this video is conde sponsored by Skillshare check out the link in the video description to get your 2 month free trial hey guys welcome back to the channel today we're talking about studying our favorite subject and I want to introduce you to the stick method for effective studying so that's STI and C which are the four most important principles when it comes to studying or learning anything effectively and efficiently S stands for spacing T for testing I for interleaving and C for categorizing and if you can apply these four principles to your studying it's going to become a lot more efficient based on the results of hundreds of studies that have been done on students all over the world the first two spacing and testing are probably the most important ones and then I'll be talking about two other concepts interleaving and categorizing that I haven't really spent much time on this channel discussing previously there's basically like five learning packs that are really supported rigorously by research and three of them that I focus on in that chapter are testing spacing and interleaving that's a guy called David Epstein and he's the bestselling author of a book called the sports gene which is all about the science of extraordinary athletic ability and he's got a new book out soon in the UK called range which is about how generalists triumph in a world of specialists apparently I've pre-ordered it on Kindle can't wait to read it in researching these two books he's looked at a lot of the evidence behind effective learning techniques both for studying for exams and stuff but also for things like sports and he concludes much like the authors of make it stick which is another really good book that every student should read he concludes that spacing testing and interleaving are the real game changes so I'm gonna talk about each of these components in turn but I'm gonna do it in the order T s C I because I think that's the order that works personally for me as a hierarchy of importance but it makes for a less good LS nice-nice mnemonic so T s CI is the order in which we're going to talk about them let's get started if you've seen any of my previous study videos you'll know that I love to go on about this idea of active recall or retrieval practice which basically just means testing yourself but they call it active recall in the scientific research papers but honestly I think the term active recall can be a bit confusing I've had so many messages from students being like how to apply active recall to this and what does active recall mean for that the answer is is just testing testing yourself is the single most important thing you can do to boost your exam scores by a ridiculous amount and in fact in the book make it stick which again you should read and I'll put a link down in the description below the author's comment that most often when students come to them asking for tips about studying and are not happy with their exam results the simple answer is that they're just not testing themselves enough and it's hard to overstate the importance of this like some of the studies that I quote in my active recall video show that just testing yourself once is a lot better than rereading the same thing four times and it's ridiculous just how much of us think that rereading our notes or reading the textbook or a highlighting or even taking notes is a useful way to study when it's really not all of the evidence shows that the more you test yourself the more the information is likely to stick the commonest objection whenever I preach this idea if you should test yourself you should try and retrieve stuff people often say that well how do I test myself if I don't know the stuff already like surely I have to learn the content first before I can then test myself on it and my answer to that is firstly you should check out my video called how to learn new content in which I'd give a 12 minute long explanation about this but the main point is as I've said that testing yourself is integral to actually learning in the first place in fact testing yourself is so important that you should be testing yourself even before you learn a topic for the first time and here is David Epstein talking about basically testing is wonderful for learning in fact you want to test people before they've had a chance to study because it actually turns out it Prime's your brain for when you then hear an answer to retain it even if you get stuff actually especially if you get stuff wrong so there's something called the hyper correction effect or if you're quite confident about an answer and turns out you're wrong you're more likely to remember the right one when you get it again there are tons of studies that show that testing yourself before during and after studying a topic is probably the single best way to actually learn that topic so yeah I could go on about this for hours and I have done in my other videos that are linked down below and up there so you should definitely check those out if you care more about the evidence behind it and about some strategies about how you can apply testing or active recall to your own studying but now let's move on to the second most important component of effective studying and that is spacing spacing or dike all deliberate not practicing is you want to leave space between bouts of practice of the same thing so again if you practice the same thing over and over and over in one session you'll see progress right away but what you really care about is how long is this stay so as david says spacing or space repetition is the idea that you're spacing out your study sessions such that you've had a chance to forget some of the information before you then re study it and hopefully by re studying it we mean testing yourselves on that information and this relates to a phenomenon in memory research that's been around since like the 1800s called the forgetting curve and the forgetting curve is something I'm sure we've all had first-hand experience with and that's the idea that over time our memory just decays so we've all probably had that experience where we're in a lecture we like we think we learn something we think we've understood something and then we look back at it a day or a week or a month later