technique and if you you know look at what you've done for your own exams and ask your friends you probably find out that rereading plays a big part of most people's exam preparation strategy the question is is rereading effective as a study technique there have been lots of studies done about this I will link some of them in the description below but I'm not gonna go into each of them in depth instead I'm gonna be quoting from a paper written by Professor John Loski which was written in 2013 where he and his colleagues analyzed like hundreds of papers looking at all the research behind 10 different ruin techniques and this is what he had to say on the topic of rereading he said based on the available evidence we rate rereading as having low utility although rereading is relatively economical with respect to time demands when compared with other learning techniques rereading is also typically much less effective the relative disadvantage of rereading to other techniques is the largest strike against it and it's the fact of the weighted most heavily in our decision to assign it a rating of low futility so this professor who's a psychology professor and he and his colleagues have looked at hundreds of research papers looking at evidence based revision techniques regards rereading your notes or rereading your textbooks as having low utility he's saying that yeah there's some limited evidence that rereading does work it does improve retention somewhat but especially if you compare it to other techniques that you could be doing rereading is pretty much a waste of time here's another quote from a 2016 paper that again looked at the evidence behind lots of study techniques and this is what they had to say about rereading they said a wealth of research has shown that passive repetitive reading produces little or no benefit for learning yet not only was repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy it was also the strategy most often listed at students number-one choice by a large margin so that's what I'm gonna say about rereading for the time being I'm very happy to discuss all the evidence against rereading and against these other techniques if you guys want to hear about that just leave a comment down below and I'll do it but I want to focus on stuff you can do rather than kind of just hopping on the stuff that you shouldn't be doing so we'll close that for now rereading generally according to the evidence is pretty ineffective it does sort of work but you know compared to other things you could be doing it's it's it's by no means the most efficient study tactic secondly let's talk about highlighting and either we highlight ourselves or we know friends who'd like to highlight their textbooks and the notes in pretty colors here is a list of studies that show that highlighting is a very popular erosion strategy and I'll link these in the description below see if you really want to read them you can but let's go back to Professor Dan loskis paper where again he looked at all the evidence around these and this is what he had to say about highlighting and underlining he said on the basis of available evidence we rate highlighting and underlining as having low utility in most situations that have been examined and with most participants highlighting does little to boost performance it may help when students have the knowledge needed to highlight more effectively or when the texts are difficult but it may actually hurt performance on higher level tasks that require inference making you know especially without subjective GCSE and most subject to a level and definitely everything at undergrad all of these subjects require inference making so highlighting presidentís key staying is probably not a very good tactic he continues he says future research should be aimed at teaching students how to highlight effectively given that students are likely to continue to use this popular technique despite its relative and effectiveness so he's conceding in his paper that although you know the evidence shows that highlighting is not very good to be honest students are probably going to continue using it and little later on in the paper he describes highlighting as a safety blanket that's just that students like to have I've experienced as I'm sure you've experienced this as well if it feels productive doesn't it like you know going through a book and highlighting one thing in blue and one thing in yellow one thing in orange I used to do it all the time but you know the evidence says it's not very good you know we could be doing more efficient things finally let's talk about summarizing or making notes again a really really popular technique that I have been using pretty much all my life and still used to this day but I'm trying to face it up because the evidence around summarizing and making notes is you know a bit equivocal there are some studies that show that students that do summarizing well perform slightly better on exams but it's really quite hard to test this because as you can imagine the quality of notes varies massively between students and so that makes it quite hard to actually test a proper rigorous scientific study about it in any case professor Dan Loski again he and his colleagues tried they looked at all the evidence around summarizing and making notes and this is what they said on the basis of the available evidence we rate summarization as low utility it can be an effective learning strategy for learners who ought who are already skilled at summarizing however many learners including children high school students and even some undergraduates will require extensive training which makes the strategy less feasible what they're saying is that if you already know how to effectively summarize and make notes which you might well do although it tends not to be taught in schools or anything if you already know that then ok summarization is probably help you but even if that's the case even if you already quite pro at summarizing it still Falls about the middle of the pack when compared to other more effective revision techniques but I think in general the conclusion we should draw from this is that we are sort of wasting our time probably by making notes now that's not to say that if you enjoy making notes that you shouldn't do it you know I enjoy making notes like having pretty colors I like you know doing trying to do a bit of you know calligraphy on them you know taking photos for the Instagram my friends comment on like oh you know it's so pretty but to be honest I wouldn't want to make notes thinking it's an effective revision strategy and I know looking back on the school days a lot of my friends who were really into their notes you know that have these massive blue folders for chemistry and have absolutely beautiful notes those were the students that would spend hours and hours on a single topic and then kind of complained sometimes about why