Speaker 1: Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new here, my name is Ali. I'm a final year medical student at Cambridge University, and today we're kicking off a new series where I'm going to be sharing with you evidence-based revision tips. So I'm going to be giving you advice on how you can prepare for your exams, but hopefully I'll be backing up everything I say with evidence from studies that have been done in the field of psychology on students like you and me over the last hundred years. No one ever really teaches us how to study. We tend to just go with what feels intuitively right, and as we'll see, the research has shown that actually the techniques that students think are the most intuitive often tend not to be the ones that are actually the most effective. So if you've got exams coming up, then hopefully by the end of this video you'll pick up some techniques that you can apply to your own studies to make everything a little bit more efficient and enjoyable. So let's just jump into it. This is going to be the structure of the video. Firstly, I'm going to be talking about the three very popular revision techniques that are shown to be less effective in the literature, namely re-reading, highlighting, and making notes slash summarizing. Those are by far the most popular techniques, but they're also not very effective if you look at the evidence behind them. Secondly, I'm going to be introducing the concept of active recall, which is by far the most powerful effective study technique, and that involves like testing yourself and practicing retrieving information from your brain because the very act of retrieving information actually strengthens connections in the brain, and there's like a load of evidence behind this. And finally, in part three of the video, I'll be giving you some specific tips on how you can actually apply this active recall thing to your own study. So hopefully by the end of the video, you'll have some practical strategies that you can apply if you feel like it. As always, everything is going to be time stamped down below, so if you want to skip to a certain bit of the video, feel free. But now let's jump into it, and let's talk about the three common but not very effective revision techniques that students love to use. Let's start with re-reading. Over here is going to be a list of some of the various studies that have been done that show that students really love re-reading as like a really common revision technique. And if you, you know, look at what you've done for your own exams and ask your friends, you'll probably find out that re-reading plays a big part of most people's exam preparation strategy. The question is, is re-reading effective as a study technique? There have been lots of studies done about this. I will link some of them in the description below, but I'm not going to go into each of them in depth. Instead, I'm going to be quoting from a paper written by Professor Dunlosky, which was written in 2013, where he and his colleagues analyzed like hundreds of papers looking at all the research behind 10 different revision techniques. And this is what he had to say on the topic of re-reading. He said, based on the available evidence, we rate re-reading as having low utility. Although re-reading is relatively economical with respect to time demands, when compared with other learning techniques, re-reading is also typically much less effective. The relative disadvantage of re-reading to other techniques is the largest strike against it, and it's the factor that weighted most heavily in our decision to assign it a rating of low utility. So this professor, who's a psychology professor, and he and his colleagues have looked at hundreds of research papers looking at evidence-based revision techniques, regards re-reading your notes or re-reading your textbooks as having low utility. He's saying that yeah, there's some limited evidence that re-reading does work, it does improve retention somewhat, but especially if you compare it to other techniques that you could be doing, re-reading is pretty much a waste of time. Here's another quote from a 2016 paper that again looked at the evidence behind lots of study techniques, and this is what they had to say about re-reading. They said, a wealth of research has shown that passive, repetitive reading produces little or no benefit for learning, yet not only was repetitive reading the most frequently listed strategy, it was also the strategy most often listed as students' number one choice by a large margin. So that's what I'm going to say about re-reading for the time being. I'm very happy to discuss all the evidence against re-reading and against these other techniques. If you guys want to hear about that, just leave a comment down below and I'll do it. But I want to focus on stuff you can do rather than kind of just hopping on the stuff that you shouldn't be doing. So we'll close that for now. Re-reading generally, according to the evidence, is pretty ineffective. It does sort of work, but you know, compared to other things you could be doing, it's by no means the most efficient study tactic. Secondly, let's talk about highlighting, and either we highlight ourselves or we know friends who'd like to highlight their textbooks and their notes in pretty colours. Here is a list of studies that show that highlighting is a very popular revision strategy, and I'll link these studies in the description below, so if you really want to read them, you can. But let's go back to Professor Donlosky's paper, where again he looked at all the evidence around these and this is what he had to say about highlighting and underlining. He said, on the basis of available evidence, we rate highlighting and underlining as having low utility. In most situations that have been examined and with most participants, highlighting does little to boost performance. It may help when students have the knowledge needed to highlight more effectively, or when the texts are difficult, but it may actually hurt performance on higher level tasks that require inference making. You