Boning
up for a work course or a school test? Trying to learn a new skill? Cramming
late, devoting a whole day to nothing but bio, reading that training manual 20
times?
You’re
doing it wrong. So very, very wrong.
Nailing
the art of studying right can be a scientific task. Two professors — Henry
Roediger and Mark McDaniel at the Washington University in St. Louis — and
author Peter Brown condensed the best study knowledge, based on scientific
papers published over the past few years, in a new book, Make It Stick: The
Science of Successful Learning. Roediger distilled his 6 top tips for
successful learning. We’re talking the best ways to retrain new knowledge for
the long haul.
Pull
up a seat, and start taking notes.
1. Take those notes by
hand. That’s
right: Go Luddite. In a board meeting or a freshman survey hall, think pen and
paper. ”When typing, students tend to record information as though they were
taking dictation,” Roediger says. Handwriting is slower, ”so they have to think
harder about the material to distill it,” he says, discussing a study just
published this April. So yes, it might seem painful to put pen to paper in
class, but you’ll save study time in the end.
2. Don’t study —
practice. Stop
re-reading the same passage 20 times. Searching your brain for what you’re
trying to remember keeps things fresher. In one of Roediger’s own studies,
subjects who took a test were more likely to do better on a subsequent test
then those who studied. It’s not just about remembering the information, but
using the brain muscles to practice retrieving the information too. That’s what
a test — and real life — requires of us.
3. Pace yourself. Cramming puts a
lot of info your head, fast, but it also leads to fast forgetting. “Spacing
helps embed learning in long-term memory,” Roediger says.
4. Sleep on it. If you never want
to think about conjugating French verbs again, pull an all-nighter before a
test. But if you’ve got info you want to keep for the long haul, plan some
zzz’s. Your brain needs time to catch up and process all you’ve stuffed in
there. Sleep is when it happens.
5. Multi-task
subjects. Maybe
you’ve got finals this week in history, bio and psych. Yuck. If you’ve only got
three days to study, don’t tackle just one subject a day, Roediger says. Devote
a bit of time every day to each of the subjects, and you’re more likely to ace
those tests. Roediger cites a 2012 study that
says we’re more likely to confuse similar things when studied together — like
if you’re trying to cram on the differences between four kinds of biological
processes that all kind of sound the same — than if we break the biology up a
bit with something else.
6. Test yourself. These are the
professor’s words, not ours. ”Make up practice tests and take them repeatedly
as you study,” he says. This goes back to tip No. 2 — finding ways to pull
things from your mind. Plus, this way, you’ll learn what you need to work on.
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