Telling people to study more does not necessarily help. In some cases it might
actually worsen their performance. Taking notes, so vital but most students who do
it haven't learned a very simple rule. The first moment you get after a class
ideally right after the class, you should sit down with your notes and expand on
everything you jotted down, give it depth flesh it out, okay? If you even wait to go
home and do it a couple hours later, you will have forgotten some of your own
notes. How do you know you know it? If you can look at it, go to the next one
read it and then stop and go back to the one before, look up in the sky and in
your own words say what that was about, yeah you know it. Now a lot of students
don't realize how much we're controlled by environmental cues. Get a little lamp
and it becomes your study lamp so if you have to study in your bedroom, turn on
the lamp and start studying. The moment you lose your edge, fifteen, twenty, thirty
minutes later turn the lamp off, get up and leave the
desk. What you're training yourself - to study while seated there and it becomes
increasingly automatic, as did the raising of the hand.
You sit, turn the lamp on and you're ready to go it's like magic. Your brain
has to be focused to be really studying not time-sharing back and forth. The more
active you are in your learning, the more effective and yet increasingly I have
students who think studying is reading it over and over and they're gonna have
some magical thing where they suddenly understand it and remember it well. First
you have to decide, what am i learning? Is it a concept or a fact, okay?
Understanding the name of a bone is a fact, understanding what it does in the
body gets into a concept, okay? So in studying sometimes there are a lot of
facts, in fact I use Anatomy as a good example. You
got to memorize bones, muscles, organs tissues a lot of it but if you simply
memorize and don't understand the function of it, the comprehension of the
actual concepts it's a lot of wasted learning really, just to know a name of a
bone is like yeh so what? But in most college classes what we as professors
are most concerned about is that you grasp the concept because concepts once
grasped, will stay with you a lifetime. Can you put the concept in your own words? If
you can't, you don't really understand it okay, it's not meaningful to you. To make
it meaningful is a struggle. It's probably the biggest struggle you have
as a student but it's a struggle you need to do or you're wasting your study
time. People are incredible at confusing recognition with recollection. Your
visual recognition threshold is so great you could see a person once, see them
years later and go 'I know you.' You've highlighted the most important stuff, you
now go back to study it and you say oh I remember it! So do you study it? No. So
what don't you learn? The most important part of the chapter. Most of you undo
good studying by not sleeping adequately.
We're not sure exactly how but there's something going on and it involves the
hippocampus, it involves the storage from a transitory long-term memory to a
permanent - what we call consolidation but we're getting increasing evidence that
that consolidation process is dependent on rapid eye movement sleep which if
you're an adult happens about every hour and a half once you fall asleep. If
you're not getting a good night typically around eight hours, you're not
getting enough REM. What you've studied doesn't become permanent and I can tell
you there are studies that show simply by getting better rest, some students
improve markedly in their performance because their brain now stores it a lot
more efficiently. By the way if you know anybody with sleep apnea, biggest thing
they'll tell you is I can't remember anything, my brain is shot. It's like my
memories gone. Yeah, it is because your REM-ing isn't happening, because you wake
up so often and you can't consolidate and store permanent memories. Here's the
funny thing. There's no money to be made by telling people to get more sleep, so
you don't hear about it on TV. Sylvan isn't telling you to get better sleep
because they don't make any money. I tell students and they go yeah that's nice
but they continue to use their time for other things. It's kind of interesting
isn't it? The best advice, sleep better and most of you'll do better. Most of you
won't even begin to take it and I know why you've got so many other things to do. I'd
ask you this, are they important? Is studying and learning the most important
thing you're doing is a student If so maybe you need to give up some of the
other activities. I have students tell me I don't have enough time. There's two-
what- 162 hours in a week? We all have the same amount of time. Marty has no more
nor less than anybody in this room. The real question is what do I do with my hundred
and sixty two hours? What I want to do is show you graphically what I'm talking
about. Let's say this is efficient studying and
I know there are no numbers there but higher means more efficient, lower means
low or no efficiency and this axis we're looking at time. Here's what happens for
the average student. For her, 6 o'clock in the evening after her supper at the
residency dining hall, she plopped herself down at her little study area
and started studying but here's what happened. By about 6:30 she was in a
major slump but what was her goal? To study 6 hours so she continued to sit at
her little desk and stare at pages until midnight. She was at her desk 6 hours, how
long did she actually study? About 20-30 minutes. Now there's a simple concept in
psychology that all of you are aware of. Things that are reinforced, we tend to do
more of, things that are punished or ignored we tend to do less of. You know
we operate by those principles to a large degree. If you're sitting there for
six hours, are you feeling good? No. Once you get here, you're looking at your book
going I hate geography, I hate literature I hate psychology
all the things we're trying to get you to fall in love with, you're hating it
and so her actual good studying was followed by five and a half hours of
pain and misery. I would bet you, I don't know for a fact, that as the quarter
progressed she sat down
and finally she was done before she even started. She sat down and just stared at
a book and she flunked every class. The moment you start to slide, you're
shoveling against the tide. What you need to do is what? Take a break. Here's what's
cool about it. You can study for a half hour, it doesn't take a half hour break
to recharge your batteries. For most people, about five minutes and this is
where you go away, do something fun for five minutes and actually say this is my
treat for having studied for 30 minutes effectively. Go back and here's what
happens. Your efficiency is nearly a hundred
percent. Study a half hour, take a break study a half hour, study a half hour, now
had she done that over a course of six hours she would have got about five and
a half hours of serious studying and about a half hour of total break time.
SQRRR. Survey that's the S, question that's the Q, then you have 3 R's - read recite
review. So how do you do the survey? These are not novels. In a novel you wouldn't
want to read the last page, would you? Find out who done it, it'd ruin the whole
thing but this is a textbook so what you do is
you actually go through the entire chapter, you look at pictures okay what's
this about apples what's this about a duckbill platypus
okay and what you're doing as you survey you ask questions. It only takes a couple
of minutes to survey a chapter in any class. As you're surveying you
simultaneously raise questions. What you're doing then is causing you to be
looking for answers and this is a powerful thing. How many of you have
noticed when you're looking through a newspaper for a piece of information, you
can find it, it kind of jumps out at you but if you're just kind of reading it
haphazardly, kind of casually, most of what you read you don't even remember.
There's something about it and I can't explain it, I can only describe it. If you
intend to find something, you find it and I've got a little demonstration I could
have brought where I actually show a placard with the words Boston and London
printed on them and I hold it up for 20 seconds. Out of a group this size, maybe
two or three of you would see Boston and London because before I do it, I tell you
to look for letters, symbols and numbers. I create what's called a set. You're now
expecting not to see words but letters and even though Boston and London are
printed on diagonal, most people don't see it. Likewise if you just kind of go
through a book without asking questions first
you kind of skim over the content. You don't have the search mechanism going,
okay? The reading, followed by the recitation, I talked about that.
Technically before a test it should be review.
It should be in the barn. Now you're just touching up to make sure you haven't
lost anything or confused anything but I know how this works because we schedule
tests, most students don't start studying until shortly before an exam and much
like my friend, it puts so much time all massed together and only study for about
a half hour, pull all-nighters so they don't get the good rest, come in and do
poorly. You're undoing yourself. If you start studying early and do some of the
things I've talked about, by the time you get to the test
you're just reviewing at that point, not truly studying.