know, especially with art subject at GCSE and most subjects at A-level, and definitely everything at undergrad, all of these subjects require inference making. So highlighting, Professor Donlosky's saying, is probably not a very good tactic. He continues, he says, future research should be aimed at teaching students how to highlight effectively, given that students are likely to continue to use this popular technique despite its relative ineffectiveness. So he's conceding in his paper that although, you know, the evidence shows that highlighting is not very good, to be honest, students are probably going to continue using it. And later on in the paper, he describes highlighting as a safety blanket that students like to have. I've experienced this, I'm sure you've experienced this as well. It fuels productive, doesn't it? Like, you know, going through a book and highlighting one thing in blue and one thing in yellow, one thing in orange. I used to do it all the time, but you know, the evidence says it's not very good. You know, we could be doing more efficient things. Finally, let's talk about summarizing or making notes. Again, a really, really popular technique that I have been using pretty much all my life and still use to this day, but I'm trying to phase it out because the evidence around summarizing and making notes is, you know, a bit equivocal. There are some studies that show that students that do summarizing well perform slightly better on exams, but it's really quite hard to test this because as you can imagine, the quality of notes varies massively between students. And so that makes it quite hard to actually test a proper, rigorous scientific study about it. In any case, Professor Dunlosky, again, he and his colleagues tried, they looked at all the evidence around summarizing and making notes, and this is what they said. On the basis of the available evidence, we rate summarization as low utility. It can be an effective learning strategy for learners who are already skilled at summarizing. However, many learners, including children, high school students, and even some undergraduates will require extensive training, which makes this strategy less feasible. What they're saying is that if you already know how to effectively summarize and make notes, which you might well do, although it tends not to be taught in schools or anything, if you already know that, then okay, summarization is probably going to help you. But even if that's the case, even if you're already quite pro at summarizing, it still falls about the middle of the pack when compared to other more effective revision techniques. But I think in general, the conclusion we should draw from this is that we are sort of wasting our time probably by making notes. Now, that's not to say that if you enjoy making notes that you shouldn't do it. You know, I enjoy making notes. I like having pretty colors. I like, you know, doing trying to do a bit of, you know, calligraphy on them, you know, taking photos for the Instagram, my friends comment on like, Oh, your notes are so pretty. But to be honest, I wouldn't want to make notes, thinking it's an effective revision strategy. And I know looking back on the school days, a lot of my friends who were really into their notes, you know, that have these massive blue folders for chemistry and have absolutely beautiful notes. Those were the students that would spend hours and hours on a single topic, and then kind of complain sometimes about why stuff wasn't going in. So yeah, making notes, summarizing sort of works probably doesn't. Evidence is a bit iffy about it. I think we should be avoiding it personally based on based on the results of these review papers. All right, just to sum up what we talked about so far, we've said that rereading highlighting, underlining and summarizing are probably not very effective revision strategies based on the evidence. So yeah, if we want to make our revision more efficient, we probably shouldn't be doing these three things that we all we all like to do. We had a lecture about this in our second year of medicine. And it was towards the end of the year when we had exams coming up. And my mind was completely blown when I found out that highlighting and making notes was not very efficient. And talking to a lot of my friends, we were all we were all absolutely aghast that, like, you know, how could we have survived these 22 years of our life without knowing, you know, effective study techniques, and that we felt that a lot of our own success and exams had been in spite of our revision techniques rather than because of them. So, you know, hopefully at this point, you're you're thinking that, okay, maybe we should be spending a little bit a little bit less time doing rereading, highlighting and making notes. Let's now talk about active recall. And active recall is by far the most important technique that you can and should be using in order to make your studies more efficient. Active recall, or active retrieval, or practice testing, whatever you want to call it, basically involves retrieving facts from your brain retrieving stuff from your brain, because the very act of retrieving stuff from your brain actually strengthens the connections between the stuff in your brain. And this, this was quite counterintuitive to me, like, for me, anyway, I'd always kind of assumed learning was this sort of process whereby you put stuff into your brain. And the only purpose of getting stuff out of your brain was to, you know, ace that exam or get that a star or whatever. In fact, this cannot be further from the truth. And over 100 years of research has shown that we learn far better by retrieving, practicing retrieving stuff from our brains than by trying to, you know, put stuff back into our brain. So what's the evidence behind this? Let's go back to Professor Dunlosky's review paper, you know, the one where he looked at hundreds of studies and, you know, decided that rereading, highlighting and summarizing weren't very good. This is what these guys had to say about practice recall, active recall