Keeping up with your studies can be tough, especially because curriculums are getting harder. There's always more content and always that next test or assignment or exam. And honestly, it can be quite a lot with the high speed that it goes. And there are tons of people, and it might be even yourself, who are studying mammoth hours, like 40 to 50 hours a week just for school or university. And you might not be even seeing a reflection in terms of your effort equaling grades as much as you'd hoped for.
So this is where inquiry-based learning actually comes in and can solve a lot of the problems. This learning model is something that I use consistently within university that has allowed me to get a perfect GPA And I'm now in my second year of med school And the funny thing is is I'm actually studying less than I was in high school as well while still achieving top results Hey guys arch here a second year medical student and on this channel We focus on learning how to learn so we can spend our time more intentionally on the things and people that matter the most to us For this video. I'm going to be sharing my main keystone learning model that makes up my current studying system. This is specifically what I think is allowing me to achieve the top marks within medical school while giving myself enough time to focus on other commitments outside of university, whether it be my businesses, life or friends and family, all that sort of stuff. And inquiry-based learning is a less popular known sort of learning model, but it's so, so effective.
And in fact, it's actually a huge competitor to things like active recall and space repetition. Yes, they have very different uses, but honestly how much you can improve using inquiry-based learning is probably more than you can with active recall and spaced repetition. And honestly it just makes life a lot easier and more sustainable as well just because if we think about the idea of spaced repetition where you have to repeat repeat the same content in spaced intervals, essentially inquiry-based learning will lengthen how long you can wait before testing yourself again.
So ultimately what does that even mean? It just increases your retention, your memory gets stronger with these certain concepts and ideas. Now in this video, I'm going to explain to you what inquiry-based learning is and why it works.
Then I'm going to explain in more detail about how this fits into each of the stages of learning when you're preparing for an exam, for example, where you have pre-study, you have studying, revision, and then you get up to your actual exam. I'm going to be sharing some tangible tips as well so you can get started with this if you are a beginner, and then we'll get into some more advanced cases of using inquiry-based learning like mind maps, which is what I personally use every day. Now inquiry-based learning is actually pretty complex.
Let's begin by defining it. So what it really means is that you are learning through asking questions. But everyone knows that's kind of a thing already.
So why is it different from that? Well, really, it makes real world connections with exploration and high order thinking. It is basically an approach to learning that encourages students to engage more in the problem solving and experiential learning.
To put it more simply, it's about triggering curiosity in your brain and using that to fuel your learning. What this really means in technical words, again, is that makes it a lot easier for you. you to encode information into your long-term memory and at a much faster pace as well.
Now, just remember that I said encode rather than memorize. The main difference is that this allows you to have a high level of long-term recall with some of this information. And ultimately, this is what you need to get those top marks in your tests and assignments by applying the knowledge and recalling what you know to the problem at hand.
The major difference between inquiry-based learning and traditional methods that you learn in school is that traditional methods kind of focus a lot more on the outcomes than what. Inquiry-based learning focuses on the relationships and processes and reasoning required for these outcomes. So it's essentially the why's.
So let's just show you a quick example and some of these examples might seem quite obvious But if you're not doing this, you should be doing it and if you are already doing that's a good job But how can you try and I guess take it to the next level and make this more of an explicit process? So for example in maths, it doesn't really matter what the answer is, honestly, you know You can check if you're right or wrong. But the main thing is knowing the reasons why each step was used, why the answer was that and not the answer that you might have thought about, are there different ways that you could have approached it, it's a lot about figuring out figuring out the why.
And this is really important in subjects like biology as well, it's not really about figuring out you know what is the mitochondria and what does it do, rather you should think about you know why does the mitochondria do what it has to. Because what this actually means is that you're going to answer those questions the what's uh before anyway. And as you can probably think about this as well, you know, coming from this angle means that you're going to be more curious about how do these things legitimately work and why am I looking into these things. And the beauty of inquiry-based learning is that it ultimately allows you to figure out the big picture of how things relate together. And therefore, those outcomes just become blatantly obvious that you don't even need to memorize them because it's just a logical consequence of the reasons behind that you figured out.
So ultimately, all this becomes a symptom of your own curiosity. And when that happens, it just means that things like to stick a bit more. So... Does inquiry-based learning work?
Yes, it does. So the best example of this being a part of literally how the human brain thinks is by looking at a baby. A baby is able to learn and pick up a language within 12 months and then soon after we'll be able to put the sentences together after learning the words and how to speak them. They do this so much quicker than we might do if we're trying to learn a second language now. So what's one of the reasons that babies can learn so quickly compared to us?
