Study Smarter, Not Harder: 4 Techniques to Boost Your Learning
Effective studying begins, first of all, by identifying that studying is not a punishment, but an opportunity to expand your horizons, shape your observations about the world, and elevate your spirit.
To increase the efficiency and experience of your study sessions, our objective, today, is to become familiar with 4 scientifically proven techniques to boost your learning. By adopting them you will get the most out of the classes that you participate in, tutorials that you watch, and books that you read.
Technique 1: Have a study schedule
‘If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail’
Benjamin Franklin
Having a study schedule can be helpful in maintaining your peace of mind, your activities organized, and working with spaced repetitions, which can substantially increase the material’s retention and learning.
To design the study schedule you can:
- Identify your learning preferences
- Organize your agenda to fit the study
- Set the duration of your study sessions
- How many days of the week you will study and what time
Creating a study schedule is easier with tools like Google Calendar, Toggl, Trello, Notion, or any device that you can use to organize, visualize and keep track of your daily activities.
Technique 2: Feynman Technique
“Nobody knows what life is about and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Almost everything is really interesting if you dig deep enough. “
Richard Feynman
Who was Richard Feynman? Not only an excellent student but an incredible teacher. Feynman was, moreover, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, known for his simple, efficient, and dynamic teaching.
His technique works by identifying the parts of the concept that you’re not familiar with, deconstructing it to its basic foundations, then explaining it as you would to a five-year-old. How can you do this?
- 1st. Select the concept you are looking to learn
- 2nd. Write in a notebook, or speak, a simple explanation of the concept (imagine explaining it to a child)
- 3rd. Identify the part of the concept that is difficult for you to explain (this is the content that you need to focus your attention on to learn and review).
- 4th. Simplify again, imagine that you are explaining this to a person who is not familiar with this concept.
Feynman’s technique is powerful because it allows us to identify what we haven’t learned, deconstruct these ideas to their basic elements, reconstruct them, and then try to explain them to someone else (you could also record your voice or a video teaching that subject).
Technique 3: Take practice tests
Passively rereading a text, or simply reviewing your notes can take you to a certain point. If you want to test your knowledge, you should practice what you’re learning with online tests, exercises, and discussion groups. There is a 2011 study that showed students who tested themselves with a practice test after learning the material were able to retain more than 50% of the information in comparison with their peers who had not taken the test.
Technique 4: Active recalling
Normally we think of learning as a process in which you receive information and then test your knowledge. However, by actively recalling the information, we are testing ourselves in every stage of the revision process. When your brain retrieves information, it strengthens the neural pathway to access that information, and, as a consequence, you can remember that information more easily.
Some tips to use active recalling are:
Closed book
- Take notes with your book closed, without consulting any material, just your memory.
- Write down as much as you can remember, then open your material to consult what part you have missed.
Fewer notes, more questions
- Before taking notes about the material, ask questions about the main ideas of the content, and try to answer them without consulting the material.
When you are revising the material, interact actively with it. Put your knowledge into action and engage in cognitive effort. This will be worth your time.
Conclusion
These four techniques can substantially increase the efficiency of your study sessions, how easily you can recall information, how quickly you learn new concepts, and how meaningful your experience is while studying.
Each of these techniques deserves a separate post (very likely this will happen in the future), but for now, our objective was to show you a synthesis of active studying and how you can apply that to your daily practice. We hope that these techniques can help you with learning better. If you like this post, spread the message! See you in our next post.
