Speaker 1: I want to start off this video with a question with lectures. Where does most of the learning happen? Does it happen before the lecture? Does it happen during the lecture? Does it happen after the lecture? I'm going to give you four options here to think about and you can, yeah, just kind of think about your answer before I go on right now, I think a lot of students and teachers go for B. They think that most of the learning goes on during the lecture, right? That's when the expert is talking. That's when the student is listening. That's when all of the information gets transmitted, right? Personally, I would go with D. All parts work together to help you learn from a lecture, but what you do before and after the lecture probably has a greater impact on learning outcomes than say the quality of the lecture itself. Now, one of the reasons that people tend to pick B is that they think that learning is primarily about information transmission. Lecture's got the information. The student needs that information. And the lecture is actually when that information is being transmitted to the student. It's kind of like the teacher is delivering mail and the student has to be at home to get it. And more accurate way of thinking about learning is as a process where knowledge and skills grow and develop over time. So productive learning is the result of several different factors coming together harmoniously, and it takes a little bit of time for that learning to come to fruition, no matter how you do it. So lectures, especially lectures that involve no interaction, no question asking, no reflection activities or time for review are basically like textbook chapters that you can't control. A lecture can be good or bad, but there's nothing about the lecture format that is particularly well-suited for learning. The popularity of lectures in higher ed has... That's why you don't stack a bunch of pillows up for your sound proofing. The popularity of lectures in higher education has nothing to do with their proven efficacy. And it has a lot more to do with economic concerns because one teacher can teach a lot of students at once. And it has something to do with tradition. It's just kind of the way they've always done it. And there isn't a big incentive for teachers to change. It's really hard to give advice on all kinds of lectures given by different teachers and all kinds of different disciplines. So what I'm trying to do here instead is to pull out a couple of examples as we walk through the basic advice that I have so that you can take these examples and take the advice and use your own judgment to adapt to whatever your particular circumstances are. Let's start with preparation. It's almost never a good idea to go into a lecture cold. That is without any preparation whatsoever. You don't know what to expect. Everything is potentially new to you. And even within say a half an hour lecture, there can be a ton of new information so much that you can really get overwhelmed so that you walk away with just a little tiny piece of what the lecturer was saying. Preparation isn't going to solve everything, but it helps you to get more out of the lecture. Ideally with preparation, you'll walk away with a more coherent understanding of the topic and probably remember some more of those details and how those details fit in. The kind of preparation you should do depends on the discipline. Suppose for instance, that you're in a calculus class and you are going to learn about a new technique to solve problems called use substitution. You don't know what that is. You just read it on a syllabus and you have no clue what that is. A reasonable thing to do would be to look up what that means before you actually go to the lecture. And you could work through a couple of example problems. So you examine some example problems where people use you substitution, and you can even try a couple of basic problems using use substitution yourself. Now there's tons of internet resources to help you with this. It's okay if you run into trouble or you don't quite understand how to do it. You're just learning about it for the first time and you're learning it on your own. The important part is to get some experience. You're planting little seeds and then the lecture is going to help water those seeds, kind of. What if you're in a history class? Well, the teacher has probably already tried to help you prepare by assigning some reading. So the first thing you might want to do is do the reading. But when a teacher says to read pages 135 to 152, what they really mean is read pages 135 to 152 and think about them. In the best case scenario, you, you have all this time and you deeply read these, these pages and you come up with all these questions and ideas as you're reading. And then you, you go into the lecture and the lecture is perfectly positioned to take you where you're at and advance your understanding and deepen your understanding. So that you get kind of the, the most acceleration that you can get out of this experience. Instead, what usually happens is we run out of time. We don't have enough time to read all the things that we're supposed to read. And the lecturer has to accommodate students with differing levels of prior knowledge and explain some things to the students that didn't read and kind of make sure everyone's on the same page as they move forward in the class. I speak from personal experience. When I run out of time, my tendency is like, well, I'm going to get through all the pages so that I can say that I did the assignment, but instead of rushing through the reading. I think as a teacher, I would rather have a student read a portion of what I assigned and then think about what they read rather than just try to rush through and