everything I'm about to tell you is based on science well almost everything all the learning techniques you're going to discover today are the result of years of scientific research what I'm planning to say about schools and teachers well that's just my experience regardless of that by the end of this video you will know how to learn anything quickly and thoroughly you'll also know which techniques to avoid like CNN at a Trump press conference are you ready to be delighted informed and entertained let's do this my school experience was pretty awful i don't know about you but my teachers never taught me how to learn they tried to teach subjects and in most cases badly and they failed many of the students now maybe I was to blame perhaps I was a bad student but in the few subjects where the teachers excelled I did very well and looking back now I know about the techniques I'm going to share with you i realize how much time I wasted on useless learning strategies when I could have learned twice as much in half the time now it's important we define the term learn when I say learn in this video I don't mean memorize obviously memorizing is part of the learning process but it's not enough these techniques are not memorization techniques they're learning techniques where learning means understanding the topic generalizing it to new situations incorporating it into your existing knowledge framework there's an excellent method of visualizing learning which breaks it down into two categories one is low-level learning remembering and understanding and two is highle learning what could that be let me show you the method of visualizing I'm referring to is called Bloom's taxonomy and I've mentioned it in previous videos it's a pyramid with six levels the first three are remember understand apply that's low-level learning and the next three are analyze evaluate and create if you've learned something well you need to be working in this higher level of learning but so many people stop at the lower level moving into this higher level is the path to mastery and expertise and guess what the learning methods that are coming will push you up here before we go any further there's something you need to know you can't make yourself remember reading willfully and thinking I must remember this as you go along will not make you remember and to prove it I want you to try to remember this 5.972 * 10 24 kg which is the mass of the earth scientific research hasn't just discovered which learning strategies are effective it's also found out which ones are useless and there's a problem here though because the useless methods are popular and the reason they're popular is because they're easy and passive and give the illusion of learning when you're not actually learning at all so to begin with I'm going to tell you which techniques you definitely should not be using but I will hazard a guess that you are also when I tell you what they are you will resist you will say "No this method is effective it works for me." But it's not and it doesn't how do I know because the research says so the most useless learning strategies by far the most popular learning strategy is rereading but it's not effective in tests students who read a text twice didn't learn any more than those who read it just once and it takes longer to read something twice twice as long so if you want to speed up your learning stop rereading it doesn't work but here's the problem it feels like it's working because the second time you read the text it's more familiar which tricks you into believing you know it but you don't there's a way of using a form of rereading effectively which I'll cover in the effective strategy section which is coming soon the next terrible learning strategy is highlighting going through a book passively highlighting blocks of test does not help you learn there is a way of doing it that can be effective and we'll come to that the third terrible strategy is not taking now before you start screaming at me note-taking is often essential and can be highly effective but it depends how you do it but just copying information from a book or a board is not an effective strategy so what do all these ineffective strategies have in common they're passive and easy they don't demand anything of you and effective studying is difficult it places a cognitive strain on you it's hard work if your learning feels easy then you're not learning now it's time for the effective strategies the most effective learning strategy is retrieval practice if you're a regular viewer you're probably sick of hearing me say this but I'm not going to apologize because I want everyone to know it retrieval practice is where you try to think of everything you can remember about a topic it's difficult and you can feel your brain straining as you reach in to try to conjure up memories of what you've just read it's more difficult than rereading much more effort is required but it doesn't always feel effective and people often give up on it in favor of rereading try not to do that so how should you put it into practice read something you want to learn and then instead of rereading close the book set a timer for 5 minutes and then write as much as you can from memory about what you just read keep going for the full five minutes even if it feels as though you've written everything you remember do not look at the text while you're writing try to connect what's in the text to what you already know put it in your own words and then when the five minutes are up go back over the text see what you got right and which areas need more work this is where rereading can be useful when it's paired with retrieval practice you can also highlight sections that you want to test yourself on but it's selective highlighting to remind you to retrieve another way of applying retrieval practice is to create flashcards but no cheating you have to come up with the answer and fully explain it before turning it over method two is elaboration there are two main strands to this first explain things out loud to yourself so if you're learning the structure of the atom explain to yourself that there's a nucleus containing positively charged particles protons and neutral particles neutrons they're orbited by negatively charged electrons the second part is to ask yourself questions why is it like that if the nucleus is stuffed full of charged particles how come they don't repel each other like charges repel don't they and also if you have a positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged electrons why don't the electrons rush to the center and the whole edifice collapse that is elaboration describe explain and ask yourself questions it's actually very similar to the Fman technique and it's effective retrieval practice elaboration is there anything else yes interle this just means mix up your revision and learning so if you're studying maths instead of focusing on differentiation and then on integration and then on vectors mix them up research shows that this is more effective why because you have to discern what the problem is and how to solve it if you practice in blocks you know the answer must involve let's say differentiation because that's what you're practicing but when interle could be anything so it helps you to learn to recognize what type of problem you're dealing with and how that differs from other problems and how to solve it and if you're revising it's likely when it comes to the exam you'll be answering different types of problems and if that's been part of your learning process it'll help your exam performance too so when you're studying mix up your topics think about how those topics relate to one another and to what you already know about the subject you're always trying to build up your understanding and evaluation to move away from memorization to intuition and another excellent way of doing that is the next method concrete examples a body remains at rest or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line unless it's acted upon by a force newton's first law but what does that actually mean can you think of a way of visualizing it there's an orange on my desk it never moves why because I prefer biscuits yes that's true but nothing makes it move there's no force applied to it but hang on when I moved the desk the other day the orange did move but not relative to the desk it was on the desk but not in the office anymore when I throw the orange at the window it bounces back but when I throw a brick at the window it doesn't if I place a brick on my foot it doesn't hurt but if I drop it on my foot h rate of change of momentum Newton's second law we don't learn well in abstract so think of concrete examples for whatever it is you're learning and that's why the final method is so useful dual coding or words and pictures research shows we learn better when our learning materials combine words and pictures think of that atom much easier to understand if you have an image of it with all the parts labeled or if you're learning history maybe a visual timeline find the visuals and the words if they don't exist make some now what was the matter of the earth one of the reasons I became interested in different learning techniques was because of brilliant.org the sponsor of this video brilliant helps you get smarter every day with thousands of interactive lessons in math science programming data analysis and AI what's the best way of learning it's not just watching videos engaging with the subject thinking about it using your brain to process and connect the ideas that's how you learn and that's what makes Brilliant the most effective way to learn it's a very hands-on process and as you work through Brilliant's interactive problems something else happens you build your critical thinking skills it teaches you how to think so what can you learn with Brilliant a lot i like Brilliant's newly updated programming courses they're a great way to build a foundation in coding get experience with real world applications and learn to think like a programmer this hones your thinking skills even further as you break down complex problems into manageable chunks of code you'll start to develop an intuition for computer logic whilst also learning to design and debug real programs it's a whole brain workout to try Brilliant for free visit brilliant.org/python /python programmer or scan the QR code on screen or you can click on the link in the description