Speaker 1: Marty Lobdell's lecture is one of the most popular studying videos on YouTube. In this video, I'm going to extend his advice by answering some of the questions that come up when you start to implement the stuff he's talking about. Questions like, what kinds of breaks should you take? How should a study group actually work? What should you do with the fact that it's easy to confuse recognition and recall? Let's get started with breaks. Breaks are really, really undervalued. It's not just that breaks can help you feel good, or they're generally a nice thing to have. It's that building breaks into your study schedule will fundamentally improve your learning outcomes. Neurons in your brain have to physically grow as you learn. And there is an immense amount of research, both in neuroscience and psychology, that suggest how breaks and rest positively influence learning outcomes over no resting comparison groups. My recommendation is to do something that is either physically active, outdoors, or social, or some combination of the three. Physical activity has loads of benefits, both for brain and body health. It also helps you sleep well, which positively influences learning. Being outside, especially in a natural environment, is positively associated with better moods and more flexible creative thinking. Obviously some outdoor environments are better than others. I also recommend doing something that is completely different from what you were just doing. Which is why interacting with another human face to face can be a nice thing to do. Because a lot of studying is solitary and isolating. If you're studying on a computer or screen of some sort, I think taking a break from the screen can be a good idea. Shoot some basketball, play some music. Staring at screens for long periods of time does create eye strain, even if you're not entirely conscious of it. You can even just sit down, close your eyes, and do nothing. Recent research suggests that a lot of good memory consolidation comes from these moments. Professor Lobdell makes a great point about creating positive study associations. So don't study in environments in which you are used to doing other things. Don't study in your bedroom if you can help it. Don't study where you game. Don't study where you mindlessly scroll through your phone. But there is a trade-off between always studying in the same location and studying in a variety of locations. Studying in the same place all the time can help you create these positive study associations so that when you sit down, your brain says, yes, I am ready to study. But studying in different places has advantages too. Generally speaking, studying the same material in a variety of locations creates better memory for that material. This effect is pretty reliable. It's pretty easy to replicate, but it's not that large. And it'll be completely swamped if you're studying in an environment where it's easy to get very distracted. What I suggest is building good study habits first. And then if you want to kick things up a notch, incorporating some variety into the settings in which you study. Maybe you don't have a specific room or a special place that you can dedicate to studying. You can still leverage the idea of positive study associations by always doing the same thing before you sit down to study, maybe it's going for a short walk, maybe it's looking out a window. Maybe it's brewing a cup of tea, whatever it is, you want to do it reliably before you sit down to study. And over time, the link between the cue that you're creating, which is that thing that you're doing before you're studying and your brain moving into study mode will become closer and closer. Now, I disagree a little bit with professor Lobdell's recommendation on note-taking. And I have a longer video about why I think in general, you should be taking relatively few notes during class. But if you are going to take notes, you want there to be a reason. To take a note. What I mean by this is that your attitude going into the class should not be, well, you know, I'm just going to write down every single thing my teacher says. This is a serious mistake that a lot of students who never learned to take proper notes make. In most cases, I think this disrupts the sense-making process that you should be engaging in when you are attending a lecture. What should you be taking notes on? Well, something that you didn't expect, something that was surprising to you. Two things that seem in conflict with one another. An interesting analogy or an example. An open question that you don't seem to know the answer to. A reference to something that you want to look up later. These are the kinds of notes that I think you should be taking. This is not, not an exhaustive list. Now there are other things you can do to maximize how you learn from a lecture, like prepare properly. But that is a topic for another video. Professor Lobdell makes an important distinction between shallow and deep processing. Shallow processing involves paying attention to the superficial details of something. So for instance, how many vowels a word has or whether a word has capital or lowercase letters. Deep processing is usually understood in the psychological literature as being about the meaning of things, especially the meaning of words. This is a good basic idea to keep in mind. You want to spend more time on the deep end than the shallow end. Here is a slightly more advanced idea, which I think is also quite helpful, which is the notion of transfer appropriate processing. So we talked about shallow processing. We talked about deep processing. This is transfer appropriate processing. The idea behind transfer appropriate processing is that how you initially encode information. How you initially process information that you are reading about or learning from depends on how you are going to use that information in the future. To see how this works. Let's look at how people remember words in psychological experiments. So there's a bunch of experiments where psychologists have people remember lists of paired words. So on one side we have cues and on the other side we have targets. And the goal is to remember as many of the targets as possible. If we push people to pay attention to the link between the cues and the targets, kind of like a flashcard, then they will do better on a cued recall test, right? If they see the cues, then they won't be able to provide the targets, but they won't do so well on a free recall test where we just ask them to remember all of the targets that they saw. On the other hand, if we get people to pay attention to