In this screencast I'm going to discuss how to study.
This is the second in a series.
The idea is based on the literature from psychology about how learning takes place.
The first screencast discussed practice testing, here I'm going to discuss distributed practice
and interleaved practice.
So one approach to study might be to spend an hour studying calculus, for example.
And then the next hour also studying calculus and then the next hour also.
That's not the best approach based on the literature.
Instead it's much better to spread things out.
So study a topic, wait, and so this is the important aspect, as you wait longer before
you study again, not surprisingly you're going to forget more.
So, for example, if this were one or two days, and then you study again, you'll have forgotten
much of it.
So the trick is to make this time so the information is barely retrievable, in other words, you
want to be able to retrieve it, but it's not going to be easy, you have to work to retrieve
it and that actually reinforces, and then after you study again.
Now you wait longer than before, here I'm saying you wait longer, you forget more, so
you can't wait too long, but after the second study, waiting longer and then studying again
is going to result in longer term retention, and then of course, the idea is wait even
longer and then study again continuing this idea, and part of the concept behind this
approach is that if you are able to retrieve something from memory it's going to be even
more retrievable in the future.
One of the studies that looked at this is fairly dramatic in the differences.
So this is looking at the proportion of answers that were correct, and this is doing a test,
and there were six study sessions for the black circles there were no days between those
sessions and the retention percent correct looks really good, but what you'll notice
then after a 30 day wait following the last study session the retention is the lowest
of the three approaches.
This case there's one day between sessions, this case actually there were 30 days but
let's look at for one day instead of on the same day, same amount of studying, retention
is significantly higher, and this is the idea of spacing out the studying, and this was
for even spaced, even better where the spacing gets longer.
And so this relates to the first topic about practice testing, that practice testing is
better when it's distributed, then it's going to be better than just distributed study.
So spacing out the practice testing is desirable based on these studies.
The third one is interleave practice, and the idea is if I have two hours of study,
I could spend this on one topic, for example, solving a certain type of differential equation.
Studies would say you don't want to do that.
You want to spend some time on topic one, then spend some time on topic two, which certainly
can be related but not the same thing in the studies, for example, might be, some of the
studies were solving different types of math problems, but all in the same general area
of geometry, and then topic three, and then maybe topic two, and maybe topic three, maybe
topic one, but the idea is this actually improves learning, and let's look at some data.
So this compares blocked approach we said we don't want to use, versus interleaving,
so again notice the idea that the practice performance, the accuracy is less when we're
practicing using this approach, but it's dramatically higher then on a delayed test the test performance.
So studying and right at the time, like we talked about, performance is not going to
be as good, but then the actual longer term retention performance is dramatically better.