Hopefully, we're supposed to be more intelligent than a baby, right? Well, it's because babies actually have a secret weapon up their sleeves, which is curiosity. Babies are super curious about literally everything, and that is what helps them learn so much in such a short amount of time.
So essentially, that is inquiry-based learning in its purest form. So if you've already seen my other video, pre-study is so, so, so important. if it's done correctly.
The problem is most people do pre-study completely wrong and they think that this technique is not something that works but that's just because they're not doing it correctly. Most students I talk to tell me that they just memorize all the definitions and concepts before going into class. Now really I wouldn't even call this pre-study I would just call it early studying. because it's not really setting a framework at all to connect ideas when you really start to get into the details. Essentially, it's just like getting, you know, a bunch of things thrown at you all at once, but just doing that a little bit earlier and so that it just doesn't happen as quickly.
Now, one of the reasons that this is less effective is because it actually doesn't use inquiry-based learning. The right way to pre-study is to prime yourself, kind of like you would put a primer layer on the wall just before you paint it with another color. It essentially makes things stick.
And I've explained this in so many other videos, but essentially, you know, if you think about all the knowledge that you're learning as books, you're creating a bookshelf so that you can put all those books in the right spot as soon as you learn it. Rather than having to create a whole pile of books and then eventually before your test or exam, you have to organize all of it onto a bookshelf. This is why it saves so much time. And honestly, if you remember more things as you're learning other things, you know, the more knowledge you have, the easier new things are to learn. By organizing this information, it actually makes it easier for you to recall a lot quicker.
and actually remember for a lot longer as well. Now, this is quite challenging in the beginning because it's something you've never done before, but this is really taking as much of use of curiosity as you can. And now you guys already know why it's so important to use curiosity as much as you can. It makes it relevant to you. And when things are relevant to us, it's a lot easier to remember.
That's why you don't remember the most recent number play on the car that you saw yesterday anymore. So when it comes to studying, the most important thing to begin with is getting a really good conceptual understanding about all these things and to avoid misconceptions as well. And now it's all about relationships. Concepts, facts and details only have value and meaning when they are compared to other things.
For example, a lemon is sour, not because of its taste, but because of its comparison to other fruits like apples. In mass, a single number wouldn't mean anything if there was no other numbers that existed. In biology, the mitochondria on its own is just an organelle.
but we learn about it because of its importance and how it fits into the cell and impacts all of its functions so we're finding its importance and how it plays into the big picture so ultimately relationships are what give more meaning value and importance behind the things that we're learning and as humans we're more likely to remember things that are important versus things that are not important because why would you remember them anyway for example it might be quite hard to remember a lot of facts within history and this thing happening after the next thing this thing happening at these certain dates but honestly if you can try and link all of these things together you can figure out that this war was like a logical logical consequence of this argument that happened before then which happened with this treaty and then all these things just start to come together as a flowchart. And now instead of having to memorize like 30 plus facts, you actually just understand why these facts are things that just happen. And instead of memorizing things in isolation, it just comes all together and it just fits so nicely.
Now by using inquiry-based learning, this study process is going to make curiosity be involved much more naturally and you won't even really have to think about it too much. It's something that actually happens quite organically and this is the great thing about it. So for example, if you're studying chemistry, you might be learning about electronegativity and you figure out why it's important and then that reasoning is just going to be that it's related to polarity and now you actually understand how these two things are related to each other.
As you do more of this, you're going to see tons and tons of things connecting, which really sets you up well to create a mind map that can just, I guess, consolidate everything that you've been learning and cement it. I'm still working on that video. And ultimately, this is the particular technique. that can allow you to develop a quite deep understanding of a topic.
So now that we're talking about revision, let's talk about the difference again between traditional methods which is what probably all your friends are doing compared to inquiry-based learning. Most people just grind out you know tons of practice papers, tons of practice questions, and honestly this is quite a very single-minded way of approaching things. It does work, but do you know how well it really works?
And how I guess efficient it really is? Here's the main concept that everyone has to know about. And this is called interleaving. When you're trying to learn something, you don't want to always tackle it from the same angle. And so that might mean if you're trying to learn this particular concept, you don't want to always use flashcards.
Otherwise, you're going to get really good at that particular flashcard. And as soon as you get, I guess, a question where it's used in a different way, you won't be prepared for it. So the research kind of shows us with how our brain likes to learn.
