Transcript for:
การเรียนรู้เนื้อหาเป็นครั้งแรกอย่างมีประสิทธิภาพ

hey guys welcome back to the channel if you new here my name is Ellie I'm a junior doctor working in Cambridge and in this video I want to talk about how you as a student can learn content for the first time so if you're watching this video then hopefully you've seen two of my other videos on this channel about evidence-based study tips the first one is about effective recall and the second one is about spaced repetition and if you haven't seen those videos they'll be linked here and there and down below and everywhere I'd really suggest you watch those videos first because I've had literally hundreds of messages from students all around the world who've said that those videos have changed their lives and changed their study techniques to the point that they're much more efficient and are getting much better marks active recall basically means testing yourself and spaced repetition is basically you know spacing your testing of yourself across you know intervals over or over a period of time but in these two videos I talked about the evidence behind them and explain exactly how you can go about using active recall and using spaced repetition to supercharge your study techniques and to make yourself much much more efficient and getting information into your brain but that's all well and good it's all well and good knowing that we need to test ourselves and we need to space our testing of ourselves over time but a question that I've got from a lot of people has been how do you actually learn the content for the first time and surely in order to revise the content you have to learn the content first and that's the question that I'm gonna be trying to answer in this video so the way I like to think about it is that is essentially just two components of learning and that is step one understanding and step two remembering so understanding plus remembering equals good learning equals good exam performance equals good real life performance at whatever job or whatever you're doing and saving lives if you're a doctor or you're working in that sort of trade or you know making money for a rich corporate banker if you're in the finance trade or or whatever you like step one understanding step two remembering so I'm going to talk about those in turn but first I want to make a point about what not to do and the biggest mistake that I've heard students make and that I certainly used to make back in the day and that I've seen loads of my friends make is that we are very quick to rely on memorization especially when you first get introduced to flashcards or to active recall ad testing yourself as a general concept then you start thinking oh my god I have no need to make notes because making notes is not as we know from the evidence behind it more in my previous videos I know that making notes is not very efficient I know that testing myself is very efficient therefore I'm gonna rock up to my lectures and I'm gonna convert every single thing the lecturer says into a flashcard on Ankita the flashcard app or Quizlet or whatever and then I'm gonna make like a thousand different flashcards for each of my lectures and then I'm just gonna go through those flashcards there's a problem with that and that firstly you get too many flashcards and secondly you're relying on memorizing the stuff you're relying on like rote learning it rather than understanding the content and having kind of a mental model of your subject of your content in your head and that's really the key thing the key thing is to not rely on memorization but instead to rely on understanding the stuff and then only using rote memorization when you absolutely have to to nail down those random arbitrary facts that you couldn't possibly understand so if you find yourself making loads of flashcards for every single lecture I think the key is to really ask yourself do I really need a flashcard to remember this and ideally you want to try and remember it because you understand the subject rather than you're just trying to memorize bits and bobs of it so let's now talk about understanding and what that actually means how do you define understanding I don't know what the dictionary definition is I'll put it up on Wikipedia or whatever over here but the way I like to think of it is that I know I understand something if I can competently explain it to a friend and answer their questions about it so it's kind of like when you are able to teach something to someone then you know that you truly understand it and that's partly why I love teaching so much because when I'm running a teaching session for students in the year below or you know 4th years or whatever I really have to understand the subject before I can competently run that session and obviously I want to do a good job therefore it really incentivizes me to actively try and understand the subject in advance and that's the key question can you explain it to a friend or you know some people like to extend this analogy further I think this is called the Feynman technique can you explain it to a five-year-old why obviously not literally to a five-year-old but you know to a layman with you know reasonable competent command of your language can you explain the subject to them and when you can explain something to someone else then you really know you understand it all right so while editing this video I realized that there was one really important thing that I missed out and actually this is the one thing that I'd recommend everyone take away from this video and that is that active recall is not just for revising active recall is also the best way of learning and what do I mean by this I mean when you're reading something in a book or through your lecture slides or whatever instead of passively reading it what I would recommend and what all the research recommends and what the author is in that really good book make it stick recommend what everyone recommends is that as you're reading stuff you are actively testing yourself on that content as you go along so let's say you've read two paragraphs or something you would stop close the book metaphor if you look away and ask yourself alright whatever I just learnt what are the key ideas can i rephrase this in my own words in medicine is very easy you would think okay I've just read that we need you know to give anticoagulation drugs in someone with atrial fibrillation okay why do we do that okay so that's because a true fibrillation means you're quivering of you're a tree and that predisposes you to clot formation therefore we need an anticoagulant to thin the blood to stop them from forming clots in their left atrial appendage and that will stop them from getting strokes wait a minute why would it why would a clot go from the left atrial appendage to give them a stroke okay I'm not quite sure about that then you go back to the book and then you would read it and work it out and then he would be like okay fine I now get that a clot in the left atrial appendage is gonna cause a stroke by embolizing over to the brain or to the lungs or whatever and you're at like as you're going along you are actively testing yourself on the content active recall is not just something you do once you've learnt the content it is a fundamental part of actually learning the content in the first place and actually there's a bit at the end of that really good book make it stick which you should definitely read there's a bit at the end where the authors are showing like you know text interviews from students that have used techniques like active recall and spaced repetition to massively boost up their marks and there's quite a good passage where they're interviewing a medical student who got into medicine by some weird route that meant he didn't have like the basic science background that all his classmates had and he ended up being bottom of the class and he talks in this book like towards the end he talked about how the only way he knew how to revise how to study stuff was to read stuff in the book and when he didn't