If you've spent any time at all on YouTube
looking for study advice, then you've probably come across this video called Study Less,
Study Smart. This is a recorded lecture from Professor
Dr. Marty Lobdell, who is a former psychology professor at Pierce College, and wanted to
give his thoughts on how to be an effective student. The video came out when I was a sophomore
in college, and I wanted to watch it, but the problem was, it was an entire hour long. I could just never make the time. I've seen a lot of students say the exact
same thing about the video, so what I want to do with this video is try to give you about
80-90% of the value packed within the lecture, in about 1/10th of the time. To do that, I first watched the lecture myself,
and took detailed notes on it. If you want those notes, I've actually included
them at the end of this video. But first, let's get into the tips. Tip number 1 is to break your studying into
chunked sessions. The reason for this is that the average student
can only really pay attention for about 25-30 minutes. This goes across the board, from lectures,
to reading, to studying. After about 25-30 minutes, your efficiency
starts to really taper off, and that's why the advice to simply study more is not effective
at all. Instead, you want to break your study sessions
into about 20-30 minute chunks, and after those are done, take 5 minute breaks where
you do something fun, or at least away from your studies. Also, once your study sessions are done for
the entire day, you want to give yourself a real, tangible reward for doing it. As Dr. Lobdell says in the lecture, reinforcement
of positive things builds good study habits, and as an added benefit, you're training yourself
to study. As you keep doing this, you're going to able
to study for longer and longer on each session. Tip number 2 is to create a dedicated study
area. The reason for this is that our environment,
the context that we're in, largely determines our behavior. Think about when you're in class. When the professor presents a question to
the entire class, you instinctively raise your hand. But if he asks you specifically, you're going
to give a verbal response. This is automatic. You're conditioned to do it. Well, your studying area is the exact same. If you do it in a place where you're conditioned
to do other things, like sleep, or play video games, or hang out with friends, it's going
to be really hard to get into your studying. What you want to do is find an area that is
specifically used for studying, so the context of the situation makes it easy for you to
get into your studies. Dr. Lobdell's third tip is to study actively,
and it's best summed up with this quote, straight from the lecture: The more active you are
in your learning, the more effective you'll be. The best way to do this, rather than going
through rote memorization, or reading and rereading chapters from your book, is to first
ask yourself, before studying, what is it that I'm learning? What you're learning is going to fall into
1 of 2 categories, either facts or concepts. A concept is something like, what does this
particular bone in the human body do? You have to understand it. A fact is just something you need to remember. What the name of this bone is. Concepts are more important than facts, because
once you learn a concept, once you truly understand its inner workings, it's with you forever. You're going to remember it. Facts, on the other hand, can sort of drift
away over time, and the good thing about that is that we have Google. We can look up facts very easily. Unfortunately, in a testing situation in class,
you have to remember both facts and concepts, and you don't have access to Google, usually,
but still, concepts are going to be more important to learn first. The best way to learn these concepts and to
be sure you know them is to put them in your own words. Test yourself and learn actively. There's one thing he gives as an example,
which I think is one of the most important parts from the entire lecture, and it's his
example about highlighting. Most students know not to highlight entire
sections of the book, because if you do that, you're basically highlighting nothing at all. But if you highlight really important terms,
and then you go back after your first read and highlight session, and study them, and
just simply recognize the thing you highlighted before, and say, "Oh, I know it," then you're
getting into this dangerous territory where you don't know whether you're actually recalling
something, or simply recognizing it. The human brain is very good at recognizing
things. We can recognize people's faces, even if we
haven't seen them in a long time. But the difference between recognition and
recollection is that recognition requires an initial trigger, a cue. If you're in a test, there is no trigger or
cue. You have to actually pull it forth from your
memory. To test and make sure that you're actually
recalling something, instead of just recognizing it, you need to quiz yourself. You need to do active studying and active
learning. The 4th tip is to take more effective notes,
and he's really brief on this one. Basically, he says, after class, as soon as
possible, and truly as soon as possible, flesh out your notes a bit. Add some more to them so you can actually
solidify the concepts on your mind. If you're fuzzy on something, ask another
classmate who also took good notes, or go to office hours, or wait until the next lecture
and ask the professor before he starts if he can clarify something that you don't really
