Study Tips - How to learn new content

- Hi guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Ali, I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge. And in this post I wanna talk about how you as a student can learn content for the first time. So if you're watching this post then hopefully you've seen two of my other posts on this channel about evidence-based study tips. The first one is about active recall and the second one is about spaced repetition. And if you haven't seen those posts, they'll be linked here and there and down below and everywhere. I'd really suggest you watch those posts first because I've had literally hundreds of messages from students all around the world who've said that those posts have changed their lives and changed their study techniques to the point that they're much more efficient and are getting much better marks. Active recall basically means testing yourself and spaced repetition is basically, you know, spacing your testing of yourself across, you know, intervals over a period of time. But in these two posts I talk about the evidence behind them and explain exactly how you can go about using active recall and using spaced repetition to supercharge your study techniques and to make yourself much, much more efficient at getting information into your brain. But that's all well and good. It's all well and good knowing that we need to test ourselves and we need to space our testing of ourselves over time. But a question that I've got from a lot of people has been, how do you actually learn the content for the first time? And surely in order to revise the content, you have to learn the content first. And that's the question that I'm gonna be trying to answer in this post. (upbeat music) So the way I like to think about it is that is essentially just two components of learning. And that is step one, understanding and step two, remembering. So understanding plus remembering equals good learning equals good exam performance equals good real-life performance at whatever job or whatever you're doing and saving lives if you're a doctor or you're working in that sort of trade or you know, making money for a rich corporate banker, if you're in the finance trade or whatever you like. Step one, understanding step two, remembering. (upbeat music) So I'm gonna talk about those in turn, but first I wanna make a point about what not to do and the biggest mistake that I've heard students make and that I certainly used to make back in the day and that I've seen loads of my friends make is that we are very quick to rely on memorization. Especially when you first get introduced to flashcards or to active recall like you're testing yourself as a general concept. Then you start thinking, oh my God, I have no need to make notes 'cause making notes is not efficient, as we know from the evidence behind it, more in my previous posts, I know that making notes is not very efficient. I know that testing myself is very efficient. Therefore, I'm gonna rock up to my lectures and I'm gonna convert every single thing the lecturer says into a flashcard or I keep the flashcard app or Quizlet or whatever, and then I'm gonna make like a thousand different flashcards for each of my lectures and then I'm just gonna go through those flashcards. There's a problem with that in that firstly you get too many flashcards, and secondly, you're relying on memorising the stuff. You're relying on, like rote learning it rather than understanding the content and having kind of a mental model of your subject, of your content in your head. And that's really the key thing. The key thing is to not rely on memorization, but instead to rely on understanding the stuff and then only using rote memorization when you absolutely have to to nail down those random arbitrary facts that you couldn't possibly understand. So if you find yourself making loads of flashcards for every single lecture, I think the key is to really ask yourself, do I really need a flashcard to remember this? And ideally you wanna try and remember it because you understand the subject rather than you're just trying to memorise bits and bobs of it. So let's now talk about understanding and what that actually means. (upbeat music) Now, how do you define understanding? I don't know what the dictionary definition is. I'll put it up on Wikipedia or whatever over here. But the way I like to think of it is that I know I understand something if I can competently explain it to a friend and answer their questions about it. So it's kind of like when you're able to teach something to someone, then you know that you truly understand it. And that's partly why I love teaching so much because when I'm running a teaching session for students in the year below or you know, fourth years or whatever, I really have to understand the subject before I can competently run that session. And obviously I wanna do a good job therefore it really incentivizes me to actively try and understand the subject in advance. And that's the key question. Can you explain it to a friend? Or you know, some people like to extend this analogy further, I think this is called the Feynman Technique. Can you explain it to a five-year-old? Like obviously not literally to a five-year-old, but you know, to a layman with, you know, reasonable competent command of your language. Can you explain the subject to them? And when you can explain something to someone else, then you really know you understand it. All right, so while