Telling people to study more does not
necessarily help. In some cases it might actually worsen their performance. Taking
notes, so vital but most students who do it haven't learned a very simple rule.
The first moment you get after a class ideally right after the class, you should
sit down with your notes and expand on everything you jotted down, give it depth
flesh it out, okay? If you even wait to go home and do it a couple hours later, you
will have forgotten some of your own notes. How do you know you know it? If you
can look at it, go to the next one read it and then stop and go back to the
one before, look up in the sky and in your own words say what that was about,
yeah you know it. Now a lot of students don't realize how much we're controlled
by environmental cues. Get a little lamp and it becomes your study lamp so if you
have to study in your bedroom, turn on the lamp and start studying. The moment
you lose your edge, fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes later
turn the lamp off, get up and leave the desk. What you're training yourself - to
study while seated there and it becomes increasingly automatic, as did the
raising of the hand. You sit, turn the lamp on and you're
ready to go it's like magic. Your brain has to be focused to be really studying
not time-sharing back and forth. The more active you are in your learning, the more
effective and yet increasingly I have students who think studying is reading
it over and over and they're gonna have some magical thing where they suddenly
understand it and remember it well. First you have to decide, what am i learning? Is
it a concept or a fact, okay? Understanding the name of a bone is a
fact, understanding what it does in the body gets into a concept, okay? So in
studying sometimes there are a lot of facts, in fact
I use Anatomy as a good example. You got to memorize bones, muscles, organs
tissues a lot of it but if you simply memorize and don't understand the
function of it, the comprehension of the actual concepts it's a lot of wasted
learning really, just to know a name of a bone is like yeh so what? But in most
college classes what we as professors are most concerned about is that you
grasp the concept because concepts once grasped, will stay with you a lifetime. Can
you put the concept in your own words? If you can't, you don't really understand it
okay, it's not meaningful to you. To make it meaningful is a struggle. It's
probably the biggest struggle you have as a student but it's a struggle you
need to do or you're wasting your study time. People are incredible at confusing
recognition with recollection. Your visual recognition threshold is so great
you could see a person once, see them years later and go 'I know you.' You've
highlighted the most important stuff, you now go back to study it and you say oh I
remember it! So do you study it? No. So what don't you learn? The most important
part of the chapter. Most of you undo good studying by not sleeping adequately. We're not sure exactly how but there's
something going on and it involves the hippocampus, it involves the storage from
a transitory long-term memory to a permanent - what we call consolidation but
we're getting increasing evidence that that consolidation process is dependent
on rapid eye movement sleep which if you're an adult happens about every hour
and a half once you fall asleep. If you're not getting a good night
typically around eight hours, you're not getting enough REM. What you've studied
doesn't become permanent and I can tell you there are studies that show simply
by getting better rest, some students improve markedly in their performance
because their brain now stores it a lot more efficiently. By the way if you know
anybody with sleep apnea, biggest thing they'll tell you is I can't remember
anything, my brain is shot. It's like my memories gone. Yeah, it is because your
REM-ing isn't happening, because you wake up so often and you can't consolidate
and store permanent memories. Here's the funny thing. There's no money to be made
by telling people to get more sleep, so you don't hear about it on TV. Sylvan
isn't telling you to get better sleep because they don't make any money. I tell
students and they go yeah that's nice but they continue to use their time for
other things. It's kind of interesting isn't it? The best advice, sleep better
and most of you'll do better. Most of you won't even begin to take it and I know why
you've got so many other things to do. I'd ask you this, are they important? Is
studying and learning the most important thing you're doing is a student If so
maybe you need to give up some of the other activities. I have students tell me
I don't have enough time. There's two- what- 162 hours in a week? We all have the
same amount of time. Marty has no more nor less than anybody in this room. The real
question is what do I do with my hundred and sixty two hours? What I want to do is
show you graphically what I'm talking about.
Let's say this is efficient studying and I know there are no numbers there but
higher means more efficient, lower means low or no efficiency and this axis we're
looking at time. Here's what happens for the average student. For her, 6 o'clock in
the evening after her supper at the residency dining hall, she plopped
herself down at her little study area and started studying but here's what
happened. By about 6:30 she was in a major slump but what was her goal? To
study 6 hours so she continued to sit at her little desk and stare at pages until
midnight. She was at her desk 6 hours, how long did she actually study? About 20-30
minutes. Now there's a simple concept in psychology that all of you are aware of.
Things that are reinforced, we tend to do more of, things that are punished or
ignored we tend to do less of. You know we operate by those principles to a
large degree. If you're sitting there for six hours, are you feeling good? No. Once
you get here, you're looking at your book going I hate geography, I hate literature
I hate psychology all the things we're trying to get you
to fall in love with, you're hating it and so her actual good studying was
followed by five and a half hours of pain and misery. I would bet you, I don't
know for a fact, that as the quarter progressed she sat down and finally she was done before she even
started. She sat down and just stared at a book and she flunked every class. The
moment you start to slide, you're shoveling against the tide. What you need
to do is what? Take a break. Here's what's cool about it. You can study for a half
hour, it doesn't take a half hour break to recharge your batteries. For most
people, about five minutes and this is where you go away, do something fun for
five minutes and actually say this is my treat for having studied for 30 minutes
effectively. Go back and here's what happens.
Your efficiency is nearly a hundred percent. Study a half hour, take a break
study a half hour, study a half hour, now had she done that over a course of six
hours she would have got about five and a half hours of serious studying and
about a half hour of total break time. SQRRR. Survey that's the S, question that's
the Q, then you have 3 R's - read recite review. So how do you do the survey? These
are not novels. In a novel you wouldn't want to read the last page, would you?
Find out who done it, it'd ruin the whole thing
but this is a textbook so what you do is you actually go through the entire
chapter, you look at pictures okay what's this about apples
what's this about a duckbill platypus okay and what you're doing as you survey
you ask questions. It only takes a couple of minutes to survey a chapter in any
class. As you're surveying you simultaneously raise questions. What
you're doing then is causing you to be looking for answers and this is a
powerful thing. How many of you have noticed when you're looking through a
newspaper for a piece of information, you can find it, it kind of jumps out at you
but if you're just kind of reading it haphazardly, kind of casually, most of
what you read you don't even remember. There's something about it and I can't
explain it, I can only describe it. If you intend to find something, you find it and
I've got a little demonstration I could have brought where I actually show a
placard with the words Boston and London printed on them and I hold it up for 20
seconds. Out of a group this size, maybe two or three of you would see Boston and
London because before I do it, I tell you to look for letters, symbols and numbers.
I create what's called a set. You're now expecting not to see words but letters
and even though Boston and London are printed on diagonal, most people don't
see it. Likewise if you just kind of go through a book without asking questions
first you kind of skim over the content. You
don't have the search mechanism going, okay? The reading, followed by the
recitation, I talked about that. Technically before a test it should be
review. It should be in the barn. Now you're just
touching up to make sure you haven't lost anything or confused anything but I
know how this works because we schedule tests, most students don't start studying
until shortly before an exam and much like my friend, it puts so much time all
massed together and only study for about a half hour, pull all-nighters so they
don't get the good rest, come in and do poorly. You're undoing yourself. If you
start studying early and do some of the things I've talked about, by the time you
get to the test you're just reviewing at that point, not
truly studying.
Easier said than done tbh, like i can do this for studying for exams and learning the content BUT my biggest inefficiency (not weakness coz i get decent marks for it) is writing scientific reports. If 1 week is given to us to write an x-length of report i would probably use about 3 -4 hours per day until the deadline to finish that report.
Wonderful stuff! Very helpful for a new student like me. Listen!
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