read all the words so that you technically ran your eyes over the words, if I had a half an hour and I could read 10 pages and then spend, I don't know, 10 minutes thinking about that, or, or as I was reading, I was kind of taking some notes or drawing some diagrams or really trying to deeply picture and understand what I was reading. I would rather spend time doing that than just rushing through the assignment. The goals of preparation can vary. A major goal is to reduce what's called cognitive load during the lecture. So as you sit in the lecture, you're bombarded with new words, new concepts, new ideas. Some of these are procedures or processes that you might have to learn or perform later yourself. Some of them might just be ideas that you need to understand in order to kind of get to the next idea or understand the next process or procedure. When our working memory has to deal with too much stuff at once, what happens is that stuff just starts to fall away. We end up not really grasping much of anything. It can even be valuable if you're in a lecture that just has a ton of new vocabulary all the time to look up some of those vocabulary words before you go into the lecture so that when you're sitting there, it's not like, oh my God, monocloidal bacchanalia, something or other. Then you're just kind of swimming with all these new concepts that aren't clear in your head. Another goal is to give yourself something to attach that new information to that you're learning about in a lecture. One random fact is hard to remember, but a collection of related facts or related ideas is a lot easier to remember. They form a unit that hopefully makes some sense when you put them together. So you pick up a few things before the lecture, you get a few more things during the lecture, which builds on what you started, and then you even pick up a few more things during the review, which extends what you learned from the lecture. Another goal would be to get some kind of practical experience that would pair well with the theoretical or canonical ideas that you would be hearing about in lecture. Lectures don't give you practice at things, but blending practical and theoretical knowledge together is really helpful for long-term learning. Another goal that is related to everything we already said is to begin the process of organizing these new ideas and these new practices and these new facts all together. If you think about learning more as a developmental process and less of a transmission process, you want to be going through the material multiple times in different ways to get a really deep understanding of the material. So the preparation is your first pass. The lecture is your second pass, and then the review is your third pass at organizing this material. So we've seen some examples of preparation. What should we be doing during the lecture? The main job is to pay attention, but I think when, when teachers tell their students to pay attention, students think they should straighten up and that they should appear to be paying more attention, right? They should give more signals to the teacher that they are paying attention so that the teacher feels good. And the actual question, are you paying attention, had nothing to do with the attention itself, but really the appearance of paying attention. Or another thing that, that happens sometimes when you tell people to pay attention is they think, well, I really need to try to remember every word that is being said, and I need to be like a tape recorder and I need to really just exert myself in some weird way. Neither of these are what I personally mean by paying attention. Your job as a student is to pay attention in a way that helps you make sense of the lecture. And to be honest, I had a really hard time explaining what I mean by this. All the usual advice that people say applies here. You want to remove distractions if you can, especially things like phones, websites, et cetera, if taking notes helps you to pay attention, then take notes, but do so in a way that synthesizes the material or kind of summarizes little bits of it rather than taking verbatim notes. Yes, it pays to observe closely, but what are the things that you should be looking for, what are the things that you should be observing, what you do depends on the kind of class you're taking and how much you already know about what you're learning. Part of the job is to pay attention to the links between the examples or the ideas that people are talking about. If you find yourself asking questions like why is the problem solved this way and not that way, or couldn't we solve this problem a different way, or what makes this example different from that example, or what makes these two examples that look very different, actually fundamentally the same, that's a good sign that you're paying attention. If you notice an inconsistency or a tension between what the lecturer says and say what your textbook chapter says, that's a sign that you're paying attention in the right way. This is another way that preparation helps you because if you already know something about what you're learning, it's a lot easier to pay attention to it. It's more interesting. It seems more relevant. It's not just a flood of new things. And now it takes a lot of effort to pay attention to something closely. And one of the reasons that lectures are not particularly great vehicles for learning is that typically 10 to 20 minutes into a lecture, without some kind of change of format or without some kind of extra stuff to do, attention drops precipitously. One interesting line of research compares sitting in a lecture to monitoring a radar screen, right? Where you're sitting there and you're just waiting for something to happen. It's called a