editing this post, I realised that there was one really important thing that I missed out and actually this is the one thing that I'd recommend everyone take away from this post. And that is that active recall is not just for revising. Active recall is also the best way of learning. Now what do I mean by this? I mean when you're reading something in a book or through your lecture slides or whatever, instead of passively reading it, what I would recommend and what all the research recommends and what the authors in that really good book "Make It Stick" recommend. What everyone recommends is that as you're reading stuff, you are actively testing yourself on that content as you go along. So let's say you've read two paragraphs or something, you would stop close the book metaphor if you will look away and ask yourself, all right, what have I just learned? What are the key ideas? Can I rephrase this in my own words? In medicine, it's very easy. You would think, okay, I've just read that we need, you know, to give anticoagulation drugs in someone with atrial fibrillation. Okay, why do we do that? Okay, so that's because atrial fibrillation means a quivering of your atrium and that predisposes you to clot formation. Therefore we need an anticoagulant to thin the blood to stop them from forming clots in the left atrial appendage and that will stop them from getting strokes. Wait a minute, why would a clot go from the left atrial appendage to give them a stroke? Okay, hmm, I'm not quite sure about that. Then you go back to the book and then you would read it and work it out and then you'd be like, okay fine. I now get that a clot in the left atrial appendage is gonna cause a stroke by embolizing over to the brain or to the lungs or whatever. And you're at like as you're going along, you are actively testing yourself on the content. Active recall is not just something you do once you've learned the content, it is a fundamental part of actually learning the content in the first place. And actually there's a bit at the end of that really good book "Make It Stick" which you should definitely read. There's a bit at the end where the authors are showing like, you know, text interviews from students that have used techniques like active recall and spaced repetition to massively boost up their marks. And there's quite a good passage where they're interviewing a medical student who got into medicine by some weird route that meant he didn't have like the basic science background that all his classmates had and he ended up being bottom of the class. And he talks in this book, like towards the end, he talks about how the only way he knew how to revise, how to study stuff was to read stuff in the book. And when he didn't understand it or when it didn't stick, he didn't know what to do because all he'd been taught, all he'd been using for his whole life was just reading the information over and over again. And actually what he says is that when he started quizzing himself on the material as he went along, in fact, I'll read out the bit to you. He says, "I would stop and think, "okay, what did I just read? "What is this about? "I'd have to think about it. "Well, I believe it happens this way. "The enzyme does this and then it does that "and then I'd have to go back "and check if I was way off base or on the right track." And he goes on to say, "The process was not a natural fit. "It makes you uncomfortable at first. "If you stop in rehearsal what you're reading "and quiz yourself on it, it just takes a lot longer. "If you have a test coming up in a week "and so much to cover, "then slowing down makes you pretty nervous. "But the only way he knew of to cover more material "his established habit of dedicating long hours "to rereading, "wasn't getting the results that he needed. "As hard as it was, "he made himself stick to retrieval practise," back to recall, "long enough to at least see if it worked." And then the guy goes on to say, "you just have to trust the process. "And that was really the biggest hurdle for me, "was getting myself to trust it "and it ended up working really well for me. "Really well. "By the time he started a second year, Young, "the student, had pulled his grades up from the bottom "of the class of 200 students to join the high performance "and has remained there ever since." And then they talk about how this guy actually started mentoring students on effective study techniques and how, you know, people started coming to him to learn how to study this guy who was literally bottom of his class in this medical school coming from a background where he didn't really have any basic science knowledge managed to get to the top to the extent that people were then asking him for help and all he did was quiz himself and stuff as he went along. I.e. active recall, retrieval practise, testing yourself is not just for when you've learned the material, it's actually a fundamental part of learning the material in the first place. You're weaving this narrative, you're building this mental model in your head. You're telling yourself a story of your content as you're getting through it, not just, you know, when it comes to the exam right at the end. So yeah, let's go back to the scheduled programming. But of course anyone who's had that experience of understanding something like, you can go to a lecture and you can think, oh my God, wow, that actually makes sense. And then you can revise it once and you can think, oh my God, yeah, it makes