practice testing. They said, on the basis of the evidence described above, we rate practice testing as having high utility. Practice testing is not particularly time intensive relative to other techniques, and it can be implemented with minimal training. Finally, several studies have provided evidence for the efficacy of practice testing in representative educational contexts. So this review paper that's looked at loads of studies, again, they've said practice testing has very high utility. And in fact, if you read the paper in their conclusions, they recommend that everyone, you know, start testing themselves more if they're not doing it enough already. Now, because this is really, really important, I'm going to be sharing with you three different studies that actually show this properly. If you're already convinced by active recall, at this point, you can skip to this timestamp. And then at this timestamp, we'll just be talking about the specific strategies that you can use to implement active recall in your studies. But if you're interested in the evidence, then continue watching this video. And I'll explain some of the studies that have been done that convincingly show that active recall is by far a better revision strategy than pretty much anything else you can do. So let's start with this study from 1939, the start of World War Two. You know, this sort of research has been going back literally decades and decades. What they did is that they got groups of students and they made them learn a topic and then gave them a test either a week later or a day later. Now, half of these students just kind of studied the material as they normally would. And these are their results. So you can see the results were on about 50% for the high achievers and around sort of 30% for the bottom third of the group as decided by some other outcome measure. So that was half of the group. They just studied the subject as they normally would have done, and they got a test either a day later or a week later. Now, the other half of the class studied the content in exactly the same way. However, they had a practice test at the end of it. And these are their results. So as you can see, the guys that had the practice test did far better, you know, it's an increase of like 15% for the high achievers, an increase of like 10 to 15% for the for the bottom third of the class, just having a practice test at the end of their study session, improved their performance by 10 to 15%. And I don't know about you, but if I could improve my exam performance from by 10 to 15%, just by, you know, practice testing myself a bit at the end of each study session, I would certainly take that. But that's just one study. Let's talk about another study, a more recent one. This one's from 2010. And again, they split students up into two groups, one group, we're going to have a practice test. And the other group, we're just going to restudy the material using whatever method they wanted. Most likely rereading, highlighting and summarizing, which as we've seen from other studies are the most popular revision techniques for students. And this study was interesting because it tested students on both the facts and concepts. Here is the group that just restudied the material normally. And these are their results. So, you know, hovering between kind of 30 and 40%, because they just studied the material once, and then, you know, had a test a week later. And here is the group that studied the material, had a little practice test at the end of it, and then had the same test a week later. And these are their results. And as you can see, you know, they're performing significantly better. For some, it's even an increase of like 30% for the first group, a difference between 30% and 60%. And again, I don't know about you, but if I could get a 30% improvement in my exam score by practicing testing myself, I would certainly take it. And I would, yeah, be doubling down on that strategy as much as I possibly could. Finally, this is one of my favorite studies. This is done from 2011. And what they did was they split students into four different groups. They had to learn some material and then had a test at the end, like a week later or something like that. The first group was just supposed to study the text, the chapter once. The second group was supposed to study it four times. The third group read the text once and then made a mind map. And the fourth group read the text once and then just tried to recall as much of the contents of the text as they possibly could. So we've got these four groups. Here are the results. So on verbatim questions, I, you know, questions specifically from the text about factual things mentioned in the text. The group that studied it once performed the worst. As you can see, the active recall group performed significantly better than the group that's that re-studied it four times. This kind of tells me that, you know, if I just practice testing myself once, that's probably more effective than re-reading this chapter four times. And re-reading a chapter four times is such a common strategy that, you know, it's pretty, pretty insane that you can get better results by just testing yourself once. But just reading it once and then just trying to recall as much of it as you can. Okay, so that was verbatim questions. Let's take these same groups of people and ask them inference questions. So questions that require you to kind of understand the text a bit more, not just retrieve isolated facts from it. And here are their results. As you can see, the group that studied it once performed the worst as you'd expect because they only studied it once. The active recall group performs the best and, you know, the other groups perform all right. Again, active recall, practicing just writing down as much as they could remember from the text, improved their results significantly more than the students that have read the text four times. So I think this is pretty solid evidence that active recall is a really, really useful strategy. But these guys, being clever psychologists, they had