This is a flashcard.
More specifically, it's a bad flashcard.
And by the end of this video, you're gonna understand
exactly why because today, we're talking about
how to make effective flashcards
and how to study them more efficiently.
Now, flashcards are an incredibly powerful
learning tool because they promote active recall,
the process of actively retrieving memories
out of your brain, which is one of the most efficient
learning strategies there are.
But flashcards are tools made by human beings
and as you probably know, things made by humans
come in varying degrees of quality.
For example, my girlfriend's art versus my art.
However, when we go into the making of a thing
with the best practices in mind,
we can come out with a better product and in
today's video, I'm gonna give you eight
specific rules for both making better flashcards
and for studying them more effectively.
Now, for the purposes of this video,
I figured I would need some flashcards of my own
to use as examples.
So I've gone ahead and issued myself a challenge
and that is to learn and memorize the entire
periodic table of elements because
believe it or not, I actually never took chemistry
in high school.
I had a really busy schedule with other classes at the time
and just never got to it, so I've gone ahead
and started making some flashcards,
which I will be using in the course of this challenge
and we're gonna use these to demonstrate
the elements of good flashcards.
But first, we have to start with a more general tip,
which is to simply make your own flashcards.
I know a lot of people like to share their flashcards
with their friends and for people
who study flashcards on computers or on apps,
there are entire online communities where you can upload
and download pre-made decks and I think
these have their uses in certain cases,
but in most cases, it's gonna be much more effective
for you to make your own flashcards.
One of the most integral and important parts
of learning is the process of intaking information
and really wrangling with it on your own
and creating your own words and your own forms
out of that information.
That's gonna build really strong neural pathways
and those are gonna be unique from the neural pathways
of somebody else and if you just take pre-made cards
made by somebody else that you didn't have to do
any work to create, you're denying yourself
that entire part of learning process.
So, now that you know the importance of making
your cards yourself, let's get into the actual
nitty gritty of what makes a card good
and the first tip I've got for you is to add pictures
to your cards and to mix them up with words.
Now, in cognitive psychology, there's a principle
called the picture superiority effect,
which describes how people remember images
and pictures much better than they do words
and from an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense.
Written language is just a system of
arbitrary symbols that people made up
and when we look at things on a grand scale,
it really hasn't been around for all that long.
Plus, our brains are adapted to be very sensitive
to imagery.
The locations of food, the animals that'll think
you're food, the animals that won't think you're food
but they'll still completely mess you up, et cetera.
By adding pictures to your flashcards,
you can make them a lot more memorable
and personally, I like to do this by drawing
on my flashcards, but you can also just print out
pictures from the internet and glue them on
or if you're using an app or a computerized flashcard
program, a lot of them will allow you to easily
import pictures.
But you can take this one step further
by making sure those pictures are next to words.
In 1985, there was a study done in Canada
that showed that descriptive sentences
added next to pictures made those pictures much easier
for people to recall.
Now, if you take a look at my chemistry flashcards here,
you might think they look a little bit weird.
But that's actually on purpose because they're
demonstrating the third tip I've got for you,
which is to use mnemonic devices on your flashcards.
Now, a mnemonic device is really anything
that helps you create associations between
pieces of information in your mind.
The classic one is the acronym, ROYGBIV,
which helps you remember the order of the colors
in the visible light spectrum, but it can really
be anything and I'm using associative imagery
on my flashcards.
For example, my flashcard for magnesium
as a magnemite asking for more goulash, which is a
completely ridiculous picture but, it helps me
remember the association between Mg
and magnesium because magnemite sounds like Magnesium
and more goulash is a good way to remember Mg.
Now, the more weird and crazy and wacky these pictures are,
the more easily you're going to remember them
and remember, you're making your flashcards
for yourself, so it doesn't matter what anyone else
thinks of them or whether or not those associations
would work for someone else.
It's just for you.
So, the next few tips I've got for you guys
really go hand in hand.
The first one is to have only one question or fact
one each one of your flashcards.
Now, doing this is gonna help you avoid
what are called Illusions of Competence.
Basically, our brains can really easily confuse
recognition with recall.
When you recognize something, you're basically
affirming to yourself that yes, I've seen this
or I've been exposed to it before.