vigilance type of task and both show somewhat similar patterns of attention drops. If you feel like, oh man, I can't pay attention for an hour. Yeah, that's not just you. That's pretty much everyone can't pay attention. Like they are really, really closely focused on something for that long. Online lectures offer a big advantage over in-person lectures in that you can stop the lecture at any time and go back to different parts of it or speed it up. If it's going too slowly or slow it down or do anything you want to do, you have more control over the information that is coming at you. I recommend stopping the video fairly frequently. Anytime that the teacher presents an example problem, I would pause the video and I would look at that problem, maybe try to solve it, try to understand what's going on in the problem before the lecture explains what's going on. Even if I don't know how to solve it, at least try to understand the nature of it, which is going to help me understand the solution to it as well. After 10 to 15 minutes, I would typically pause the video just to collect my thoughts and figure out where we are now and what might be coming up next. Anytime that I listen to a lecture for more than 30 minutes, to me, I feel like, well, I know I've gone too far. I haven't stopped it early enough because I'm probably not getting as much out of that 30 minutes as I could have. So we've prepared, we've gone to the lecture and now it's time to review what happened. The review is going to be our third pass on this same material. I'm going to sound like a broken record in all my videos, but I do think the simplest thing that you can do to help you remember what you learned during the lecture is to just take out a blank sheet of paper, write down everything you can remember about it, try to organize and synthesize what you heard, and then use either notes or a textbook or maybe the lecture itself or the internet to fill in some of the gaps that you missed. I talked more about that in some of my other videos, so I'm not going to dwell on it here. Ideally, I think you want to do this relatively soon after the lecture. It doesn't have to be immediately after, but I wouldn't wait longer than a day or so, even if you only did this free recall exercise once a week, I think it would be immensely helpful, especially if you're not doing any other kind of reflection or synthesis of what you're learning. If your teacher gives you time at the end of every class to time, like 10 minutes to sit and collect your thoughts or something like that, that's different. You're getting that, some of that reflection time during the class instead of after the class. You can find some more creative ways to review too. You could stand in front of a mirror and explain the lecture to yourself. I sometimes do this when I don't have anyone else to talk to because I like to talk about things and verbalize things and, and figure things out as I talk. And you can talk about it with a classmate, right? And collaborating, getting two perspectives on the same ideas that you heard, probably a good idea. You can talk about it with a friend that is not in the class who doesn't have a strong background in this material, and that forces you to bring more background knowledge and they might ask questions that you didn't think to ask because they're not already in that mindset that you were in during the lecture. During the lecture, everything seems like it makes sense, right? But when, as soon as you have to explain it to someone else, you start to figure out what doesn't make sense to you. You could test yourself on the topic with practice tests. You could ask Chad TPT to give you questions on it based on the notes you've taken or based on a summary of the lecture. You could write a short instructional guide to someone else or to yourself, your future self about how to get things done in this particular area. The important part is that you do something to straighten out things in your head for a bit. Sometimes this review process is going to blend in to become the preparation for the next lecture. We're doing five lectures all on the same topic. When you start doing review after lecture one, that's helping you to prepare for lecture two. Other times the lectures like jump around in topics. And so your review is not really going to be that helpful to prepare you for the next lecture. Don't neglect reviewing things that you think you already know. Obviously you can take this too far, but it's very easy, especially if you're inexperienced to think, well, I already know that. I've already been through that. This looks familiar to me, so I'm not going to review it or think about it more deeply. In most topics that I have learned in my life, it's always much later on that I realize, oh wait, those fundamentals, those things that I learned in the beginning, I actually had a superficial understanding of those things. And now I realize how important those basic things are. I always find myself going back, wait, wait, hold up, hold up. What was, what was the first thing again? What were those first, most basic, most important things? There probably was a reason the teacher told me those things in the beginning, because those aren't the most important things. And if you understand those well, then a lot of the other topics become kind of appendages to it that make a lot more sense if you understand the fundamentals. In a lot of disciplines, there are big principles or big themes, and then there are specific cases of those themes being played out in action or those patterns being played out in action, another way of putting it is that there are examples and there are explanations that make sense of those examples. If you're in a discipline like this, it's good to have