a third phase of the study. And what they did was they, like, before doing any of this, they asked the students what they think the results of the study would be. So they asked the students to kind of have a guess at, you know, which of these techniques would be the most effective. And these are the results of that. So as you can see, the students rated repeated study as being the most useful technique, and they rated active recall as being probably the least effective one. So this kind of goes to show that our own intuitive idea of what makes a good study technique does not match up with the evidence at all. We think that, you know, reading something over and over again, of course, that's going to, you know, increase our understanding, increase our attention of it. But actually, just reading it once, and then just practicing testing ourself, it's just so much more efficient. That is, it's insane that this isn't taught in schools more often. And there's a really good book called Make It Stick, which I'll link down in the description below, and which will pop up over here that you can read more about these sorts of techniques if you want. And they go into more in depth about the exact evidence behind these techniques. But even then, you know, they say that the two most important things are active recall, which we're talking about in this video, and spaced repetition, which we'll be talking about in the next video. Point, hopefully I've convinced you that rereading, highlighting, and summarizing, slash making notes are not very effective revision strategies as judged by the evidence. Again, links in the description below if you want to read it for yourself. And hopefully I've convinced you that active recall or practice testing is a really, really useful technique, and it's far more efficient than these other techniques that students enjoy using. Now we're going to be talking about specific strategies that you can use to apply active recall or practice testing in your own studies. And the first thing to say is that this is not really rocket science. Pretty much anything you do that requires you to use cognitive effort, like use brain power to retrieve information that you have learned once already, pretty much anything is going to be really, really efficient for you. But having said that, I know a lot of you guys benefit from specific strategies. So here are three that I find useful personally. Number one is an app called Anki. And Anki is a flashcard app that you might have heard of, like loads of medical students use it. The idea behind that is that you make a flat, like an online flashcard, and then it comes up and in your like practice session. But the special thing about Anki is that once, once a flashcard comes up, you can mark it as being easy, medium, or hard. And depending on what rating you gave it, it comes up later on depending on what that rating was. So if you found a fact really easy to recall, maybe they'd ask you again in a day. If you found it hard to recall, they'll ask you again in 10 minutes. If you found it impossible to recall, they'll ask you again in one minute. And this kind of learns from your behavior, it kind of changes over time. So as you progress through your studies, as you progress through your revision, some facts that are really easy, you might see them in two months time because the whole algorithm changes. And it really uses this whole space repetition thing to great effect. I think I think Anki is really good for two things. Firstly, I think it's really good for memorizing particular facts. So I used it a lot for anatomy back in the day, whereas, you know, what's the nerve supply for particular muscles, things like that. And I used it a lot for pharmacology. So learning the names of drugs and what they do and what the mechanism of action is. In my third year, when I was doing psychology as a subject, I also used Anki like a lot to memorize particular paragraphs for to like slot into my essays. On one side of the flashcard, I would have Carpachian Blunt 2011. And on the other side of the flashcard, I would describe the study that they did, and the evidence behind it and what I was going to say about it. So therefore, in the essay in the exam, when I wanted to recall the Carpachian Blunt study, I would have kind of the information about it already memorized it. So I used it to memorize chunks that I could then drag and drop into my essays effectively. One of my friends is a Cambridge medic, he's got like first class every year. He uses Anki for pretty much everything. And he said that he can't imagine getting through Cambridge without having used Anki. And instead of making notes and lectures, what he started doing now is just going directly to making the flashcard. So yeah, if you're interested, please do check out Anki, it's free. I think you can pay a few pounds for the iOS version. But even if you don't want to pay, you can use the web version completely free of charge. I'll link it here and in the description below. Secondly, something that I like doing because I because I still can't quite break the habit that you know, I enjoy making notes, is that making notes with the book closed. So not like having the textbook open and making notes and making it all pretty and copying from the textbook like I used to do. But actually like learning a topic and then closing the book and then thinking, okay, how would I explain this topic? How would I kind of make my own notes on it. So then I write down as much as I can remember about the topic in a nice fashion with like pretty colors because that makes me feel good. And then afterwards, I open the book and see the bits that I missed. And actually, when I was preparing for my third year exams in third year, I did psychology. I ended up that was by far my best performance like ever in my life on any exams. And I think the reason behind that was that because I very aggressively use these two techniques of space repetition and active recall. So what I did, I made about 50 different essay plans initially, earlier on in the year. And then in order