have a good grasp on. The 5th tip is to summarize or teach what
you learned. He says the best way to actually learn something
is to teach it. The reason for this is two fold. Number 1, it's a great form of active studying,
because you're forcing your brain to recall all the information so you can basically summarize
it for somebody. Number 2, you're really making sure that you
fully understand the subject. If you're explaining it to somebody who has
absolutely no idea about the the topic, and they're coming at it from a beginner's perspective,
then you're really going to have an easy time of pinpointing gaps in your own understanding. Tip number 6 is to use your textbooks correctly. In this part of the lecture, he goes over
the SQ3R method, which stand for survey, question, read, recite, and review. As I talked about in my active reading video,
I think overarching systems like this are actually kind of cumbersome and time consuming. But I do think it's important that you take
individual portions of these systems and see if they're worth it for your studying methods. As an example, the survey portion of SQ3R,
surveying the chapter before you read it, and especially going to the end and looking
at the review questions and the vocabulary, can really prime your brain for picking out
the most important information when you actually do the reading. Dr. Lobdell's 7th and final tip is to use
mnemonics when studying facts. Now, facts, as opposed to concepts, are a
lot harder to tie actual meaning to, and as a result, a lot of students often turn to
simple rote memorization to remember them, but a better way to go about it is to use
mnemonics. A mnemonic is really any system that facilitates
recall, but he goes over 3 specific types of mnemonics in the video. Those 3 are acronyms, things like Roy G. Biv
for remembering the color spectrum, coined sayings, things like, in 1492 Columbus sailed
the ocean blue, and the third one, which both I and Dr. Lobdell think is the best one, image
associations. Another way to think about image associations
are just interacting images, including the thing you're trying to study, that create
a ridiculous picture or story in your head. The more emotionally evocative or weird it
is, the more easily you're going to be able to recall that piece of information. That is my summary of Dr. Lobdell's lecture. If you want to see the entire hour long video,
I have it linked down in the description. Otherwise, you can get my notes and other
things in the end card. Thanks for watching this video, and I will
see you in the next one. Hey guys, thanks for sticking around to the
end of my video. If you want to get even more study tips, I
made a video about advanced study tips last week, and you can see those by clicking the
thumbnail. Also, if you want to get new study tips every
single week, and ways to be an awesome college student, then just click the big, red subscribe
button, right there. As I said in this video, you can get the detailed
notes on the entire lecture by clicking the orange button to go to the companion blog
post for this video. Also, if you want to become an awesome study-er,
I wrote a hundred plus page book on how to get better grades, and you can get it for
free by clicking the picture of the book. Lastly, if you want to connect with me, or
have ideas for new videos, you can either connect with me on Twitter @Tom Frankly, or
just leave a comment on this video.
Hey guys! So, there’s this lecture called “Study Less Study Smart” that I’ve seen mentioned around here before. It’s probably the most-viewed study advice video on YouTube - but it’s an hour long. I’ve seen several comments both here and on YouTube from students who don’t want to sit through the whole hour.
That gave me an idea - how much time would it take to go through the most important parts of it? This week, I challenged myself to create a video that summarized those parts in 1/10th the time of the lecture.
To do that, I watched and took detailed notes on the lecture, which essentially boils down to 7 main tips:
In the video, you’ll find a quick rundown of each of these. Want to see my notes on the entire lecture? Here you go.
My initial, handwritten notes in the Flow-notetaking style: http://imgur.com/a/TjzD1
The final, typed Outline-style notes (more readable): https://www.evernote.com/l/ACGXj-uCH0tOa6-3zK2DdeKOpeSbFjU63qg
Hope this helps!
Very well done! Thanks for taking the time to do this :)
Great video as always! I remember seeing the video before my school year and it really motivated me to keep strong grades. The funny thing is, I was thinking about "study smart, study less" today! But yeah, you basically covered the meat of it.
This was great! I especially like the idea of reading the chapter review before the chapter. I hadn't thought about doing that. Thank you for taking the time to make this.
This was/is a super awesome video. I remember watching the other video you mentioned in this one (or at least part of it).
I somehow managed to get through to my last year of Pharmacy school with really poor study habits, and now I'm paying for it because I don't remember anything! I'm hoping this will allow me to study in any spare time I have and really learn the concepts I should have learned prior.
P.S. You are quite a handsome man. :)
I'm a junior in high school who is having a lot of trouble studying. Thank you so much for this video. I am going to try out some of the things you said tomorrow, and I'll let you know the results. Keep up the great work!
I have finals in less than a month..