stuff wasn't going in so yeah making notes summarizing sort of works probably doesn't evidence is a bit iffy about it I think we should be avoiding it personally based on based on the results of these review papers all right just to sum up what we talked about so far we've said that rereading highlighting underlining and summarizing are probably not very effective revision strategies based on the evidence so yeah if we want to make a revision more efficient we probably shouldn't be doing these three things that we will we all like to do we had a lecture about this in our second year of medicine and it was towards the end of the year when we had exams coming up and my mind was completely blown when I found out that highlighting and making notes was not very efficient and talking to a lot of my friends we were all we were all absolutely aghast that like you know how could we have survived these 22 years of our life without knowing you know effective study techniques and that we felt that a lot of our own success and exams had been in spite of our revision techniques rather than because of them so you know hopefully at this point you're you're thinking that okay maybe we should be spending a little bit a little bit less time doing rereading highlighting and making notes let's now talk about active recall an active recall is by far the most important technique that you can and should be using in order to make your studies more efficient actually recall or active retrieval or practice testing whatever you want to call it basically involves retrieving facts from your brain retrieving stuff from your brain because the very act of retrieving stuff from your brain actually strengthens the connections between the stuff in your brain and this this was quite counterintuitive to me like for me anyway I'd always kind of assumed learning was this sort of process whereby you put stuff into your brain and the only purpose of getting stuff out of your brain was to you know ace that exam or get that aced or whatever in fact cannot be further from the truth and over a hundred years of research has shown that we learn far better by retrieving practicing retrieving stuff from our brains then by trying to you know put stuff back into our brain so what's the evidence behind this let's go back to Professor Don loskis review paper you know the one where he looked at hundreds of studies and you know decided that rereading highlighting and summarizing weren't very good this is what these guys had to say about practice recall active recall practice testing they said on the basis of the evidence described above we rate practice testing as having high utility practice testing is not particularly time intensive relative to other techniques and it can be implemented with minimal training finally several studies have provided evidence for the efficacy of practice testing in representative educational context so this review paper that's looked at loads of studies again they've said practice testing has very high utility and in fact if you read the paper in their conclusions they recommend that everyone you know start testing themselves more if they're not doing it enough already now because this is really really important I'm gonna be sharing with you three different studies that actually show this properly if you're already convinced by active recall at this point you can skip to this time stamp and then at this time sample but we'll just be talking about the specific strategies that you can use to implement active recall in your studies but if you're interested in the evidence then continue watching this video and I'll explain some of the studies that have been done that convincingly show that active recall is by far a better revision strategy than pretty much anything else you can do so let's start with this study from 1939 the start of World War two you know this sort of research has been going back literally decades and decades what they did is that they got groups of students and they made them learn a topic and then gave them a test either a week later or a day later now half of these students just kind of studied the material as they normally would and these are their results so you can see they were the results were about 50% for the high achievers and around sort of 30% for the bottom third of the group has decided by some other outcome measure so that was half of the group they just studied the subjects as they normally would have done and they got a test either a day later or a week later now the other half of the class study the content in exactly the same way however they had a practice test at the end of it and these are their results so as you can see the guys that had the practice test did far better you know it's an increase of like 15% for the high achievers an increase of like 10 to 15% for the for the bottom third of the class just having a practice test at the end of their study session in prove to their performance by 10 to 15% and I don't know about you but if I could improve my exam performance for a man abide by 10 to 15% just by you know practice testing myself a bit at the end of each study session I would certainly take that but that's just one study let's talk about another study a more recent one this one's from 2010 and again they split students up into two groups one group we're gonna have a practice test and the other group we're just gonna restart the material using whatever method they wanted most likely rereading highlighting and summarizing which as we've seen from other studies of the most popular revision techniques of students and this study was interesting because it tested students on both the facts and concepts here is the group that just re studied the material normally and these are their results so you know hovering between kind of thirty and forty percent because they just tell you the material once and then you know had it had a test a week later and here is the group that study the material had a little practice test at the end of it and then had the same test a week later and these are their results and as you can see you know they're performing significantly better for some it's even an increase of like 30 percent for the first group a difference between 30% and 60% and again I don't know about you but if I if I could get a 30% improvement in my exam score by practicing testing myself I would certainly take it and I would yeah be doubling down on that stir on that strategy as much as I possibly could finally this is one my favorite studies this is done from 2011 and what they did was they split students into four different groups they had to learn some material and then had a test at the end like a week later or something without the first group was just supposed to study the text the chapter once the second group was supposed to study at four times a third group read the text once and then made a mind map and the fourth group read