to commit those to memory, I just drew spider diagrams with with the book closed. So I would have a spider diagram for each essay plan. And I just draw as much of it as I could possibly remember. And then afterwards, when I was done with it, I'd look at my actual essay plan and fill out the bits that were missing. And I repeated this over over the course of like two months, leading up to the exams. And by the end of it, by the by the time the exam came around, I had these 50 really, really good essays in my head that had like 10 references each and was able to just kind of vomit them onto the paper in the actual exam. So I would fully endorse this whole making notes, making spider diagrams with the book closed as being a really effective method of active recall. And there is actually some evidence behind this. Again, it's in the book, make it stick. It's also in Professor Domboski's paper, you can read it down below. Finally, I want to talk about a third strategy. And that's an alternative to making notes. I know that this whole making notes thing, it's really hard to not make any notes. These days, if I'm in a lecture, or if I want to learn something, instead of making notes from the lecture or from the textbook, what I instead do is that I write questions for myself. And I think this is called like the Cornell note taking method. I came across that earlier today when when researching stuff for this video. The idea is that you write questions for yourself based on the material such that when you revise the material, you look at your questions and you try and actively answer them in your head or on paper or out loud or whatever. The point is that instead of passively rereading or highlighting the information like we are tempted to do, we have to engage in cognitive effort to retrieve this information from our brains. And that strengthens the connections between the information, it makes us more likely to remember it and to understand it. So I actually gave a talk about this evidence based revision thing, like three years ago when I was when I was a third year, and a friend of mine who was a first year medic at the time, after this talk, he had about two months left until the exams. And he decided that the only technique he was going to use was to just write questions for himself. So for the entire Cambridge first year medical syllabus, he wrote himself like a list of 100 and something questions. And each night before bed, he would just kind of go through them. And his revision technique was pretty much just answering these questions. And he ended up coming second in the year out of like the whole cohort. He's very intelligent in itself, but I but talking to him afterwards, he he put a lot of faith in this method of writing questions for yourself, because writing questions for yourself makes you engage in cognitive effort. And kind of the more the more brainpower it takes to recall a fact, the better strength and that connection seems to get according to the evidence at least. So yeah, instead of kind of writing notes from the textbook or from the revision guide or from the lecture notes, maybe try this method where you're writing questions for yourself. And then when you're revising the topic using hopefully spaced repetition, which we'll talk about in the next video, when you're when you're revising the topic, then you can just answer the questions in your head. And I find this to be a really, really effective strategy for getting lots of information into your head very quickly. And hopefully you can find it useful as well. So that brings us to the end of this video, I really hope you found some of this useful. Just to summarize, we've talked about why rereading highlighting, underlining and summarizing slash making notes are probably not very efficient revision techniques. If you're using them, I'm not saying you're doing it wrong. I'm just saying that, you know, if you're using these techniques, which most of us do, and you think in yourself that your revision is not very effective, or you're not really getting the results that you want, then maybe it's time to rethink some of these strategies, feel free to continue using them. But you know, what I would say is that use them but alongside do practice testing, test yourself more and then use space repetition and interleaved practice. Those are the three things we'll be talking about in future videos as well. So yeah, hopefully you found this video useful. We talked about why those three particular strategies are not very effective. We talked about some of the evidence behind active recall, I quoted three studies that you and I've given you lots of links in the in the description below. If you want to read more about this, the book make it stick is really good as well. And there's also a few podcast episodes that I've been listening to recently in preparation for this video that I'll link below. So you can find loads and loads of people around the world who've looked at all the evidence for saying exactly the same thing. They're saying that most revision techniques students like to use like rereading underlining and making notes are not very effective. And they're saying that by far the most effective techniques are active recall and space repetition. So hopefully you can apply those to your to your own revision. And I've given you three possible ways to do it. But to be honest, pretty much anything that you do that requires you to retrieve information from your brain is going to be an effective revision strategy. So yeah, I really hope you like this video. Thank you very much for watching. If you like the video, if you found it useful, please give a thumbs up or leave a comment down below. That would be really nice. If you have any questions at all, again, leave a comment down below and I'll try and be as evidence based as I can in my answers to you guys. So yeah, thanks very much for watching. Please subscribe to the channel if you are not already subscribed, and I will see you in the next video and all the best with your revision. I really hope you smash it. Bye bye.