the structure of the targets by grouping them into meaningful categories, for instance, they will do quite well on a free recall test, but they won't do nearly as well on a cued recall test, how you want to encode information, how you want to organize all the stuff that you are learning in your brain depends on what you are going to do with that stuff in the future. This is part of the reason why realistic applied practice early on in the learning process and the form of well-designed practice tests or literal practice experiences can improve learning. When you get a better idea of what you are going to be doing with all the stuff you are learning, it helps you to choose an appropriate encoding strategy, an appropriate study strategy for that material. Study groups can be extremely helpful to students if they are structured properly. If they're not, they can be a complete waste of time. First of all, I would aim to have two to four people in a study group. Three to four is probably ideal. Five is possible, but pushing it a bit. My recommendation here just comes from experience, structuring student groups and observing the group dynamics. You want a group where everyone feels like they can contribute. And when you have some of these larger groups, it's easy for people to attend, but not really participate. Before meeting, everyone should do their own individual work. If you're working on problem sets, for instance, everyone should try solving the problems on their own first before they come to the group with any questions or problems that they had. And one of the reasons for this is that when everyone tries to solve problems collaboratively, it's easy for a group member to think they understand something really well when they actually don't. Now, when you're working with someone who understands the material really well, it can all seem like it makes sense to you. But then when you go to do the problem individually by yourself, you might realize, oh crap, I don't actually know how to do this. You want to figure out those, oh crap moments much earlier before you meet with your group. Now, of course you want to meet at a place and time when you can focus on the material. This is the same idea of creating positive study associations that we talked about earlier. Now, if they're friends, you can go hang out with them at a different time and place, but don't try to mix the two together. Setting up some basic norms for interaction can be really, really important. It's good to build trust with your other members so that you know that when they give you criticism or feedback, or when they say that you're wrong about something, that they are doing it because they are trying to help you and not just because they want to be a jerk. Sometimes you end up in these situations where one person is doing all the work and the other people are just sitting there watching this other person do all the work. This can be a really dysfunctional situation, but I think it's useful to distinguish two varieties of this. One is where the people who are weaker in the subject matter either can't, meaningfully participate or won't meaningfully participate in the group. In that case, I don't think there's any purpose in having a group in the first place and the group should just disband. But in some cases, the less knowledgeable people know enough to ask interesting questions, even if they can't explain the answers to those questions. In that case, the more knowledgeable person is probably still getting a fair amount of value out of this study group because they have to answer these questions and they have to clarify their explanations. Which helps them to clarify their own understanding. A lot of times teaching others or preparing to teach others leads to beneficial learning outcomes for the teacher. Highlighting is not a good strategy. I discuss a completely different approach in these two videos that I have linked in the description below. But the badness of highlighting also relates to the thing that we are about to discuss right now. One of the most important points that Professor Lobdell makes is that students often confuse recognition for recollection. This is usually what happens when you reread a sentence that you highlighted. Oh yeah, I remember this. Being able to recall the meaning of the sentence without any reference material is a completely different cognitive process and a much harder thing to do. Naive study methods tend to be input heavy. We read a lot and we reread a lot. More effective study methods have a balance between input and output, especially output oriented towards synthesizing and organizing what you are learning. Applying what you know in a test or in the real world is output. You have to recall information or skills and apply them correctly. Self-testing study strategies, which force you to recall information and apply it, offer a variety of benefits. But here are two. The extra effort that it takes to recall information rather than just reread it leads to large learning benefits in the long run. This is an extremely reliable, robust effect. I have more references in the description in case you're interested. Self-testing study strategies are also informative. They tell you what you know and what you don't know so that you can make more informed decisions about what to study in the future. Rereading as a generic study strategy, like I'm going to go reread chapter five, does not do that. I love that Professor Lobdell talks about the skill of reading textbooks, which is a completely different skill than say reading novels or newspapers or something. But I think a lot of people have a misunderstanding about what that skill entails. They think that they should be sucking up information like a vacuum, but that's not what reading a textbook is about. Your brain is not just a receptacle for information. Learning from a textbook is about creating knowledge through interaction with the text. That means that you are not reading it linearly necessarily. Making sense of the material is priority number one, and every single action flows from that. Sometimes you'll be flipping back to an earlier example to compare it with something that you're reading about right now. Sometimes you'll be pausing to imagine a hypothetical example. Sometimes you'll be asking questions or making predictions or generating explanations about what's going on. Whatever you do, don't just be a receptacle. That's it. I hope this was helpful. You can let me know in the comments. Links to a lot of related videos are down in the description below. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.