If we're learning something from many different angles, from many different ways, that information is going to stick so much better. We'll be able to apply it in more unfamiliar scenarios and that's what you want. Now for everyone who says they love practice papers, love practice questions, so just doing them, they don't even know that and that's just such a basic thing about how our brain works. There's only a very minimal form of interleaving in doing multiple questions that tackle a specific concept from slightly different angles. But honestly, that's going to be quite limited on how many practice questions you have and the quality of them and how much they're interleaving and depending on your weaknesses, you can see that there's a lot of factors here that you have to rely on to be perfect for practice papers to be like very efficient for you.
And this is honestly one of the hardest things is that there are so many misconceptions about learning and studying. So inquiry-based learning really shines when you're trying to prepare for those curveball questions because you can create that interleaving. And honestly, the type of questions that you can create here are what separate high achievers from the rest. The curveball questions that I'm talking about are so hard to prepare for because the definition of them is that you've never seen a question like it before and it's a new question in the exam.
So you can hope that the practice paper questions you have are similar just enough, but you're still going to have to take that leap. And how do you know that you're going to make it? So that's why practice papers in these particular cases for the very, very, very top marks do not matter that much.
So how can you get over this massive massive hurdle? Firstly, let's just understand that these curveball questions are really trying to see who has a very deep understanding of the content. And this is to the point where they can apply multiple concepts simultaneously at the same time and see a potential relationship that you might have not been taught originally. And so this understanding is gained by relationships. If you have a really good understanding about how all these concepts come together, you should have no worries with being able to apply this.
in your test or exam and honestly this is what preps you up to deal with these higher level application questions which is what always catches people out because honestly if you knew your stuff that well then you should know the knowledge and how to apply it but honestly we don't really reach that point because we're using techniques that don't incite a high enough level of learning. So again in your revision time you're trying to find those weaknesses trying to find all the little gaps in your knowledge and you need to use your curiosity and inquiry based learning to figure out the relationships and develop that understanding of all these concepts. So when trying to create curiosity there are two types that we can do.
One is completely natural which usually happens during pre-study where you just genuinely ask questions coming from your own curiosity and you can repeat this and repeat this until you get a good understanding of the topic however in most cases this is actually really difficult to do so you can use some pre-made questions that kind of allow you to find i guess the meaning the value the importance behind concepts and then uh trying to force you to relate them much more quickly and so we can ask these high yield sort of questions so for example why is this concept important And the second most important thing that we can be asking is how is this related to why or like what other concept there is. Starting by asking these questions is a really good way to incite that curiosity and get started with this sort of thing. And honestly, when the curiosity starts to die down, this is how you can bring it back.
And as you write these questions, you want to put it down somewhere. So you might want to do it in Notion, for example. And so you can then go about finding the answer to all of these curious questions that you have. Even if you're feeling really uncomfortable from moving from linear notes, writing down top to bottoms from the page, Honestly, just start to think about how you can attach a question on top of the information that you've been learning. This allows you to start getting in that problem solution kind of framework and understanding, knowing that all the things that we learn are there to solve a problem.
And again, this means it makes it easier for your brain to kind of know the importance of each thing that you're learning. Ultimately, you can then take this to the next level by representing this with flowcharts and mindmaps. So after you reach this level of conscious competence, that's the real name for this kind of stage where you get really good with a technique like inquiry-based learning, you can take it to the next level by going to unconscious competence by using mind maps. So you can combine the approach for inquiry-based learning and mind maps by thinking about all those relationships that you figured out throughout your questions and putting it all together onto a mind map.
And through creating this mind map, you're going to figure out more questions that you can be answering and you can just put that onto the mind map. Now, eventually you'll get to a stage. where you won't even need to have these questions written down on Notion and you can just do it on a mind map. However, I would not recommend that to anyone who hasn't even done this for at least two to three months. And that's what I do for med school.
I don't need to actually write the questions down anymore because it's an internal process in the way that I think about any information that I'm learning and so I can just do it straight away onto the mind map. But the huge thing that I kind of need to say is that this is a study technique It's more so a skill that has to be learned and developed. You need to get better with it. You'll make mistakes sort of thing. It's not just like a quick study hack because if study things like this were genuinely very easy, then everyone else would be doing it.
Everyone would be getting full marks. That's why there is a select few of people who can get very high marks or can study, you know, not that much, but get really high marks because they have really developed skills. So this is how you get started with that. If study hacks really worked, then everyone will be using them. Everyone will be getting full marks, but that's not the case.
There are many guidelines about what makes a really good and effective mind map. So I will have a video on that soon. While you wait on this, it's very important that you begin to start trying this out even before I make this video because it's setting up a priming layer for you to learn off that mind map video a lot quicker as well.
All right, so make sure to check out my pre-study video that shows you how one hour of effective pre-study can save you 10 hours of studying later on if you haven't already. And I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye-bye.