By Anne Miller
culled from:http://www.ozy.com
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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