But recall is different.
Recall is actively retrieving something out of memory
without again, being exposed to it.
And our brains can really confuse these things
if we're not careful.
So, here's an example.
Say you're taking a history of flight class
because obviously, airplanes are awesome
and now you're studying for a test
where you need to know some information
about the first airplane, the Wright flyer.
So, you make yourself a flashcard.
You put First Airplane on the front,
but then on the back, you put several different facts
and here's where you can run into trouble
because later on, when you're studying and you see
First Airplane, you might remember that it flew in 1903.
You might remember that it was called the Wright flyer
and you might even remember that it flew four times.
But maybe you forgot that it used a sprocket chain drive
to drive the propellers.
And then you turn it over and you say to yourself,
"Oh yeah, I do remember that."
And then you put it aside.
So, by making four individual cards
for each of these facts, you're guaranteeing
that you're getting each one either right or wrong
and that's gonna help you to study the ones
you got wrong more efficiently and avoid
those illusions of competence.
Now, on a related note, we have the fifth tip here,
which is to break complex concepts or questions
down into simpler questions.
And you can run into a lot of situations like this one,
where let's say you're trying to learn
the different groupings of elements
on the periodic table.
And there's lots of them.
There's the alkali metals, the transition metals,
there's some noble gases.
So, maybe you go and make a flashcard like this
where all these groupings are a different color
and you have to name all of them.
Well, once again, this is a bad flash card
because maybe you know some of those groupings.
Maybe you know all but one, but that one grouping
you didn't know, there's gonna be an illusion
of competence and you're gonna think that you knew it
just by looking at the listing on the back.
So instead, make flashcards like this
that only highlight one of those groupings
and make sure that you know it before putting that
flashcard aside.
So, now that you guys know some of the best practices
for making your flashcards, it's now time to move over
into how to study them.
I've got three really important tips
in this section of the video for you guys
starting with the first one, which is
to say your answers out loud
when you're studying your flashcards.
This is kinda just a way to mentally commit
to your answer before you actually look
at the back of the card, which helps you,
again, avoid those illusions of competence
and helps you make sure that you're not recognizing
the answer and mistaking that recognition
for recall.
Make sure that you actually know the answer.
Now, the second tip here is to make sure you study
your cards from both sides and this is a way
of creating neural pathways in your brain
that work in both directions so that way,
if you're asked either side of a question,
you'll be able to trace that neural pathway
back to the answer.
For example, if you only studied the chemical symbol,
Be and you knew that it stood for Beryllium,
but then you were later on asked,
"What's the chemical symbol for Beryllium,"
you might not be able to get back to Be if you didn't
study the cards in both directions.
So, make sure you do.
And lastly guys, my final tip for you here
is to realize that flashcards are not a silver bullet.
They're just one method of reviewing material
and they are situational.
They're just like, say, a bow and arrow, right?
You wouldn't use a bow and arrow in every
single situation.
You wouldn't use it up-close no matter how good
of a Hanzo player you think you are
and flashcards are the exact same way.
You have to know the right situations to use them in.
A lot of information ties into an overall
visual hierarchy or an organization and with flashcards,
you kind of lose that.
For instance, the periodic table is a really,
really powerful visual tool and if you were to say,
try to memorize all the atomic numbers of the elements
with flashcards, you'd really be doing your brain
a disservice because learning the periodic table
and all the visual representations
and relationships is much more effective.
Also, make sure that you're learning before
you're reviewing because flashcards often
aren't the best tool for teaching you
the underlying concepts, which may help you learn
facts much more efficiently.
So, those are my eight tips for improving the way
that you make and study flashcards
and right now, you might be thinking to yourself,
"Wait a minute, Tom skipped something."
And yes, I did, because there's one additional
incredibly effective technique for learning
and studying that goes hand in hand with flashcards
and that is spaced repetition.
But that's such a complex topic and I really wanna
dig deep into it and teach you guys the science behind it
and how to use it effectively both on paper
and with apps, so that is gonna be
the subject of next week's video.
Until then guys, thank you so much for watching
and if you've got additional tips about flashcards,
I would love to hear them down in the comments below.
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