STUDY HABITS that are RUINING your grades

you've got an exam coming up so you whip out your notes and your favorite highlighter and get to work the exam will commence in one minute exam done felt it went okay you've got another exam coming up so you whip out your notes and your favorite highlighter and really put the time and effort in you work longer and harder than you've ever worked before have you done your revision of course and you oh yes you walk into the exam turn the paper over and now hey everyone welcome to Bear it in mind this video is the first in a series exploring the psychology of how to study how to do well in your exams is not a mystery the psychological research is out there for all to see and some students know it and are putting it into practice however despite this knowledge being out there in the world every year there are lots of students I come across who do not know these things they think there are some people who are just clever and those that just aren't how is it she knows everything so this video is designed to show you why you may not be getting the grades you want and to demystify what it is that those students who always seem to be getting A's are doing then in the next videos I'll break down specifically what it actually looks like to do those things in practice here's the scenario you're sat in class and the teacher has been explaining something perhaps it's how SSR eyes affect the process of synoptic transmission and you just don't get it and so you put your hand up and ask your teacher for help now here's what sometimes happens in my experience I go over to the student to help them explain it to them again breaking it down into smaller steps and then I'll say do you understand now and usually they say yes now at this point something interesting might have happened it's the illusion of knowing this is a cognitive bias that makes people think they understand something better than they actually do they think they have learned and understood something when in fact they haven't the student thinks that they understand it because the teacher has simply and clearly explained the information in a way that they could follow and it sounded simple enough and it made sense but how do they know if they really know it at this point the thing to do with the student is to say okay if you've understood it explain it back to me and this can be very revealing for the student because sometimes when they try to put it into words they often struggle generally give an overly simple answer and perhaps miss a few Key Parts out they discover that it was harder to explain than they thought and realize they couldn't do it without reading from their notes they thought they knew but actually it was an illusion they did not have an accurate perception of their own understanding another example of where students experience the illusion of knowing is through Reading students might read a page of a textbook a few times to get ready for an upcoming test and having successfully read the textbook pages and understood what they read I.E it made sense they feel like they've learned the material have you done your revision course and you oh yes however when they open in the exam paper and attempt the questions they really struggle to answer them they can't really remember what they read they thought they'd understood the material they thought they knew it when they studied but the test revealed otherwise and they say things like I just couldn't remember it in the exam my mind went blank it's not that your mind went blank it's that your mind is blank you thought the knowledge and the memory was there but it wasn't and the exam revealed that there's a now famous research paper written by professor John Den Los and colleagues in 2013 where they reviewed loads of psychological studies to identify what the most effective learning techniques were the least effective strategies were rereading highlighting and summarizing all of these strategies can feel like you're doing work and studying I mean who doesn't like a good highlighter or a beautifully drawn and decorated set of notes nicely summarized and reading through the textbook on my notes makes sense because that's what the test is going to be on and maybe it'll stick and stay in my mind when I read it but the evidence says the opposite these strategies are low in Effectiveness when compared to other methods so what did they find was the most effective strategies answer practice testing otherwise known as active recall or retrieval practice the only way I know if my students know something is when I test them and the only way they know if they understand something is if they test themselves we usually think about tests as the big tests at the end and we naturally have a negative reaction towards the word test but listen to this from Professor delosi by viewing tests as the end all assessments administered only after learning is complete teachers and students are missing out on the benefits of one of the most effective strategies for improving student learning what you've got to do is practice getting the information out of your head it's input then output ask yourself how much time you spend trying to get information into your head through reading your notes summarizing information or even watching YouTube videos there's nothing wrong with those things but if that's all you do if it's just input trying to get things into your head you will struggle consider these two studies to see how powerful practice testing can be B in this study firstly participants were asked to read a passage of text and then in condition one reread the passage of text and in condition two test themselves on the passage by trying to recall as much as they can then 2 days later or one week later they were given a test to see how much they could recall here's what they found you can see that simply testing yourself after learning can make a huge difference to the amount of information you can correctly recall in this second study they had four conditions all students were given a science text to study in condition one they were just given the text to study and that was it in condition two they had the chance to study and reread the text on four occasions in condition three these students study the text and then produced a summary map of the information and in condition for students studied the text and then practiced recalling as much of the information as they could on a free recall test after recalling once the students re studied the text and recalled again what I really like about the study is what the researchers did next they asked the students to predict how much information from the text they will be able to remember one week later here's what the students predicted isn't that interesting the illusion of knowing they thought the techniques of studying of rereading and going over the material again will be more effective than testing themselves and here's what they actually found iic and blunt reported that retrieval practice produced the best learning students predicted that repeated studying would produce the best long-term retention and that practice retrieval would produce the worst retention even though the opposite was true so let's bring it into clear Focus imagine preparing for your driving test by watching a few episodes of Top Gear and all the Fast and Furious films smoke but that's what students do all the time time they do everything else except the thing they're going to get asked to do in the exam if you never test yourself to see if you can successfully park the car then you don't need me to tell you how it's going to go in your driving test and if you never practice recalling the process of Coptic transmission you don't need me to tell you how it's going to go in your Psychology exam you want to already know you can do it because you've tested yourself loads of times beforehand you don't want to discover whether you know or not in the exam when it really matters and it's too late the ideal situation in the exam is to turn the exam paper over and go hello friend we've met before so in short the key is active recall it's practice testing you must try to get the information out of your head remember input and then output and the harder we have to work to retrieve the information the more we strengthen the connections in our brain and the easier easier it becomes in the future to recall it so that's the theory but what about the practice what does active recall look like well to start what you need to do is write down a big long list of questions for all the topics for each of the exams that you're going to sit so that you can test yourself but that's going to take ages but if you're an a-level psychology student then you're in luck because I've done it for you in the description below I've put a link to where you can download a free copy of the approaches Topic in psychology with questions to test yourself and also links to where you can access all the others if you wish in this next video I'm going to walk you through some practical ways you can actually do active recall in your studies to watch that you can click on the screen now or you'll find it linked below I hope you found this video helpful and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: Bear it in MIND

Views: 4,648

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Id: mBs2AvZth4A

Length: 9min 48sec (588 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 17 2024