both of those kinds of knowledge in your back pocket. So you can pull out examples when you need examples to support the overall pattern. You can pull out exceptions when you need exceptions. You can also talk about the overall theme and principles as a whole. In a lot of disciplines, there are claims and evidence for those claims. So you want to understand what the claims are. You want to understand what the evidence is, and you want to understand how strongly the claim is supported by the evidence. In most disciplines, there are techniques or tools to accomplish something. One part of the learning process is growing the techniques that you have to solve a problem. But another part of the learning process is being able to use the techniques that you have more and more effectively, so there's almost two things that you're learning at the same time, if you're just focused on tools and techniques. In law school, there are rules that come from somewhere, either laws or regulations or the common law. And then there are cases that interpret those rules and there's reasoning why those rules apply in a particular situation and don't apply in another situation. In anatomy, there are lots and lots of little bits, but all those little bits work together into larger and larger systems to accomplish certain processes and create certain products for the body to live and survive and do all the things that the body does. You need to understand the bits, but part of the purpose of the bits is in these larger and larger systems. So the more that you can understand how the systems work together to accomplish certain goals, the more sense that the bits are going to make. I'm sure you can think of others. All of these are just basic frameworks for understanding new material. As you review and accumulate more and more knowledge about an area, it's really helpful to have these frameworks to help structure your understanding and your review of what it is you're learning. In most cases, the kind of review that I'm talking about here is not just doing your homework problems. There are different kinds of homework assignments. They can emphasize different kinds of things, but homework assignments tend to be procedural. It's about getting practice at doing something, usually. But what you really want to do is to link some of the conceptual ideas that come up in lecture with the procedural skills that you're hopefully developing in the homework. And if you think like, well, doesn't everyone naturally do that? Not necessarily. I've seen lots of cases where people are kind of on parallel tracks. You know, they go to the lecture, they write this stuff down, they do the practice problems. There's kind of a connection between the two, but they don't make that connection really explicit. And they don't bounce back and forth between the ideas and their actual implementation. That's where a review can come in. It can be helpful to see things all together and make things more clear in your mind. One thing you might want to do is to look at your homework assignment and try to figure out, well, which ideas or which tools or techniques apply to which questions. You're not trying to answer the questions yet. You're just trying to link what you've learned in the lecture with the homework that you're going to be doing. Now, keep in mind, these are just some basic ideas to help you make decisions during your study time. You still have to exercise your own judgment and apply these things wisely. There's not just one right way to learn from lectures. It depends on what you're learning. It depends on what your preferences are. It depends on the prior knowledge that you have already, how much you know about what you're learning. It depends on the resources you have access to. Do you have access to friends? Do you have access to books? Do you have access to practice tests? And you might be thinking, holy crap, do I have to do this before and after every single lecture that I take? And the answer is, nah, nah, you don't. The nice thing about preparing and reviewing is that even a very, very little bit helps a lot. If you spend five minutes looking a couple of things up before class or just previewing the topic a little bit, I think that's a great use of time. If you spend 10 minutes after class or five minutes at the end of the day, or even just once a week, got out a piece of paper and did a free recall exercise. The other thing is if you do start to do this kind of thing early on in the semester, it pays dividends a lot later on. So I can't tell you how many times in the beginning of the semester, when I was an undergrad and in grad school in various parts where I was basically like, you know, I'm, I'm chilling. I'm going to watch some game of Thrones for the first few weeks of class. I'm not gonna, I don't really have to do anything. I'll just keep up with the homework barely and move on with my life. But if you start to understand those fundamentals early on, it just builds and builds and builds and builds so that by the end of the semester, you might feel like, Hey, I've got a really good handle on this already, so I don't feel like I have to do a lot of preview and review and all this stuff, if you'd like this video, I am developing a membership site, which is kind of like a Patreon where members get exclusive access to great content, early access to YouTube videos. There's going to be a lot of Q and A's and maybe we'll even collaborate on research together. If you're interested in belonging to this kind of community, you can click the link in the description below, enter your email, and you will be one of the first people to know when this website launches. The advertisement has now ended. Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time.