sense. I fully understand it. But then you know, a few weeks later you come across it again and you're like, ah, okay, maybe I didn't understand it as well I thought I did because I just can't remember any of it. And that brings us on to the second component of effective learning and that is the remembering component. (upbeat music) And obviously if you've seen my previous posts, you know what I'm gonna say here, the two absolute key pillars of remembering anything are active recall, i.e. testing yourself and spaced repetition, repeating that testing of yourself over a period of time. Right, so active recall, I talk much more about this in the actual post about it, but you know, just briefly, it's all about testing yourself. You can do this in loads of different ways. You could write questions for yourself, like I do, for example, I've got a little spreadsheet where I write like loads of questions for myself that I will then answer, and if I don't know the answer, then I'll just look it up. So that saves me from having to actually write up flashcards. You could write up flashcards if you want. It takes a bit of time, but it's worth it. If you can consistently maintain this flashcard habit every day or however often you wanna do it. You can do that thing where you grab a blank piece of paper and make a spider diagram where you write everything you know about that subject, in that spider diagram. There's loads of methods for active recall. It really doesn't matter what you do. The point is you need to be testing yourself because the more you try and retrieve that knowledge from your brain, the stronger those connections are gonna be encoded. And therefore, yeah, you could understand something one day, but unless you test your understanding of it, i.e. test yourself with questions or get someone else to test you, you're just gonna forget it 'cause there's that thing called the forgetting curve that over time you just forget everything that you've ever learned unless you actually revisit it by testing yourself. So that's active recall. Spaced repetition is, you know, if you do it one day, then you'll do it the next day and then, you know, wait a week and you'll have forgotten some of it and then you test yourself again and then look up the stuff that you didn't know, and then you know, by that point you already know most of it. So then a month later you might test yourself. And the idea is that you're interrupting the forgetting curve at spaced intervals. And the more you do this, you're after about three or four repetitions of this over a period of let's say a month or two, you'll find by the end of it that your forgetting curve is very flat and that over time, even though you're not testing yourself anymore, you probably won't forget the information. And that's kind of the key thing to spaced repetition is to interrupt our forgetting curve so that we keep stuff in our brains for a longer period of time. So yeah, that's pretty much all there is to it. This is a very short post. If you're interested in like in-depth study tips, firstly read the book called "Make It Stick," it's a book I'd recommend to every single student anyway because it explores all of the evidence behind, you know, all these effective study techniques in a really engaging format. And if you're interested in like diving more in-depth into effective learning techniques, watch my two posts about active recall and spaced repetition. Those are like 25 minutes long each and we fully go into the evidence. But I just wanted to make this post to address this issue of how do we learn things in the first place? And the way we learn things is not by jumping straight to making a flashcard. It's by understanding, it's by being able to explain it to a five-year-old, being able to explain it to a friend, being able to answer their questions and essentially forming within our brains this mental model of our subject and getting an idea of how everything fits together in our own words, ideally using simple language without having to rely too much on jargon. So yeah, I can't state it more emphatically. The key thing is to understand. Screw memorization. Memorization does not work consistently and over the long-term in an efficient way. But if you can understand something and then use active recall and spaced repetition to, you know, bolster your understanding and build, you know, maintain that foundation, then you would truly understand your subject and you'll absolutely smash your exams and end up on a saving lives or whatever you wanna do with your degree or whatever. So yeah, I hope you found that useful. If you've got any other specific questions about study techniques, let me know in the comments of this post and I'll be sure to do a more kind of shorter posts where I address these in depth. But yeah, if you haven't seen the posts on active recall and spaced repetition, they'll be linked down below and above there and everywhere. So please watch those. And I can pretty much guarantee that if you're currently not happy with the results that you're getting from your study techniques and you start incorporating more testing of yourself and more spaced repetition, I can pretty much guarantee that your marks will improve almost overnight. So yeah, I hope you found this post useful. If you liked it, please give it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, then please consider doing so. Have a lovely day and I will see you in the next post. Goodbye. (upbeat music)