understand it or when it didn't stick he didn't know what to do because all he'd been taught all he'd been using for his whole life was just reading the information over and over again and actually what he says is that when he started quizzing himself on the material as he went along in fact I'll read out the bit to you he says I would stop and think okay what did I just read what is it what is this about I have to think about it well I believe it happens this way the enzyme does this and then it does that and then I'd have to go back and check if I was way off base or on the right track and he goes on to say the process was not a natural fit it makes you uncomfortable at first if you stop and rehearse what you're reading and quiz yourself on it it just takes a lot longer if you have a test coming up here not in a week and so much to cover then slowing down makes you pretty nervous but the only way he knew of to cover more material his established habit of dedicating long hours to rereading wasn't getting the results that he needed as hard as it was he made himself stick to retrieval practice and to recall long enough to at least see if it worked and then the guy goes on to say you just have to trust the process and that was really the biggest hurdle for me was getting myself to trust it and it ended up working really well for me really well by the time he started a second year young the student had pulled his grades up from the bottom of the class of 200 students to join the high performers and has remained there ever since and then they talked about how this guy actually started mentoring students on effective study techniques and how you know people started coming to him to learn how to study this guy who was literally bottom of his class in this medical school coming from a background where he didn't really have any basic science knowledge managed to get to the top to the extent that people were then asking him for help and all he did was quiz himself and stuff as he went along ie active recall retrieval practice testing yourself is not just for when you've learned the material it's actually a fundamental part of learning the material in the first place you're weaving this narrative you're building this mental model in your head you're telling yourself the story of your content as you're getting through it not just you know when it comes to the exam right at the end so yeah let's go back to the scheduled programming but of course anyone who's had that experience of understanding something like you can go to a lecture on you cling in and you can think oh my god wow that actually makes sense and then you can revise once and you can think oh my god yeah it makes sense I fully understand it but then you know a few weeks later you come across it again and you're like ah okay maybe I didn't understand it as well as I thought I did because I just can't remember any of it and that brings us on to the second component of effective learning and that is the remembering component and obviously if you've seen my previous videos you know what I'm gonna say here the two absolute key pillars of remembering anything are active recall are you testing yourself and spaced repetition repeating that testing of yourself over a period of time right so active recalled I took much more about this in the actual video about it but you know just briefly it's all about testing yourself you can do this in loads of different ways you could write questions for yourself like I do for example I've got a little spreadsheet where I write like loads of questions for myself that I will then answer and if I don't know the answer then I'll just look it up so that saves me from having to actually write out flashcards you could write up flashcards if you want takes a bit of time but it's worth it if you can consistently maintain this flash card habit every day or however often you want to do it you can do that thing where you grab a blank piece of paper and make a spider diagram where you write everything you know about that subject in the spider diagram there's loads of methods for active recall it really doesn't matter what you do the point is you need to be testing yourself because the more you try and retrieve that knowledge from your brain the stronger those connections are going to be encoded and therefore yeah you can understand something one day but unless you test your understanding of it ie test yourself with questions or get someone else to test you you're just going to forget it because there's that thing called the forgetting curve that over time you just forget everything that you've ever learned unless you actually revisit it by testing yourself so that's active recall space repetition is you know if you do it one day then you'll do it the next day and then you know wait a week and you'll have forgotten some of it and then you test yourself again and then look up the stuff that you didn't know and then you know by that point you already know most of it so then a month later you might test yourself and the idea is that you're interrupting the forgetting curve at spaced intervals and the more you do this you're after about three or four repetitions of this over a period of let's say a month or two you'll find by the end of it that your forgetting curve is very flat in that over time even though you're not testing yourself anymore you probably won't forget the information and that's kind of the key thing to spaced repetition is to interrupt our forgetting curve so that we keep stuff in our brains for a longer period of time so yeah that's pretty much all there is to it this is a very short video I've died if you if you're interested in like in-depth study tips firstly read the book called make it stick it's a book I'd recommend to every single student anyway because it explores all of the evidence behind you know all these effective study techniques in a really engaging format and if you're interested in like diving more in depth into a effective learning techniques watch my two videos about active recall and spaced repetition those are like 25 minutes long each and we fully go into the evidence but I just wanted to make this video to address this issue of how do we learn things in the first place and the way we learn things is not by jumping straight to making a flashcard it's by understanding it's by being able to explain it to a five-year-old being able to explain to a friend being able to answer their questions and essentially forming within our brains this mental model of our subject and getting an idea of how everything fits together in our own words ideally using simple language without having to rely too much on jargon so yeah I can't state it more emphatically the key thing is to understand screw memorization memorization does not work consistently and over the long term in an efficient way but if you can understand something and then use active recall and spaced repetition to you know bolster your understanding and built you know maintain that foundation then you will truly understand your subject and you'll absolutely smash your exams and end up saving lives or whatever you want to do with your degree or whatever so yeah I hope you found that useful if you've got any other specific questions about study techniques let me know in the comments of this video and I'll be sure to do a more kind of shorter videos where I address these in depth but yeah if you haven't seen the videos and active recall and spaced repetition they'll be linked down below and above there and everywhere so please watch those and I can pretty much guarantee that if you're currently not happy with the results that you're getting from your study techniques and you start incorporating more testing of yourself and more spaced repetition I can pretty much guarantee that your marks will improve almost overnight so yeah I hope you found this video useful if you liked it please give it a thumbs up if you haven't subscribed to the channel yet then please consider doing so have a lovely day and I will see you in the next video goodbye [Music]