the text once and then just tried to recall as much of the contents of the text as they possibly could so we've got these four groups here are the results so on verbatim questions are you know questions specifically from the text about factual things mentioned in the text the group that studied the ones performed the worst as you can see the active recall group performs significantly better than the group that's that re studied at four times this kind of tells me that you know if I just practice testing myself once that's probably more effective than rereading the chapter four times and rereading a chapter four times is such a common strategy that you know it's pretty pretty insane that you can get better results by just testing yourself once but just reading it once and there's trying to recall as much of it as you can okay so that was verbatim questions let's take these same groups of people and ask them inference questions the questions that require you to kind of understand the text a bit more not just retrieve isolated facts from it and here are their results as you can see the group that studied it once performed the worst as you'd expect because the only study at once the active recall group performs the best and you know the other groups perform perform all right again active recall practicing just writing down as much as they could remember from the text improve their results significantly more than the students that have read the text four times so I think there's a pretty solid evidence that print that active recall is a really really useful strategy but these guys being clever psychologists they had a third phase of the study and what they did was they like before doing any of this they asked the students what they think the results of the study would be so they asked the students to kind of have a guess at you know which of these techniques would be the most effective and these are the results of that so as you can see the students rated repeated study as being the most useful technique and they rated active recall as being probably the least effective one so this kind of goes to show that our own intuitive idea of what makes a good study technique does not match up with the evidence at all we think that you know reading something over and over again of course that's gonna you know increase our understanding increase our retention of it but actually just reading it once and then just practicing testing yourself it's just so much more efficient that is it's insane that this isn't taught in schools more often and there's a really good book called make it stick which I'll link down in the description below and which will pop up over here that you can read more about these sorts of techniques if you want and they go into more in depth about the exact evidence behind these techniques but even then you know they say that the two most important things are active recall which we're talking about in this video and spaced repetition which we'll be talking about in the next video hopefully I've convinced you that rereading highlighting and summarizing / making notes are not very effective revision strategies as just by the evidence again links in the description to that if you want to read it for yourself and hopefully I've convinced you that active recall or practice testing is a really really useful technique and it's far more efficient than these are the techniques that students enjoy using now we're going to be talking about specific strategies that you can use to apply active recall or practice testing in your own studies and the first thing to say is that this is not really rocket science pretty much anything you do that requires you to use cognitive effort like use brain power to retrieve information that you have learnt once already pretty much anything is going to be really really efficient for you but having said that I know a lot of you guys benefit from specific strategies so here are three that I find useful firstly number one is an app called Anki and Anki is a flashcard app that you might have heard of like loads of medical students use it the idea behind that is that you make a flat like an online flashcard and then it comes up and in your like to session but the special thing about hanky is that once well once the flashcard comes up you can mark it as being easy medium or hot and depending on what rating you gave it it comes up later on depending on what that rating was so if you found a fact really easy to recall maybe they'd ask you again in a day if you found it hard to recall that I'll see you again in 10 minutes if you found it impossible to recall that ask you again in one minute and this kind of learns from your behavior it kind of changes over time so as you progress through your studies as you progress through your revision some facts that are really easy you might see them in two months time because the whole algorithm changes and it really uses this whole space repetition thing to great effect I think I think hankies really good for two things firstly I think it's really good for memorizing particular facts so I used it a lot for Anatomy back in the day where is that you know what's the nerve supply for particular muscles things like that and used it a lot for pharmacology so learning the names of drugs and what they do and what the mechanism of action is in my third year when I was doing psychology as a subject I also use danke I like a lot to memorize particular paragraphs for two likes talking to my essays on one side of the flashcard I would have copy key and blunt to 2011 and on the other side of the flashcard I would describe the study that they did and the evidence behind it and what I was going to say about it so therefore in the essay in the exam when I wanted to recall the copic in blunts tally I would have kind of the information about it already memorized it so I used it to memorize chunks that I could then drag and drop into my essays effectively one of my friends is a Cambridge medic he it's got like first class every year he uses Anki for pretty much everything and he said that he can't imagine getting through Cambridge without having used Anki and instead of making notes and lectures what he started doing now is just going directly to making the flashcard though yeah if you're interested please do check out Anke it's free I think you can pay a few pounds for the iOS version but even if you don't want to pay you can use the web version completely free of charge I'll link it here and in the description below secondly something that I like doing because like because I still can't quite break the habit that you know I enjoy making notes is that making notes with the book closed so not like having the textbook open and making notes and making all pretty and copy from the textbook like I used to do but I actually like learning a topic and then closing the book and then thinking okay how would I explain this