and we're like crap where did all that information go and in fact since I seem to have become one of these study tips agony ants on the Internet one of the most common queries I go on Instagram DM is along the lines of I'm in class that I've made my notes and I've studied and I think I get it and then I just forget it the next day and I don't know why that is and I think I must be really bad because all my classmates seem to be getting it immediately the first time the answer to that is no you're not bad because this is literally how memory works you're supposed to forget stuff over time unless you re retrieve that information and re encode it and make it stick and your classmates are not getting it first time unless they're the one of the 0.0001 percent of people who have a genuinely photographic memory they are also having to put in multiple repeated sessions of learning to actually learn something there is no such thing as someone who just gets it first time around is a forgetting curve literally applies to everyone so don't worry if you find yourself forgetting stuff and as we're talking about in this video the best way to get this information to stick in the long term is firstly again to read the book make it stick but also to apply these things of spacing testing interleaving and categorizing and here is David Epstein again there was one study one famous study where two groups of people were learning Spanish vocabulary one group got like eight hours intensive on one day the other group got four hours one day and then the other four hours a month later they had the exact same studying one was just separated by a month eight years later they brought them back and the group that had the spaced practice intervals remembered two hundred and fifty percent more with no studying in the interim and so you have a certain amount you want to study it becomes more efficient if you space it out you take deliberately not practicing so this was talking about is clearly an extreme case but you see pretty much identical results reported across the entire literature on effective studying and that's the idea that spacing your study sessions is much much more efficient than trying to do everything all in one go otherwise known as cramming if you want to know more about spacing you should check out my 26 minute video all about spaced repetition and the evidence behind it and in that video I'll go into some details about how you can apply to your own studying but if you don't care about the evidence and you just want a very quick method that you can immediately apply from today you should check out my video about the retrospective revision timetable which is one of my favorite techniques for ensuring that I'm using active recall spaced and spaced repetition or rather spacing and testing to make my studying as efficient as possible which means I can then do other things with my spare time like to make videos like this thirdly I want to talk about the idea of categorizing and that is one of my personal favorite efficient study techniques I'm working on a proper long video about this where I fully talk about some of the evidence and stuff but in this video I'm just going to give a general overview and in general the main point is that if we want to learn large amounts of information it's far better for us to try and build a categorization system for that information try and build a structure around it rather than just trying to learn the information which is probably the default strategy that a lot of us would default to and there have been loads of studies in the literature whereby they get two groups of students one group of students just gets told to memorize a list of words and the other group of students gets some kind of categorization system in place for those words or gets told to create their own categorization system so they can lump certain words into different categories and in the vast majority of these studies you find that the second group the categorization group completely destroys the first group in terms of the amount that the information sticks both in the short term and also in the long term now one way to think about this is to build what I like to call a tree of knowledge around our subject around a topic and that is starting with a like a main trunk and then building a branches off it such that anytime we get any new piece of information we're able to hang it on one of the branches of our tree I'll give you an example from medical school so I used to find the topic of Hematology which is the study of the blood quite overwhelming because there's so much various things that can go wrong with the blood but then one day I sat down and decided you know what I'm just gonna build a tree of knowledge I didn't call it a tree of knowledge back then but that's kind of what I was thinking I'm just gonna sit down and build my tree of knowledge about hematology and I realized that looking through the specific looking through the syllabus looking through a few textbooks and online resources that everything within hematology can pretty much be categorized into three things problems with anemia ie your hemoglobin levels going too low secondly problems with clotting and thirdly there are cancer malignant hematology stuff and then within those we've got our own subcategories so within anemia we've got microcytic anemia normocytic anemia macrocytic anemia and within those we've got some more categories within coagulation we've got things that make you clock versus things that make you bleed within malignant hematology we've got four things we've got the lymphomas we've got leukemias we've got the myeloproliferative disorders we've got the plasma cell dyscrasia and a few other things I'm creating my tree of knowledge and I found that since creating this tree of knowledge for hematology I've started to understand the subject a lot better because now when I come across I don't know Waldenstrom's macroglobulinemia I know exactly where it fits on my little branch thing and when I come across Burkitt's lymphoma or something I know exactly where that fits in my thing when I come across antiphospholipid syndrome I'm not thinking oh crap what is that I'm thinking ah I know that that fits on that branch