Telling people to study more does not necessarily help. In some cases it might actually worsen their performance. Taking notes is 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. If you even wait to go home and do it a couple hours later, you'll 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. 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, 15, 20, 30 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 going to 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? Understanding the name of a bone is a fact. Understanding what it does in the body gets into a concept. So in studying, sometimes there are a lot of facts. In fact, I use anatomy as a good example.
You've 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 bone, of the actual concepts, it's a lot of wasted learning, really. Just to know a name of a bone is like, yes, 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 can't do it. can't, you don't really understand it. 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 can 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.
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 sleep.
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, the biggest thing they'll tell you is I can't remember anything.
My brain's shot. It's like my memory's gone. Yeah, it is because your REMing 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.
Sylvian 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. Thank you.
It's kind of interesting, isn't it? The best advice, sleep better, and most of you will 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 as 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, what, 162 hours in a week? We all have the same amount of time. And Marty has no more nor less than me. Anybody in this room?
The real question is, what do I do with my 162 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.
On this axis we're looking at time. Here's what happens for the average student. For her, six 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 six hours. So she continued to sit at her little desk and stare at pages until midnight. She was at her desk six hours. How long did she actually study?
About 20, 30 minutes. Now, there's a simple conduct 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 100%. 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. SQ3R. Survey, that's the S. Question, that's the Q.
Then you have three 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 duck-billed 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 skizz over the content.
You don't have the search mechanism going. The reading, followed by the recitation, I talked about that. Technically, before a test, it should be reviewed.
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, they put so much time, all mass 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.