topic how would I kind of make my own notes on it so then I write down as much as I can remember about the topic in a nice fashion with like pretty colors because that makes me feel good and then afterwards I open the book and see the bits that I missed and actually when I was preparing for my third year exams in in third year I did psychology I ended up that was by far my best performance like ever in my life on any exams and I think the reason behind that was that because I very aggressively used these two techniques of spaced repetition and active recall so what I did I made about 50 different si plans initially earlier on in the year and then in order to commit this to memory I just drew spider diagrams with with the book closed so I would have a spider diagram for each si plan and I just as drought as much of it as I could possibly remember and then afterwards when I was done with it I'd look at my actual asset plan and fill out the bits that were missing and I repeated this over over the course of like two months leading up to the exams and by the end of it by the by the time the exam came around I had these fifty really really good essays in my head that had like 10 references each and was able to just kind of vomit them onto the paper in the actual exam so I would fully endorse this whole making notes making spider diagrams with the book closed as being a really effective method of active recall and and and there is actually some evidence behind this again it's in the book make it stick it's also in Professor Dan loskis paper you can read it down below finally I want to talk about a third strategy and that's an alternative to making notes I know that this whole making notes thing it's really hard to not make any notes these days if I'm in a lecture or if I want to learn something instead of making notes from the lecture or from the textbook what I instead do is that I write questions for myself and I think this is called like the Cornell note-taking method I came across that earlier today when when we when researching stuff for this video the idea is that you've write questions for yourself based on the material such that when you revise the material you look at your questions and you try and actively answer them in your head or on paper or out loud or whatever the point is that instead of passively rereading or highlighting the information like we are tempted to do we have to engage in cognitive effort to retrieve this information from our brains and that strengthens the connections between the information it makes us more likely to remember it and to understand it so I actually gave a talk about this evidence-based revision thing like three years ago when I was when when I was a third year and a friend of mine who was a first year medical time after this talk he had about two months left until the exams and he decided that the only technique he was going to use was to just write questions for himself so for the entire Cambridge first year medical syllabus he wrote himself like a list of 100 and something questions and each night before bed he would just kind of go through them and his revision technique was pretty much just answering these questions and he ended up coming second in the air out of like the whole cohort he's very intelligent in itself but I thought but I talking him afterwards he he put a lot of faith in this method of writing questions for yourself because writing questions for yourself makes you engage in cognitive effort and kind of the more the more brainpower it takes to recall a fact the strengthen that connection seems to get according to the evidence at least so yeah instead of kind of writing notes from the textbook or from the erosion guard from the lecture notes maybe try this method where you're writing questions for yourself and then when you're revising the topic using hopefully spaced repetition which we'll talk about in the next video when you're when you're revising the topic then you can just answer the questions in your head and I find this to be a really really effective strategy for getting lots of information into your head very quickly and hopefully you can find it useful as well so that brings us to the end of this video I really hope you found some of this useful just to summarize we've talked about why rereading highlighting underlining and summarizing / making notes are probably not very efficient revision techniques if you're using them I'm not saying you're doing it wrong I'm just saying that you know if you're using these techniques which most of us do and you think in yourself that you're revision is not very effective or you're not really getting the results that you want then maybe it's time to rethink some of these strategies feel free to continue using them but you know what I would say is that use them but alongside do practice testing test yourself more and then use spaced repetition and interleaved practice those are the three things we were talking about in future videos as well so yeah hopefully you found this video useful we talked about why those three particular strategies are not very effective we talked about some of the evidence behind active recall I quoted three studies at U and I've given you lots of links in the description below if you want to read more about this the book make it stick is really good as well and there's also a few podcast episodes that I've been listening to recently in preparation for this video that are linked below so you can find loads and loads of people around the world who looked at all the evidence or saying exactly the same thing they're saying that most revision techniques that students like to use like rereading haunt aligning and making notes are not very effective and they're saying that by far the most effective techniques are active recall and spaced repetition so hopefully you can apply those to your to your own revision and I've given you three possible ways to do it but to be honest pretty much anything that you do that requires you to retrieve information from your brain is going to be an effective revision strategy so yeah I really hope you like this video thank you very much for watching if you liked the video if you found it useful please give a thumbs up or leave a comment down below that would be really nice if you have any questions at all again leave a comment down below and I'll try and be as evidence-based as I can in my answers to you guys so yeah thanks very much for watching please subscribe to the channel if you are not already subscribed and I will see you in the next video and all the best with your revision I really hope you smash it bye bye

Channel: Ali Abdaal

Views: 3,591,818

Rating: 4.9751897 out of 5

Keywords: study tips, how to study, revision tips, how to revise, exam revision, exam study, exam revision tips, cambridge medical student

Id: ukLnPbIffxE

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2018