of the coagulation tree and therefore this is what's going on there and so overall this makes the whole subject a lot less overwhelming and I kind of wish I'd been doing this from day one of medical school for every single subject and I wish I'd started doing that before even learning the subject like when I was scoping the subject which is what I like to call it ie just sitting down with the syllabus and working out what is everything within cardiology what is everything within respiratory medicine just taking those one or two hours to sit down and build a tree for that subject would have done absolute wonders for me because then when I get new pieces of information I'm not just you know chucking it into a notebook and hoping that it sticks I'm hanging it on my tree of knowledge and therefore increasing the chances that I'm likely to retreat there are tons of other benefits of categorization but I'll save those for the proper video about it for now if you're struggling with a subject if you find yourself getting a bit overwhelmed by it try and think about it as maybe a tree of knowledge I found that really helpful in my life maybe you'll find it helpful in yours and finally let's talk about interleaving so testing spacing and interleaving means just or mixed practice is like mixing up the things you want to learn and this again has to do with forming these conceptual models for knowledge so if you're teaching kids how to learn a certain type of math problem let's say actually you have the same 20 math problems that has five of one kind five another five another five another what we usually do is you give them five of type A five of type B five of type C five type D you'd be way better off mixing those all together so again they will struggle more it'll take them longer but they'll learn again more how to match a strategy to a type of problem so this shows up in all sorts of learning studies you don't want to get to a point where you're finding a certain topic or certain skill easy because as soon as you start finding something easy it then means you're not learning as well as you could be and this can feel incredibly unintuitive we all probably have that feeling where we're learning something and we're finding it really hard and therefore well we tell ourselves as oh I must be stupid I must not understand the subject enough but actually if you're finding and learning hard that is when the learning is most happening well it's kind of like going to the gym like if you're lifting weights that you find easy it's not going to be doing anything for you but if you're lifting weights that you find hard then you're gonna be making muscles and it's kind of the same with the brain the brain is sort of like a muscle controversial but sort of like a muscle going back to this idea of testing the harder you're having to work to retrieve information the more strongly that information is going to get encoded and therefore learning should be difficult it should be mentally taxing to work which is why things like you know summarizing your notes from the textbook and highlighting they feel really productive because they're easy to do and we feel like we're I've produced four pages of a4 today and it looks really pretty with highlights and stuff but if you think back to all the times where you've been summarizing notes from a textbook I've been guilty of this myself far too many times to count it's it's too easy like it's a lot harder to actually actually think about stuff to test ourselves before looking at the book it takes a lot more mental strain and therefore we will shy away from it thinking oh my god if I'm finding it hard I must know how I must not be doing it right but in fact it's the opposite if you're finding it hard you are doing it right if you're finding it easy you're not learning anything at all and again this concept of interleaving is talked about quite extensively in make it stick so again a plug for that book if you haven't read it you should read it it's really good before we wrap up with some final thoughts I just want to give a massive shout out to Skillshare for being kind enough to sponsor this video Skillshare is a massive online learning community with thousands of classes from all sorts of topics ranging from creative odds - entrepreneurial stuff so things like photography but also things like marketing and productivity and you can sign up to the premium subscription for less than $10 a month and that gives you unlimited access to all of these high-quality classes I've recently enjoyed a Skillshare class hosted by one of my personal youtube idols his name is Thomas Frank he's got what's probably the best productivity themed YouTube channel on the internet and in this class he breaks down his own system for productivity and how he uses quick capture and how he deals with email and how he uses various different apps so I've gained a lot of tips from that that I'm trying to apply to my own personal productivity system if you fancy checking out skill shirt you can click the link in the video description and that'll give you a free two month trial in which you can explore all the classes you want and then you can continue a subscription if you feel like it I'd also put a link in the description to my own skill chef profile I am in the planning stages of a series of classes about how I make these sorts of videos so from the production side the filming side the editing side so if you're interested in that please follow me on Skillshare and then you can be up to date when I release new classes so yeah thank you Skillshare for sponsoring this video and thank you for watching if you enjoyed this video and want to see more stuff about how to make your studying much more efficient which means you can get so much more done and also do extra things with your time you should check out the playlist over there and that will contain links to some of my best videos about evidence based study tips you know I've had messages from thousands of students around the world who've said that those tips have literally changed their lives and transformed their study habits so you should definitely check those out if you feel like it thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video bye