students who study smarter have a greater awareness of their own thinking and memory
processes this awareness is called metacognition and is a learned skill
that involves thinking about your own thinking it's why high performance students tend to study
how to study it can give you a massive advantage because you start to study
far more efficiently average students on the other hand they tend to study passively and they don't
seem to know if or when they have actually learned the material therefore as a result
average students study harder they read and reread and try to memorize the content instead of truly
understanding the meaning of the content and learning a whole concept or idea you can study
passively for 12 hours but someone studying actively for four hours will probably consume
just as much information so in this video i'm gonna go over several ways how you can do that
the 60 second review the 60 second review is an incredibly useful activity that can be used
pretty much anywhere so during a lecture just after it's finished or when everyone is packing
up or even just before everyone is packing up takes 60 seconds to write a couple of sentences
summarizing the main two or three points of what you just learned in your lecture it only takes 60
seconds but it's a phenomenally effective use of that 60 seconds because you're forcing your
brain to recall and process the main two or three points in the lecture therefore you're cementing
that knowledge into your brain by moving it from your short-term memory over to your long term
memory if you carry out this 60 second activity after every lecture and you turn it into a habit
although it only takes 60 seconds over the course of the semester it can have a massively
compounding result in terms of the information that you're actually able to retain from your
lectures a slightly different version to this activity is to jot down a couple of points from
the lecture that you feel was the least clear that you didn't really understand that well again this
shouldn't take you more than 60 seconds but it will help you identify the gaps in your knowledge
and that right there is the first step to fixing them you see when you're studying smart you're
constantly analyzing how you're learning and what you're learning you're always trying to find flaws
in your study strategy and you're always trying to find gaps in your knowledge so this is a great
60 second strategy that will quickly help you find those gaps and then go ahead and fill them up and
making this activity into a habit so you're doing it daily even multiple times a day is when this 60
second strategy becomes extremely powerful i made a video on six other high performance habits that
successful students do that if you're not doing them you could be massively missing out you can
click on the pop-up banner above to watch it close your eyes and review so as i just mentioned it's
important that you're constantly trying to find the gaps in your knowledge so you can work on
fixing them but when you're reading your course material it's easy to mix up recognizing the
content as opposed to understanding the content it's easy to kind of trick your brain into
thinking you understand the topic when actually you're only recognizing the topic so this is a
common mistake a lot of students make because once you think that you understand the material
you're going to move on and learn other material right so a good way of dealing with this is to
close your books or close your eyes and recall the information if you can't recall the information
then you've not learned it well enough and you need to go back if you can recall it relatively
easily and relatively quickly then it means that you understand it pretty well and you can move on
it's a super simple tool that you can use that i still use pretty much every time i study to kind
of test myself and make sure that i actually have learned what i'm supposed to learn rewrite your
notes you'll notice that most of the strategies in this video focus on trying to eliminate passive
studying and this tip is no exception so when you rewrite your notes it gives your brain another
opportunity to process the information rather than just passively glancing through the material as
you rewrite your notes summarize and condense them down even further so when it comes to revision
for your exams you aren't having to go through a huge pile of papers trying to find the information
besides smallest summarized bite-sized statements are far easier to understand and recall compared
with paragraphs of boring text right they've also been studies that show that handwriting notes
is better for memory retention compared with typing notes on a laptop or computer so firstly
because if you're using a laptop you're far more likely to get distracted i mean
we all know how easy it is to open a new tab and just start mindlessly browsing the internet right
but a research paper titled the pennies mightier than the keyboard published in 2014 by mueller and
oppaimer found that hand taking notes is far more effective than taking notes on a laptop because
it involves deeper processing the study found that students that take notes on their laptops
more likely to just retype what their lecture is saying rather than summarizing the points in their
own words on the other hand though i'm not a fan of handwriting notes that's just me personally i
don't particularly like the process of writing with a pen and paper typing is faster for me
and just feels more fluid i guess so if you're like me and you prefer to type out your notes
just make sure that you are actually rewriting and summarizing your notes rather than copying
them down word for word the chunking technique chunking is when you take an individual piece
of information and you group them together into larger units to help you memorize them probably
the most common example of this are phone numbers we usually string the numbers of a phone number
into two or three parts right to help us remember them because by grouping each data point into a
larger hole the brain finds it easy to process and recall the information and this is mainly because
of how limited our short-term memory is according to neuroscientist daniel barr who's also the
author of the ravenous brain trunking allows us to hack the limits of our memory by using our natural
tendency to see patterns and make connections so the next time you have to remember a long list
start by separating the list into smaller groups and when you're creating these groups
look for ways you can relate units to each other by meaningful ways so by looking for connections
and associations it will help your brain cement this information into your long-term memory
test yourself frequently another strategy that is aimed to eliminate passive studying and encourage
active studying there have been numerous studies showing that self-testing is essential when it
comes to improving academic performance in one of the studies university of lewisville psychologist
keith ly taught an identical statistics course to two groups of university students
in the first group the students were asked to complete a short quiz at the end of each lecture
in the second group the students didn't have to complete any quizzes and at the end of the course
the students in the first group saw the students that had to complete a short quiz after every
lecture significantly outperformed the second group in every single exam so just a short quiz
at the end of each lecture forced the students to recall the information that they had just learned
therefore reaffirming this knowledge in their long-term memory it's why in the transforming
grades in 30 days course that i launched a couple of months ago after every single lecture for the
entire 30 days i have a short quiz at the end because it's so incredibly useful when it comes
to memory retention and memory recall it doesn't take long to complete each quiz just 60 seconds or
so but the return from that 60 seconds is huge and that's really what studying smarter rather
than harder is all about if you can implement a 60 second activity into your day that significantly
improves your memory recall why wouldn't you right and speaking of the course it's still
open for student enrollment we're offering 30 lectures to help you study more efficiently
over 30 days we're offering worksheets a productivity planner a private facebook community
group and one-on-one coaching and on top of that we have a 50 promotional discount there's a link
in the description below if you want to check it out so when you are studying don't just read your
textbooks passively or take notes in class without even thinking about it study smart by quizzing
yourself on key concepts particularly at the end of the study session or at the end of a lecture
just spending one or two lectures at the end of a study session can have significant improvements
on your grades learn don't memorize so i see far too many students in my transform your grades in
30 days coaching program memorizing everything they read without trying to understand it
so they're studying really hard they're putting in the hours but then when their exams come
around their grades don't match with the number of hours they're putting into their studying
because often exam questions are structured in a way that requires the application of knowledge
but once you understand the material you'll be able to answer any question on that particular
topic that might come up and you can explain it very well i guess when you memorize something
you learn it on a very basic level whereas when you truly learn something then you understand it
on a far deeper level the more paths in your mind that connect new information together
the easier and more coherent that data becomes therefore the better position you'll be to answer
any exam questions because pretty much the whole concept of study smarter not harder can be summed
up in one sentence study actively rather than passively if you're prone to studying passively
then you're wasting a lot of time studying actively and fully understanding your material
it takes time you'll make a lot of mistakes you'll forget a lot of things you'll probably
get frustrated but these areas are important in their own right it just takes patience and i used
a lot of advanced study methods to trigger my brain into memorizing a lot of information in a
short amount of time when i was at university and i made a whole video on it on how i went
from d grades to a grades you can click on the card on the screen to watch it alternatively
i made another video on how i'm able to study for 12 hours a day
again you can click on the card on whichever video you choose i'll see you over there