0:00 reading and rereading material and re re rereading material is far less effective than reading material and then thinking about that material now let's talk about how the best students structure their days turns out there are great studies on this there is a really nice paper in fact that surveyed close to 700 students these were medical students approximately equal number of male and female students and analyze the most useful learning habits that is the learning habits associated with the most successful students now anytime you do a study like this where people take surveys there's always the issue of causality in fact we can pretty much set aside any possible causality for instance I'm about to tell you that the very best performing students tend to
0:46 study for about 3 or 4 hours per day but you could easily say Well they're the best students because they study three or four hours per day they don't study three or four hours per day because they're the best students and you'd be exactly right okay we can get into all sorts of discussions about correlation versus causation about reverse causality and on and on however none of that is the point here the point here is to establish what are the habits that the most successful students seem to incorporate over and over again regardless of what classes they're taking regardless of where they are in their Arc of their learning trajectory and so what we know based on this study and I'll provide a link to it in the show note captions is that there are at least 10 study habits that the highly effective students use use I'm going to focus on the top five or six just for
1:33 sake of time because it turns out that most of the effect it appears of being a better student can be attributed to these top five or six habits first of all they set aside time to study they literally schedule time to study now this probably serves several roles the first one is that they are able to clear out other distractions and in fact that's the second thing that they do they are very effective where they make it a point of putting their phone away and off of isolating themselves that's right they're not studying with other people they study alone which is not to say that people who study with others cannot be effective in their studying but the best performing students seem to study alone they put their phone away they tell their friends and families
2:18 that they are not going to be able to be reached during that time and yes they study for 3 or 4 hours per day but they break that up into a couple of different sessions typically to two or three sessions so they're not doing a three or four hour studying about Allin one shot so they're managing their time they're eliminating distractions and they're studying for a consistent amount of time at least 5 days per week okay presumably they're taking some weekends off although that wasn't made clear from this paper the other thing that they do and this is very important is that they make an effort to then teach their peers to teach other students in the class now some of you may be thinking and I'm thinking back to college here mostly that if you spend all this time learning the information and you are in a competitive scenario with the other
3:05 students that teaching them the information is kind of a freebie for them and it's harder for you meaning you're putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage or you're giving them an unfair Advantage for not having done the work now while this paper didn't do an analysis of whether or not these students that served as the Learners from the other students got an unfair Advantage it's very clear that students who make it a point to learn material in isolation then bring that material to other students in the same course and teach them perform exceedingly well in comparison to the other students so don't be afraid to be a teacher of your peers in order to test this is key to test and develop Mastery of the material if ever there was a strongly research supported tool in the literature in the
3:51 peer reviewed literature about how students can learn information better it's testing and I know I know I know we think of test as a way to evaluate our knowledge but it turns out that testing is one of the best ways to build our knowledge to retain our knowledge and again to offset forgetting now the study of testing as a learning tool not just as a way to evaluate how much information we've learned goes back over a hundred years there's a classic study that was done in 1917 where grade school age children read biographies so they read biographies and and then the kids were divided into different groups one group read and reread and reread those
4:37 biographies over and over another group read the biographies once and then were tested on those biographies but get this they tested themselves on those biographies simply by having to think about the information that they had read and trying to remember the information like what was the biography who was the person who are they married to what did they do when did they go to school what did they do in school what did they do in the world what role did they play in life so they essentially tested their own knowledge simply by going into their own head and asking themselves what they could remember about those biographies now keep in mind here that even though it's fairly apparent that reading a biography two three four times might
5:23 seem more passive than testing oneself on a biography that they had read just once right you could imagine that thinking about the biography involves more effort and indeed it does but keep in mind also that the kids in the second group were only exposed to the biography once and yet when you look at the percent of accurate recall of information from those biographies the children that read the biography once and then made a deliberate point to think about that biography in their own mind to effectively test themselves on that material just within their heads over and over but an equal number of times as the kids that read the biographies directly on a page over and over vastly outperformed the kids that
6:09 read the biographies over and over put differently reading and rereading material and re re rereading material is far less effective than reading material and then thinking about that material testing yourself on that material forcing yourself to bring that material to mind in your own mind and this is not just for sake of remembering more volume of material but also accuracy of recall of that material and that at least to me was pretty surprising at first until one starts to explore subsequent studies of the role of testing as a learning tool and then you start to realize that testing yourself is Far and Away the best tool for studying and learning not just for evaluating your knowledge but for
6:55 actually studying and incorporating that knowledge into your neural circuits okay so the more tests that you take as a way to expose you yourself to the material the better you're going to perform on that material at some later point now of course at some point you have to be exposed to the material for the first time right that's why it's studying and learning but after one exposure to new material taking more tests on that material even if you don't perform that well on those tests as long as you're able to see the accurate answers to those tests and compare your answers to those answers will lead to better performance on the ultimate test and retention of that material at some later time put differently it's not about how many times you study the material or how many times you're exposed to the material it's about being exposed to the
7:42 material doing your best to focus and attend to that material and then self- testing yourself on that material or as the case may be if an an instructor is the one giving you the test but nonetheless taking tests on that material not just once but ideally two three times that's what really locks the material into your neural circuits that's what's going to lead to the most pervasive change the most durable change we should say in your neural circuits that carry that material that hold that material in your mind what we call Neural encoding okay so the more times you test yourself or that you are tested on material the better your retention of that material thanks for watching if you found this information helpful be sure to like share and subscribe for more
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